The Indian Conceptual World

With these preliminary remarks, let me directly focus on the Indian conceptual world. There are very early texts belonging to Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina traditions where one comes across a bewildering variety of speculations about the origin of the universe. However, there is a hymn in the Ŗgveda, one of humanities oldest existing documents, that deserves special mention. This well-known hymn of creation expresses this query, “Whence all creation had its origin ...”, ponders over it and then ends with the lines “... he, who surveys it all from the highest heaven, he knows - or maybe even he does not know.”

The early Upanişhads, which have tremendous impact on the unfolding of subsequent Indian thought, contain records not only of an intense search for detecting a principle that regulates and controls all, that underlies change and becoming but also documents the views of skeptics, agnostics and naturalists who were against any explanation for occurrence of an event through causal operation. These views were carefully examined and rejected. What is of primary importance for our present discussion is to note the idea highlighted in these early sources, starting from the Ŗgveda itself, is the notion of ‘Anădi Samsara/jagat’ - the idea that the universe is beginningless. It is not only in the Hindu tradition with its roots in the Vedas, but also the Buddhist and the Jaina traditions, which are non-Vedic, non-theistic, advocate this idea. In other words, Anădi Samsara is a pan-Indian concept.

Prior to exposing other conceptual subtleties that are integral to philosophico-religious thinking regarding the large question about the nature and origin of the universe, let us note that by describing the world as Anădi or beginningless, what is denied is the notion of an absolute beginning i.e. a beginning out of nothing. There has been ample discussion in the philosophical literature in favor of the idea that the occurrence of an event is inconceivable without invariable dependence on something else i.e. a cause, These also demonstrate at the same time the absurdities that will follow from holding a position in which a cause itself is taken to be of the nature of non-being. The idea that recurs in the tradition, in spite of the differences in metaphysical structures, epistemological theories etc. proposed by the Proponents of the different schools, is that only that which is eternal i.e. ever-present or that which is fictitious i.e. never-present can be said to be uncaused whereas that to which a beginning or/and end can be ascribed that is the Contingent must have a cause, which accounts for rule and order in every case of occurrence and happening. Consequently, whether it is in cosmological speculations or for soteriological purposes or for the sake of forming a theological symbolism intended to accentuate the idea of an all-powerful personal God, the Hindu traditions of thought invariably hold on to the basic tenet, as expressed in the Bhagavad Gītā, ‘Nāsato vidyate bhāvo’ i.e. Being cannot come out of nothing.

Let me quickly remark in this connection that if no theistic school in the mainstream Hindu tradition had espoused a model similar to that of the ‘creatio ex nihilo’ with a creator as the First Cause, it is on grounds that stem from ethico-religious considerations. This is quite a different issue to which I will come back to later.

Contributed by: Dr. Anindita Balslev