Cosmogonic Myths in India

Creation

The act of creation was thought of in more than one manner. One of the oldest cosmogonic myth in the Rigveda  (RV 10.121) had being come into existence as a cosmic egg, hiranyagarbha (a golden egg). T  Purusha Sukta(RV 10.90) narrates that all things were made out of the mangled limbs of Purusha, a magnified non-natural man, who was sacrificed by the gods. In the Puranas, Vishnu, in the shape of a boar, plunged into the cosmic waters and brought forth the earth (Bhumi or Prithivi).

The Shatapatha Brahmana tells us that in the beginning, Prajapati, the first creator or father of all, was alone in the world. He differentiated himself into two beings, husband and wife. The wife, regarding union with her producer as incest, fled from his embraces assuming various animal disguises. The husband pursued in the form of the male of each animal, and from these unions sprang the various species of beasts (Shatapatha Brahmana, xiv. 4, 2). Prajapati was soon replaced with Brahma in the Puranas.

In the Puranas, Brahma the creator was joined in a divine triad with Vishnu and Maheshvara (Shiva), who were the preserver and destroyer, respectively. The universe was created by Brahma, preserved by Vishnu, and destroyed for the next creation by Shiva. However, the birth of Brahma was attributed to Vishnu in some myths. Brahma was often depicted as sitting on a lotus arising from the navel of Vishnu, who was resting on the cosmic serpent, Ananta (Shesha). In the very beginning Vishnu alone was there. When Vishnu thought about creation, Brahma was created from a lotus that came from his navel.

The nature of time 

According to Hindu system, the cosmos passes through cycles within cycles for all eternity. The basic cycle is the kalpa, a “day of Brahma”, or 4,320 million earthly years. His night is of equal length. 360 such days and nights constitute a “year of Brahma” and his life is 100 such years long. The largest cycle is therefore 311, 040,000 million years long, after which the whole universe returns to the ineffable world-spirit, until another creator god is evolved.

In each cosmic day the god creates the universe and again absorbs it. During the cosmic night he sleeps, and the whole universe is gathered up into his body, where it remains as a potentiality. Within each kalpa are fourteen manvantaras, or secondary cycles, each lasting 306,720,000 years, with long intervals between them. In these periods the world is recreated, and a new Manu appears, as the progenitor of the human race. We are now in the seventh manvantara of the kalpa, of which the Manu is known as Manu Vaivasvata.

Each manvantara contains 71 Mahayugas, or aeons, of which a thousand form the kalpa. Each mahayuga is in turn divided into four yugas or ages, called Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. Their lengths are respectively 4800, 3600, 2400 and 1200 “years of the gods,” each of which equals 360 human years. Each yuga represents a progressive decline in piety, morality, strength, stature, longevity and happiness. We are at present in the Kali-yuga, which began, according to tradition, in 3102 BCE, believed to be the year of the Mahabharata War.

The end of the Kali-yuga is marked by confusion of classes, the overthrow of the established standards, the cessation of all religious rites, and the rule of cruel and alien kings. Soon after this the world is destroyed by flood and fire. Most medieval texts state that the cosmic dissolution occurs only after the last cycle of the kalpa, and that the transition from one aeon to the next takes place rapidly and calmly.

Eschatology 

The dissolution of existing beings is of three kinds: "incidental, elemental, and absolute." The dissolution which occurs at the end of each Kalpa, or day of Brahma, is called naimittika, incidental, occasional, or contingent. The naimittika, occasional, incidental, or Brahmya, is as occasioned by the intervals of Brahma's days; the destruction of creatures, though not of the substance of the world, occurring during the night. The second is the general resolution of the elements into their primitive source, or Prakriti, the Prakritika destruction, and occurs at the end of Brahma's life. The third, the absolute, or final, Atyantika, is individual annihilation, Moksha, exemption for ever from future existence.


The cosmic egg

The universe emanated from a cosmic egg, the "golden womb". Egg Prajapati (lord of procreation and life saver) was born. Later in the Puranic period (genre of Indian written literature) was identified as the demiurge Brahma (literally "evolution" or "development" in Sanskrit language) God created the universe.

Mahabharata

Besides its epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pandava princes, the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or purusharthas (12.161). Among the principal works and stories that are a part of theMahabharata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the Rishyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The oldest preserved parts of the text are thought to be not much older than around 400 BCE, though the origins of the epic probably fall between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century).The title may be translated as "the great tale of the Bhārata dynasty". According to the Mahabharata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simplyBhārata.

The Mahabharata is the longest epic poem in the world and many a times described as "longest poem ever written".Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana. W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahabharata to world civilization to that of the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Qur'an.

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