Parashara had finished the rites of the forenoon and was still seated when Maitreya came to him, bowed, touched his feet, and settled before him with a question that had been growing in him for years. “Gurudev, from you I have learned the whole of the Veda in its proper order, and the Vedangas, and every shastra of dharma, so thoroughly that even a man who wished me ill could never say I spared myself the labor of study. And still I do not know the one thing that lies under all of it. How did this world come to be, and how will it come to be again when the next kalpa opens? What is the stuff it is made of? From whom did all of this, the moving and the unmoving, arise? In whom did it lie dissolved before, and in whom will it dissolve? Tell me the measure of the elements, beginning with akasha; how the oceans and the mountains and the gods were born; what holds the earth up, how large the sun is and what carries it; the lineages of the gods; the Manus and their manvantaras; the kalpas with their four yugas that come around and come around again; the shape of pralaya; the dharma proper to each yuga; the separate natures of the devarshis and the rajarshis; the branches of the Veda as Vyasa arranged them; and the dharma of Brahmins and the other varnas, of brahmacharya and the other ashramas. All of it I want to hear from you. Turn your mind to me kindly, so that by your grace I may know it.”
Parashara was quiet for a moment, and when he answered he began a long way from creation. “Maitreya, you have reminded me of something that happened long ago, something my father’s father Vasishtha himself spoke of, and you deserve my thanks for it. When I heard that a rakshasa, set on by Vishvamitra, had eaten my father Shakti, a great anger seized me. I began a yajna to destroy the rakshasas, and in that fire hundreds of them were burned to ash. My grandfather watched the race of the rakshasas going into the flames, and he came to me. ‘Child, anger carried this far is wrong; calm it now. The rakshasas are not at fault at all; for your father it was to happen this way. Anger belongs to fools; how can it live in a thinking man? Who kills anyone? A man eats the fruit of his own deeds and nothing else. This anger is the great destroyer of the fame and the tapas that a man gathers through long hardship. It spoils this world for him and the next, and the great seers put it away for good; do not let it rule you. Nothing is gained by burning these poor rakshasas, who have done you no wrong. End your yajna. The wealth of the good is always forgiveness.’”
“I bowed to the weight of his words and ended the yajna, and Vasishtha was pleased with me. At that same hour Pulastya arrived, a son of Brahma and the elder brother of Pulaha. My grandfather gave him arghya, and when Pulastya had taken his seat he turned to me. ‘There was great enmity in your heart, and still you accepted forgiveness at the word of your elder; for that you will know all the shastras. In the height of your anger you did not destroy my progeny to the last one; for that I give you one boon more. Child, you will be the speaker of the Purana Samhita, and you will know the gods as they truly are. By my grace your intellect will stand clear of doubt about the karmas that lead to enjoyment and the karmas that lead to moksha.’ Then my grandfather said, ‘All that Pulastya has spoken will come true.’ Maitreya, everything those two said in that former time has come back to me at your question, and so I will tell you the whole of that Purana Samhita. Listen with care. This world arose from Vishnu. It stands in him. He is the cause of its continuance and its dissolution, and this world, too, is he.”
The world has a single root
Parashara began with a salutation. He bowed to Bhagavan Vasudeva Vishnu, who as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shankara is the cause of the world’s birth, its continuance, and its ending, who carries those who love him across the ocean of samsara; changeless, pure, imperishable, Paramatma, always of one essence, conqueror of all. He bowed to the one who, being one, is many; who is gross and subtle, the unmanifest cause and the manifest effect, and for his devotees the cause of their release. He bowed to Vishnu, root of the world’s origin, continuance, and destruction, support of the universe, finer than the finest thing, Purushottama dwelling inside every creature, in truth spotless knowledge and only through ignorance seen as this crowd of separate objects, who as Time can make the world and unmake it, unborn, unaging, unchanging. Having bowed, he told Maitreya where what he was about to say had come from. Brahma the Grandsire had spoken it when Daksha and the other munis asked him; Daksha and those munis told it to King Purukutsa on the bank of the Narmada; Purukutsa told it to Sarasvata, and Sarasvata told it to Parashara. Now he would tell it in order.
That which is beyond even prakriti, the supreme, the Paramatma seated in the inner self, has no form, no color, no name, no attribute. The six changes that every created thing passes through, birth, growth, alteration, decay, destruction, and death, are wholly absent from it. Of it one thing alone can be said: it is. Because it is everywhere, and because the whole universe dwells in it, the wise call it Vasudeva. It is the eternal, unborn, imperishable, unchanging Parabrahman, one in nature and spotless, spotless because there is nothing in it that needs to be cast off. He alone is all this, as the manifest effect and the unmanifest cause, and he stands as Purusha the witness and as Kala, Time, the great cause. Of these the first form of Parabrahman is Purusha; the unmanifest, which is prakriti, and the manifest, which begins with mahat, are his other forms; and Kala, which sets all the rest in motion, is his supreme form. Beyond these four, beyond pradhana and Purusha and the manifest and Time, lies what the pandits alone see, and that is the param pada, the supreme abode of Bhagavan Vishnu. Each of the four is a separate cause of the showing forth of creation, of its sustaining, and of its destruction, and since Bhagavan Vishnu himself stands as the manifest, the unmanifest, Purusha, and Time, Parashara told Maitreya to know the whole of it as his child’s play.
The unmanifest cause, which holds every effect inside it as a power not yet shown, and which is eternal, the best of the munis call pradhana, and they call it subtle prakriti. It is imperishable, rests on nothing outside itself, cannot be measured, does not age, does not move, and has no sound, no touch, no form. It is made of the three gunas, it is the cause of the world, it has no beginning and no origin and no end, and before the pralaya, as before every creation, this whole universe was pervaded by it. Learned brahmavadins who know the Veda recite a verse that holds this meaning: “At that time there was no day and no night, no sky and no earth, no darkness and no light, and nothing else; past the reach of ear and intellect there was only one, pradhana, brahma, and purusha.” From the supreme form of Vishnu came these two, pradhana and Purusha, and the other form by which they are joined when creation comes and parted when pralaya comes is named Kala. Because in the past pralaya this manifest world lay dissolved in prakriti, that dissolution is called prakrita. And because Kala, who is Bhagavan himself in the form of Time, has no beginning and no end, the origin, the continuance, and the pralaya of the world never stop; they run on without a break, like a current. In the time of pralaya, with pradhana resting in the balance of its gunas and Purusha standing apart from prakriti, it is this Time-form of Vishnu, holding both, that goes on.
Then, when the time for creation came, that Parabrahman, Paramatma, lord of all beings and the Self of all, Parameshvara Hari, by his own will entered the changing pradhana and the unchanging Purusha and agitated them. A fragrance does nothing, and still by mere nearness it moves the mind; so Parameshvara by mere nearness set pradhana and Purusha in motion. He is the agitator and he is the agitated, and he is pradhana itself in both its states, drawn in to equilibrium and spread out in agitation. Vishnu, lord of all lords including Brahma, is the collective and the single, the jiva forms of Brahma and the rest, and the form of mahat and all that follows it. So at the time of creation, when pradhana, its gunas in balance, was presided over by Vishnu as the knower of the field, mahat-tattva arose from it, and pradhana closed around the mahat that had risen the way a husk closes around a seed. Mahat is of three kinds, sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic, and from this threefold mahat arose the threefold ahankara: vaikarika, which is sattvic, taijasa, which is rajasic, and the tamasa kind called bhutadi, the beginning of the elements. Ahankara, the cause of elements and senses, is pervaded by mahat as mahat is by pradhana. Then the tamasa ahankara, bhutadi, changed and made the tanmatra of sound, and from sound came akasha, whose quality is sound; bhutadi covered it. Akasha changed and made the tanmatra of touch, and from touch came vayu, strong, whose quality is touch; akasha covered it. Vayu changed and made the tanmatra of form, and from form came tejas, fire, whose quality is form; vayu covered it. Tejas changed and made the tanmatra of taste, and from taste came water, whose quality is taste; tejas covered it. Water changed and made the tanmatra of smell, and from smell came earth, whose quality is smell. In each of these only its own tanmatra, its bare quality, is present, which is why they are called tanmatras; they have no particular features of their own, so they are called avishesha, and they cannot be felt as pleasure or pain or delusion. This is the creation of the elements and their tanmatras out of the tamasa ahankara. From the taijasa ahankara, the rajasic one, came the ten indriyas, and from the vaikarika, the sattvic, came the ten devatas who preside over them and the eleventh, the mind, which is vaikarika too. Skin, eye, nose, tongue, and ear, which with the help of buddhi take hold of sound and the rest, are the five indriyas of knowing; anus, genitals, hands, feet, and speech, whose work is excretion, pleasure, craft, movement, and speech, are the five indriyas of action. Akasha, vayu, tejas, water, and earth, each joined in turn to sound, touch, form, taste, and smell, can be felt as pleasure and pain and delusion, so they are called vishesha, the particular.
These elements held various powers of their own, and without fully combining they could never have made a world. So, depending on each other and aiming at one single aggregate, all the evolutes from mahat down to the particular elements, presided over by Purusha and by the grace of pradhana, joined into one and produced an egg. Grown little by little from the elements like a bubble rising on water, round and resting on water, that great egg of Brahma born of prakriti, Hiranyagarbha, became the natural and excellent abode of Vishnu, and in it the Lord of the world, whose own form is unmanifest, dwelt himself in the manifest form of Hiranyagarbha. Of that great Hiranyagarbha, Sumeru was the ulba, the membrane that wraps the unborn child; the other mountains were the jarayu, the womb that holds it; and the oceans were the waters of the womb. In that egg appeared the mountains and the dvipas, the oceans and the planets, all the worlds, gods and asuras and human beings and every kind of living thing. Outside, the egg is covered by water, by fire, by air, by akasha, and by bhutadi, each ten times greater than the one within it; mahat-tattva surrounds bhutadi; and the unmanifest pradhana covers all of these together with mahat, seven coverings grown from prakriti, the way the kernel of a coconut lies inside husk upon husk. Seated in that egg, Vishveshvara Bhagavan Vishnu himself becomes Brahma, takes up rajas, and sets about creating this world. Once it is made, Vishnu of unequaled valor, holding sattva, protects it yuga after yuga until the kalpa ends. At the end of the kalpa that same Janardana takes the terrible Rudra form in which tamas rules and devours every being; having devoured them and made the world one ocean, Parameshvara lies down on the couch of Shesha, and waking, in the form of Brahma, he creates the world once more. One Bhagavan Janardana takes three names, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, for creation, continuance, and destruction. As creator he creates himself; as preserver he preserves himself, the preserved; and at the end, as destroyer, he himself is withdrawn. Earth, water, fire, air, akasha, all the senses and the inner instrument, the whole of the world, all of it is Purusha in form; and since that imperishable Vishnu is world-formed and the inner self of every being, the creating and the rest that go on in Brahma and the other beings serve him alone, as the oblation the priests pour into the fire serves the one who commissioned the yajna. So that Bhagavan Vishnu, all-formed, best, giver of boons, worthy of worship, in the states of Brahma and the rest, is the creator and is himself created, preserves and is preserved, destroys and is himself destroyed.
What we call Time
Here Maitreya stopped him. “How can Brahma, who is nirguna, beyond any measure, pure and spotless, be the doer of creation and all that follows it?” Parashara answered that the powers of things lie in a knowledge no argument can reach; no one reasons his way to them. Heat belongs to fire by its nature, and in the same way the powers of creation, continuance, and destruction belong to Brahman. “Now hear how Bhagavan Brahma, who is called Narayana and is the grandsire of the worlds, engages in creation. When we say he is born, we say it only by convention. By his own measure his life is a hundred years. That hundred years is called a Para, and half of it a Parardha.”
“I told you of Vishnu’s Time-form,” Parashara went on. “By it the life of Brahma is measured, and the life of everything that moves or stands still, earth, mountains, and oceans alike. Listen. Fifteen nimeshas, fifteen blinks of an eye, make one kashtha; thirty kashthas make one kala; thirty kalas make one muhurta. Thirty muhurtas are one day and night of a human, and that many days and nights make one month of two fortnights. Six months make one ayana, and the two ayanas, the southern and the northern, make one year. The southern course of the sun is the night of the gods and the northern course is their day. Twelve thousand divine years hold the four yugas, Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali; hear their separate measures. Those who know the ancient reckoning count Satya at four thousand divine years, Treta at three thousand, Dvapara at two thousand, and Kali at one thousand. Before each yuga runs a sandhya of as many hundreds of years as the yuga has thousands, and after each a sandhyamsha of the same measure: four hundred, three hundred, two hundred, one hundred. The time that lies between the sandhya and the sandhyamsha is the yuga itself, Satya or whichever of the four it may be.”
“Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali together are one chaturyuga, and a thousand chaturyugas are one day of Brahma. In one day of Brahma there are fourteen Manus, and this is their measure of time. The saptarshis, the gods, Indra, the Manu, and the Manu’s sons who rule as kings are all created at one time and destroyed at one time, as they were in the kalpa before. A little more than seventy-one chaturyugas is one manvantara, and that is the time of that Manu and of his gods. By divine reckoning a manvantara is 852,000 years; by human reckoning it is a full 306,720,000 years, and no more. Fourteen times that is a day of Brahma, and at its end comes the pralaya called Brahma-naimittika. Then Bhurloka, Bhuvarloka, and Svarloka, the three worlds, begin to burn, and the siddhas who dwell in Maharloka, scorched by the heat, go up to Janaloka. When the three worlds have become one ocean, Brahma, the lotus-born, in the form of Narayana, sated with the three worlds he has swallowed, meditated on by the yogis of Janaloka, sleeps on the couch of Shesha through a night as long as his day, and when the night has passed he creates the world again. Counted this way, by fortnight and month and the rest, comes Brahma’s year, and a hundred such years are the full life of that great soul. One Parardha of Brahma has already passed, and at its end was the great kalpa known as Padma. Of his present second Parardha, this is the first kalpa, and its name is Varaha.”
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)