The Making of the Worlds

Maitreya told Vidura how the worlds are made, and the Bhagavata’s account is deliberately a story and not a mechanism, because the Purana’s whole position is that the universe is not a machine that happened but a thing that was, in some sense, meant — and meaning can only be told, not diagrammed.

It begins not with a bang but with a sleep. Before this creation there is dissolution: the Lord alone, the worlds withdrawn into him, the unmanifest ocean, a vast and dreamless rest. Creation is the waking — the one, without needing anything, consenting to become many. The Bhagavata renders this through its central image: from the navel of the reclining Lord a lotus rises, and on the lotus sits Brahma, the first born, who looks around at the endless waters and does not know who he is or where he came from or what he is for. The first creature’s first experience is bewilderment.

The Purana makes Brahma’s confusion the heart of the chapter, and it is a choice with meaning. Brahma searches the stalk of his own lotus downward for his origin and cannot find it; he undertakes long austerity; and only then is he given the vision of the Lord from whom he came and the knowledge of what to do. The Bhagavata is saying something through this that it will say again and again: even the creator of the worlds does not generate himself or his understanding; he receives it, after seeking, from the source. Nothing in this cosmology stands on its own. The structure of the universe is, from its first occupant, a structure of dependence and gift.

Then the unfolding, told swiftly and as descent rather than assembly: from the one come the principles of mind and matter, the elements, the senses, the cosmic person whose body is the worlds, the egg of the universe, and within it the populations of beings, the gods and the ancestors and the demons and the animals and the humans, the divisions of time so vast that a day of Brahma contains ages within ages. The Bhagavata gives the numbers and the tiers, but it keeps subordinating them to the point: all of it issues from, is pervaded by, and returns to one reality, and the many is real but not separate, the way a dream is real but not other than the dreamer.

For the reader the chapter’s use is the frame it sets for everything after. The Bhagavata is not interested in creation as a past event. It is establishing the stage on which its real subject — the soul’s forgetting and the Lord’s descents to recall it — will be played, and it is establishing that the stage was never neutral: it came from a person, it is pervaded by that person, and the bewilderment Brahma felt on the lotus is the same bewilderment every soul in the Purana will feel until it does what Brahma did, which is seek and then receive.

This is the Bhagavata’s answer, begun, to the question Vidura carried from the broken hall. The worlds are not an accident indifferent to him. They are the body of the one the rest of the book will show descending into them, again and again, to find the souls that forgot. Having made the stage, the Purana now brings on its first such descent and its first such soul — a son born to a noble woman precisely so that he can teach her, and through her the reader, the way back up the lotus stalk.