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Seeds of Parinama in the Earliest Literature
This concept of an abstract self-creative principle as the prius of the world is philosophically a definite advance over the previ-. ous one, of a personal creator, showing the operation of thought and abstraction.
We have so far left out two important cosmogonic hymns viz. the Nasadiya Sūkta (X.129) and the Puruşa Sūkta (X.90), since they deserve special notice. Prof. Macdonell sees in the former, the starting point of the natural philosophy which developed into the Samkhya system. According to Prof. Belvalkar, it contains the earliest germ of what later developed into the Pariṇāmavāda or the doctrine of evolution. But neither of these two views seems to be warranted by the actual wording of the hymn. The first two verses which run thus
I,
"There 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?
II. Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal : No sign was there, the day's and night's divider.
That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: Apart from it was nothing whatsoever."
3
- bring out that the absolute reality which is at the back of the whole world cannot be characterised by us in any words. In the next three verses, the order of evolution is given :
III. "Darkness there was at first concealed in
- darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and formless : By the great power of warmth was born that Unit.
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5 Vedic Reader, p. 207.
6 History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. II. p. 24.
7 The Hymns of the Rgveda, Griffith, Vol. II. p. 575. This hymn is translated by Muir, Max Muller, Madconell, etc.
