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The sage Maitreya, having finished his daily observances, came to Parashara, touched his feet in greeting, and sat with folded hands. He said, “Master, by your grace I have studied the whole of the Vedas, the Vedangas, and every work of dharma in its proper order, so thoroughly that even those who would oppose me cannot claim I spared myself the labor. Now a single question rises in my mind, and I want to hear its answer from your own lips. Where did this entire world come from? For what cause was it made? In what did it once rest, and into what will it dissolve again? The sky, the ocean, the mountains, the gods, the sun, the Manus and the manvantaras, the ages that return again and again, the shape of the great dissolution, and the branches of the Veda: be gracious enough to explain all of this to me.”
Parashara was silent for a while, then he spoke. “Maitreya, you have called an old memory back to me, and for that you deserve my thanks. Listen. When I heard that a rakshasa, urged on by Vishvamitra, had devoured my father, a terrible anger took hold of me. To wipe out the whole race of rakshasas I began a yajna, a fire-rite, and in it hundreds of night-wandering demons caught fire and were burned to ash. Seeing this, my grandfather Vasishtha stopped me. He said, ‘My child, anger carried to such a pitch is not right. Anger belongs to fools; how can it live in a thinking man? A person reaps only the fruit of the deeds he himself has done, and these poor rakshasas have committed no crime against you. This anger of yours burns up the fame and the tapas, the austerity, that you gathered with such long effort. Calm it. Bring this yajna to an end. Forgiveness is the only wealth the good ever keep.’”
Honoring the weight of his words, I stopped the yajna, and Vasishtha was greatly pleased. At that very moment Pulastya, a son of Brahma, arrived. My grandfather offered him the welcome-water, and once Pulastya had taken his seat he turned to me. “Child, even with so great a wrong festering in your heart, you accepted forgiveness on the counsel of your elders, and so you will become a master of every shastra. Furious as you were, you did not tear my offspring out by the root; for that I grant you a further, finer boon. You will become the teller of the Purana Samhita, and you will know the gods as they truly are. By my favor your understanding will move surely, free of all doubt, through both kinds of action, the path of engagement and the path of withdrawal.” When Pulastya had said this, my grandfather Vasishtha added, “All that Pulastya has spoken will come true.” Maitreya, it is exactly this that your question has called back to my memory, and so it is this Purana Samhita that I will recite to you; listen closely. This world has come forth from Vishnu; it rests in him; he is the maker of its continuance and its dissolution; and this world, too, is he.
The world has a single root
The one who, wearing the forms of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shankara, brings about the birth, the sustaining, and the destruction of this world, that Vishnu is the root of everything. He is free of change, pure, indestructible, forever of a single essence. Though he is one, he appears in countless forms; he is the gross and the subtle, the cause and the effect alike. This knowledge has come down through an unbroken line. Brahma first told it to Daksha and the other sages; those sages recited it to King Purukutsa on the bank of the Narmada; Purukutsa passed it to Sarasvata, and Sarasvata spoke it to me.
Now hear the description of that supreme reality. It lies beyond even prakriti, primal nature, and it dwells inside everything; it has no form, no color, no name, no attribute. In it there is no birth, no growth, no change, no decay, no death. The only thing that can be said of it is that it always is. It is the eternal, unborn, imperishable, and spotless Brahman, which the wise call Vasudeva, because he is everywhere and because the whole universe dwells within him. Know that he has three forms. Purusha, the cosmic person, is his first form; unmanifest prakriti together with the manifest order that begins with mahat is his second; and Time is his supreme form.
At the hour of the great dissolution, when this whole visible expanse melts back into prakriti, there is no day and no night, no sky and no earth, no darkness and no light; only the unmanifest prime matter and the cosmic person remain. Then it is the Time-form of Vishnu alone that holds them both. For this reason the birth, the continuance, and the dissolution of the world never cease; they run on without a break, like a current that keeps flowing forever.
Then, when the hour of creation comes, that same supreme Lord, by his own will, enters into prakriti and Purusha and sets them stirring. Just as a fragrance does nothing by its own effort and yet moves the mind simply by being near, so the Lord, by his mere nearness, stirs the prime matter into motion. From that first stirring arose the great principle, mahat; then the threefold ego, in its sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic kinds; from ego came sound, touch, form, taste, and smell; and from these, in order, appeared sky, air, fire, water, and earth. Each of these five elements held its own separate power, and alone not one of them could fashion anything; so, resting on Purusha and blessed by the grace of prakriti, they all joined together and became a single spherical egg.
Swelling like a bubble on water, that immense egg came to be called Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb. Within it the Lord of the world, Vishnu, whose true nature is unmanifest, made himself manifest and took his seat. Inside that egg, Mount Sumeru became the membrane that wrapped the growing fetus, the other mountains became the outer caul, and the oceans became the fluid within. Within that same egg appeared the continents, the mountains, the planets, the gods, the asuras, and human beings. From the outside, seven sheaths enclosed the egg, of water, fire, air, sky, ego, and the rest, the way the husk of a coconut wraps the seed within it. Seated there, Vishveshvara Vishnu becomes Brahma, takes the support of rajas, the quality of energy, and fashions the creation; then, through sattva, the quality of poise, he sustains it for age upon age; and at the close of the kalpa he puts on the fierce and terrible form of Rudra and gathers all of it back into destruction. One and the same Janardana takes on three names, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, for creation, sustaining, and destruction. He is the one who makes, the one who keeps, and the one who draws it all back in again; and this whole play of his is like the game of a small child.
What we call Time
Then Maitreya asked, “Lord, how can something that is without qualities, pure and spotless, ever be the maker of a creation?” Parashara answered, “Maitreya, the powers that lie inside things are beyond thought; no reasoning gets a grip on them. Heat is natural to fire, and in the very same way the power to create is natural to Brahman. When Brahma, who bears the name Narayana, sets about creation, we say he is born only as a manner of speaking. By his own reckoning his life spans a hundred years; that full span is called a Para, and half of it is a Parardha.”
Now hear the measure of time. Fifteen nimeshas, the space of an eye’s blink, make one kashtha; thirty kashthas make one kala; and thirty kalas make one muhurta. Thirty muhurtas make one day-and-night, and thirty of those day-and-nights make one month. Six months make one ayana, and two ayanas 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 make the four ages together, which, under the names Satya Yuga, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali, run in order to four thousand, three thousand, two thousand, and one thousand divine years, while their twilight junctions, reckoned separately, come to the same numbers again, now counted in hundreds of years.
A thousand such chaturyugas make one day of Brahma, and his night is just as long. Within one such day, fourteen Manus come and go. One manvantara runs a little longer than seventy-one chaturyugas, which, counted in human years, comes to exactly 306,720,000 years, and no more. Fourteen times that figure makes one day of Brahma, and at its close the three worlds begin to burn and the occasional dissolution takes place. Narayana, the lotus-born, having satisfied himself by swallowing the three worlds whole, sleeps on the couch of Shesha through a night as long as that day, and when it has passed he fashions creation once more. A hundred years reckoned this way are the full life of Brahma. One Parardha of his has already gone by, and at the end of it came the great kalpa called Padma; the one now running is the first kalpa of his second Parardha, and its name is Varaha.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)