The History of Buddhist Thought c15.25

c15.25

Questions of cosmogony are much older than the Upanishads. In the Vedic hymns we find the universe conceived as a sacrifice performed by the gods. Once it is even represented as a human sacrifice, in which the four classes of society proceed from different parts of the primeval man.² Or it is an egg. The Brāhmaṇas and Upanishads go on multiplying these myths. The favourite ideas are emanation, in which a primeval being emits everything from himself,¹ or production by the magic means of austerities (tapas). “Verily in the beginning there was nothing here. This (world) was covered over with Death, with hunger; for hunger is Death. He formed the thought, ‘would that I might have a self.’”² Most of these myths are attempts to find an absolute beginning, for neither the doctrine of recurrent cycles nor rebirth is yet found, and it is against such vain attempts that the attacks of the *Brahmajāla-sutta* are directed.³ But another principle was also involved. An origin implies an originator. The Buddhists opposed this in two ways. As we have seen, they explained away Brahmā the creator as being an individual who arose first at the beginning of a new cycle, and imagined that he had created all the rest as it arose out of the chaotic state between two cycles. He is represented as declaring, “I am Brahmā, the great Brahmā, the subduer, the unsubdued, the beholder of all, the subjector, god, maker, former, the chief appointer, the controller, the father of those that have been and shall be.” Besides thus explaining away the creator, the Buddhists invented a creation myth of their own.⁴ As the doctrine of recurrent cycles was assumed, it was not necessary to ask about an absolute beginning. There is no destruction of the whole universe, but only up to the world of Brahmā.