Shri Maitreya wanted the beginning itself. “Tell me how, at the start of the kalpa, Bhagavan Brahma, who is called Narayana, created all beings.” Parashara answered that he would tell him how Bhagavan Brahma, the lord of the Prajapatis, Narayana in form, had made the beings, and he took him back first to the night before that day. The day of Brahma that had just ended had run for fourteen manvantaras, and at its close the three worlds, Bhuh, Bhuvah, and Svah, had gone up together in fire; the siddhas of Maharloka, scorched past bearing, had climbed to Janaloka above and waited out the end from there, and where the three worlds had been there lay one ocean. On that water, on the couch of Shesha, the lotus-born had rested in the form of Narayana and slept, and the yogis of Janaloka had held him in their meditation through every hour of the dark. That vanished kalpa, which closed the first half of Brahma’s hundred years, is remembered by the name Padma; the day now opening, the first of his second parardha, is called Varaha. The night ran out. Bhagavan Brahma rose from his sleep with sattva uppermost in him, looked out, and saw every world lying empty. He is Bhagavan Narayana himself, beyond the beyond, past the reach of thought, the lord even of the lords, of Brahma and of Shiva, Brahma in form, without beginning, the origin of all. Manu and the other lawgivers cite one verse about him, the source and the dissolution of the world: “The waters are called nara because they arise from Nara, the Purusha; those waters were his first ayana, his first dwelling; and so Bhagavan is called Narayana.”
What he looked out on was water and nothing else. No shore, no summit, no ground anywhere on which a world could be set down, and no sign of the Earth in any direction. Brahma, the Prajapati, reasoned her out: she had to be inside the water, somewhere beneath all of it, and he wished to bring her out. For that he took another body. He had done it before, in kalpas gone by, taking the form of the Fish, the form of the Tortoise, whatever the hour required; so at the start of this Varaha kalpa he took the body of a Boar, a shape made for going down and for lifting, and that body was made of the Vedas and of yajna, every limb of it a part of the rite. He who is intent on the steadiness of the whole world, the inner self of all, the unmoving Paramatma, the bearer of the earth who rests on nothing other than himself, entered the water, and Sanaka and the other siddhas of Janaloka sang his praise as he went under. Down he went through the whole depth of the flood, past where any light reached, to the region of patala, and there, at the bottom of everything, the goddess Vasundhara, the Earth herself, saw him coming for her and knew who it was. She bowed low in devotion, and she praised him.
The Earth’s Plea
“You hold the conch, the discus, the mace, and the lotus, and your eyes are lotuses; I bow to you. Raise me today out of this patala. Once before I arose from you, Janardana, and once before you raised me; I know your hands. You are the material cause of me, of the sky, and of every being there is; what I am made of is you. You who have the form of the Paramatma, I bow to you. You who are the self of the Purusha, I bow to you. You who are pradhana, the cause, and vyakta, the effect, I bow to you. You who have the form of Kala, of time itself, I bow to you again and again.”
Her praise widened from herself to the worlds. “For the making of the world you take the form of Brahma, for its keeping the form of Vishnu, for its ending the form of Rudra, and so it is you who bring forth every being, you who sustain it, and you who destroy it. When the world becomes one ocean, Govinda, you devour all of it and at the last lie down in the water, and the wise meditate on you lying there. No one knows your supreme essence; no one has reached the end of you; and so the gods worship the form that appears in your avataras. Those who seek liberation become free by worshiping you, the Parabrahman. Who, without worshiping Vasudeva, can reach moksha at all?”
Then she named him by everything there is. “Whatever the mind takes hold of, whatever the eye and the other senses grasp, whatever the buddhi turns over in thought, all of it is your form. I am your form; I rest on you; I was made by you and I live in your shelter, and that is why the world also calls me Madhavi, Madhava’s own. Victory to you who are all knowledge, and to you who are the gross form; to the imperishable and the endless; to the unmanifest and the manifest; to the higher form and the lower, the self of the world, the lord of yajna, the sinless. You are the yajna itself, you are the vashatkara that sends the offering up, you are the Omkara, and you are the fires, the ahavaniya and the rest. Hari, you are the Vedas and the limbs of the Vedas and the Yajnapurusha, the Person of the sacrifice; the sun and the planets, the stars, the nakshatras, and the whole world are you. Purushottama, Parameshvara, the formed and the formless, the seen and the unseen, what I have said and what I have left unsaid, all of it is you. I bow to you again and again.”
The Earth Raised on His Tusks
Praised so by the Earth, Bhagavan Dharanidhara, the bearer of the earth, whose voice is the Sama chant, answered her with a roar, deep and rolling, the sound of the chant itself coming up through the water. Then the great Varaha, his eyes like lotuses in full bloom, took the Earth up on his tusks, and dark as a lotus leaf, huge as Mount Nila, he came up out of rasatala with her, the whole drowned ground of the three worlds balanced on two tusks. As he rose, the water stirred up by the breath of his mouth went all the way to Janaloka and drenched the great sinless munis who live there, Sanandana and the others, brilliant men standing suddenly in the spray of his breathing.
The water his hooves had torn open went back down toward rasatala with a great sound, and the siddhas living in Janaloka, caught in the wind of his breath, were scattered and ran this way and that. The great Varaha came out with the Earth, his belly wet with water, and shook his Veda-formed body as any animal shakes the water from its coat, and the munis who live among the hairs of that body, a world of sages on the coat of the Boar, rode the shaking and began to praise him. The yogishvaras of Janaloka, Sanandana and the rest, who had been drenched and flung about a moment before, watched him rise and felt no fear; with their gaze lifted and their heads bowed in deep humility they praised the earth-bearer with glad hearts.
What they sang read his body as a yajna, limb by limb. “Keshava, you hold the conch and the mace, the sword and the discus; victory to you, supreme lord of the lords, of Brahma and the rest. You are the cause of the world’s origin, its continuance, and its destruction; you are Ishvara; and what is called the param pada, the highest place, is nothing other than you. Your tusks are shaped like the yupa, the post to which the offering is tied at the yajna, and you are the Yajnapurusha himself, the whole rite standing up in a body. In your feet are the four Vedas, in your teeth the yajnas, in your mouth the fire-altars built of piled brick; the sacrificial fire is your tongue and the kusha grass is your hair. Night and day are your eyes, and Parabrahman, the support of all, is your head. All the suktas, the Vaishnava hymns and the rest, are your mane, and every havis offered into the fire is your breath. The sruk, the ladle, is your snout; the deep sound of the Sama is your voice; the pragvamsha, the house where the yajamana sits through the rite, is your body; the sattras, the long sacrifices, are your joints; and the two dharmas, ishta, the rites at the fire, and purta, the wells dug and gardens planted for others, are your two ears. You are eternal; be pleased with us.”
Then they looked at what he carried, and the praise turned to the Earth on his tusks and to what the Earth is. “You are the imperishable one, the form of the whole world, who covers the earth with a single stride; we know you as the first cause of the world, the supreme lord and master of all that moves and all that stands still. Be pleased with us. This whole Earth set on your tusks looks like a mud-smeared lotus leaf stuck in the tusks of an elephant that has trampled a lotus grove. The whole space between earth and sky is filled with your body; there is no one like you, and you who are radiant enough to fill the universe, do the world good. The paramartha, the true reality, is you alone, and there is nothing else; this glory of yours is what pervades everything that moves and everything that stands. Whatever formed world is seen is your knowledge-form. Men who have not mastered their senses see it through delusion as the world; the unwise, taking this world of knowledge for a world of objects, wander without end in the ocean of samsara; and those of pure mind, who know vijnana, see this whole world as your form made of knowledge. You who are all and the self of all, be pleased. You are beyond measure; raise the Earth as a dwelling for the world and give us peace. Govinda, now sattva is uppermost in you; raise the Earth for the world’s well-being and give us peace. May this impulse toward creation that comes from you work the world’s good. We bow to you. Give us peace.”
The Earth Resting on the Water
Praised in this way, the Paramatma in the form of Varaha, the holder of the earth, swiftly lifted her and set her down on the vast water. She rests on that mass of water like a very large boat, and because her shape is so wide she does not sink; the flood that had swallowed her now carries her. Then the beginningless Parameshvara leveled her and placed the mountains here and there, each in its division. The peaks that had burned at the end of the previous kalpa were gone to the last stone, and he made them again on her surface, each in its own place, by his unfailing power, for his will always comes true: a range stood where a range had stood and a summit rose where a summit had risen. Then he laid out the seven dvipas and the rest on the earth in their proper divisions, and, as before, conceived the four lokas, Bhurloka and the three above it, so that the world had its floors again.
After that Bhagavan Hari, who had gone down into the water with sattva uppermost, joined himself with rajas, took the four-faced form of Brahma, and made the creation. In that making Bhagavan is only the nimitta, the occasion, and nothing more is asked of him; the chief cause of a creation is the powers that lie in the things to be created, each thing carrying within itself the power to unfold into what it becomes. The occasion sets them going, as the Boar’s tusks set the Earth back on the water; their own powers do the rest. “Things need nothing beyond the nimitta,” he told Maitreya, “for a thing reaches thingness by its own power.”
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)