The Nasadiya Sukta: the hymn that ends in doubt

The ending, first

Somewhere past three thousand years ago, in the oldest body of scripture still in daily use anywhere on earth, a poet finished a hymn about the creation of everything and chose to end it like this, in Ralph Griffith’s public-domain rendering:

“He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.”

Read the last clause again. He verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not. The hymn climbs all the way to the one who oversees creation from the highest heaven, and then, instead of bowing, it wonders aloud whether even he understands how it began. Roughly three thousand years before anyone coined the word “agnostic,” a Vedic seer wrote the posture into a hymn.

This is the Nasadiya Sukta, the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rigveda. How a hymn like this was composed, heard and carried for centuries without being written is the subject of The Seers Who Heard. The tradition calls the Veda shruti, “that which was heard,” revelation itself. And here, inside revelation, is a confession that the answer may be beyond anyone’s reach.

Neither was, nor was not

The hymn opens by cancelling the two categories everything else is built from. Griffith again, verse one:

नासदासीन्नो सदासीत्तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् । किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद्गहनं गभीरम् ॥

“Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water?”

Ṛgveda 10.129.1 #

The Sanskrit first line, nasad asin no sad asit tadanim, says it flatly: then there was neither the non-existent, asat, nor the existent, sat. Before being and non-being, before air, before any sky to be “beyond.” The hymn does not start from a creator and a void. It starts from a condition language can barely hold, and it asks questions rather than making claims. What covered what? Where? Eleven words in, and certainty is already gone.

Then, verse two, the first positive thing the hymn will allow:

“That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever.”

Anid avatam svadhaya tad ekam. That One, tad ekam, breathed without breath, windless, by its own power. Not a god with a name. Not yet. A singular, impersonal that, before death and before deathlessness, before day had any line to divide it from night.

Darkness, water, heat, desire

Verse three gives the only process the hymn will commit to. “Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos,” Griffith renders it; the all was salila, undifferentiated water, and out of it “by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit.” The Sanskrit names the power tapas, heat, the same word that will later mean ascetic austerity. The One arises by a kind of cosmic ardour.

And then verse four, which is the strangest and most quietly radical line in the hymn:

“Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of Spirit.”

Kama, desire, is named as the first movement of mind, “the primal seed.” Before will, before act, before any maker decides to make: a wanting. The sages, the kavayas, searching their own hearts with thought, “discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent,” found the bond between sat and asat not in a revelation handed down but in their own contemplation. The fifth verse stretches a cord or ray across the dark, with powers below and impulse above, and is so compressed that translators have argued over it for a century. The hymn does not pause to resolve it.

The gods came late

Verse six is where the hymn turns its doubt outward, and it is devastating in its calm:

“Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows, then, whence it first came into being?”

Arvag deva asya visarjanena. The gods came after the world was sent forth. They are not original witnesses. They arrived once there was already a world for them to inhabit, which means no god can testify to the beginning from memory. The hymn has quietly removed the obvious authorities. If the gods are post-creation, who is left who could possibly know?

Which sets up the ending we began with. The overseer in the highest heaven, the adhyaksha, the one whose eye controls it all. Surely he knows. So anga veda yadi va na veda. He surely knows, or perhaps he knows not.

Three ways to read the silence

What do we do with a scripture that ends on “or perhaps he knows not”? Here the honest answer is that serious readers diverge, and the divergence is worth seeing whole.

The first reading takes it straight, as proto-agnosticism. The gods cannot know because they came after; even the overseer perhaps cannot know; the origin may be unknowable to anyone, divine included. Carl Sagan, narrating Cosmos, reached for exactly this hymn as an instance of “a tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries.” On this reading the last line means what it says.

The second reading belongs to the scholar Joel Brereton, who argued in a 1999 study that the doubt is a deliberate device, not a flat denial. He noticed that the final verse is metrically short, two syllables missing, and ends grammatically unfinished, a subordinate clause with no main verb to land on. He read these “defects” as intentional: the hymn enacts puzzlement in its own broken grammar, and because it has already named thinking, the sages searching their hearts, as the first creative act, the listener’s own baffled reflection becomes the point. The question is built to provoke insight, not to close a case. He called it “edifying puzzlement.”

The third reading is the devotional one. Later tradition often identifies tad ekam and the overseer with Brahman, the Absolute, and hears the closing line as apophasis: a way of saying the Absolute exceeds even the category of “knowing” as creatures know, so that “or perhaps he knows not” guards transcendence rather than confessing ignorance.

The text itself does not choose among these. That refusal is, arguably, its genius. What it will not do is hand you a tidy creator and a finished story. To call it simply “atheist” overstates it; to call it a settled theism ignores its grammar. It stays open on purpose.

Doubt at the root, on purpose

There is one more thing worth saying plainly, about where this sits. The tradition holds the Veda to be apaurusheya, authorless and eternal, the highest revelation. The documentary record places this particular hymn in the tenth mandala, a later stratum of the Rigveda, conventionally dated to somewhere around 1200 to 1000 before the Common Era, composed in ordinary human poetic metre alongside the other great cosmogonies of that book. Both of those are true at once, and the meeting of them is the remarkable part. At the point where the tradition locates its most authoritative speech, the speech declines to be certain.

That instinct does not disappear after the Rigveda. It runs forward into the neti, neti of the Upanishads, “not this, not this,” the refusal to pin the Absolute to any description, and into a whole later philosophy comfortable with saying that the deepest reality is reached by unsaying. The seed is here, in this hymn. The complete Rigveda holds it as one hymn among more than a thousand, and the overview of Sanatana Dharma places this kind of open inquiry inside the larger tradition it opens.

The oldest scripture in living use does not begin its account of everything with “in the beginning, God.” It begins with “then was neither non-being nor being,” and it ends with a question.

The hymn does not answer it. Perhaps that was the answer.