The Ṛgveda
The Ṛgveda is a collection of 1,028 hymns (sūktas) arranged in ten books (maṇḍalas). Its hymns were composed by poet-seers (ṛṣis) in an early form of Sanskrit, and preserved for millennia by oral recitation, using memory techniques so exact that the text has come down with remarkably little variation.
Books 2 to 7 are the oldest core, each associated with one family of seers. Book 10, where the Nāsadīya Sūkta sits, is generally held to be the latest. It holds many of the Ṛgveda’s most reflective hymns, including several that wonder about the origin of the world.
The hymn’s traditional details
Every Vedic hymn is recited with four pieces of information, listed in the ancient index (Anukramaṇī):
| Seer (ṛṣi) | Prajāpati Parameṣṭhin, “the lord of creatures, who stands at the highest” |
| Subject (devatā) | Bhāvavṛtta, “the course of becoming” |
| Metre (chandas) | Triṣṭubh: four lines (pādas) of eleven syllables each |
| Place | Ṛgveda 10.129, verses 1 to 7 |
Unusually, the devatā here is not a god such as Agni or Indra, but becoming itself.
Its neighbours: other creation hymns
The Nāsadīya is one of a cluster of late Ṛgvedic hymns about origins. Reading them side by side shows how open the question was:
- Ṛgveda 10.72 says that in the earliest age of the gods, being was born from non-being.
- Ṛgveda 10.90, the Puruṣa Sūkta, pictures creation as the sacrifice of a cosmic person.
- Ṛgveda 10.121, the Hiraṇyagarbha Sūkta, speaks of a golden embryo, and asks again and again, “to which god shall we offer?”
- Ṛgveda 10.190 says that order (ṛta) and truth (satya) were born from kindled heat (tapas), the same heat as in verse 3 here.
How it has been read
The fourteenth-century commentator Sāyaṇa read the hymn through Vedānta: the One is Brahman, and its “breathing” is pure existence before the world. Western scholars from the nineteenth century, such as Max Müller, singled it out as early philosophical poetry. Modern Vedic scholars, such as Joel Brereton, read its contradictions and questions as deliberate puzzles, designed to lead the listener’s mind to the edge of what words can do.
In India it reached a wide modern audience as the opening song of the 1988 television series Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, which set a Hindi rendering of the hymn to music.
A note on the chant you hear here
Vedic hymns are traditionally recited with three pitch accents (svaras: udātta, anudātta, svarita), passed on teacher to student. The recitation on this site is synthesised in classical śloka chant style, without Vedic svaras. It is a study aid for following the words, not a substitute for traditional Vedic recitation.