The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s6.31

v2.c40.s6.31

It was inevitable that, in the view of the universe which regarded it as a creation, and distinguished between the soul of man and his body, there should arise the conception of the soul of the universe related to it as the soul in man to his body: this conception is made material in the person of Hiraṇyagarbha, who in the Rigveda⁵ is the golden germ which enters into creation after the first action of the creator, or of Brahman as masculine. The position of either of these deities is first quite distinctly asserted in the Kauṣītaki Upaniṣad,⁶ and the idea appears in prominence only in the theistic Çvetāçvatara Upaniṣad,⁷ where a third name occurs, the red seer, Kapilarṣi, a term often,⁸ but certainly wrongly, assumed to refer to the founder—who is a very legendary figure and may owe his name to this passage—of the Sāṁkhya system. But the idea is found in a less theoretic form in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,⁹ where in the development of principles the 'great self' stands after the undeveloped and the primeval spirit, and later in the Buddhi of the Sāṁkhya.