Rig Veda: Creation

Before reading Rig Veda: Creation I felt it was necessary for me to at least know a bit of background on what I was reading. This prompted me to look what the Rig Veda was and a bit of its background. I learned a number of interesting things about this book. The first thing I learned was that Rig Veda means “the knowledge of verses” in Sanskrit. It is the oldest sacred book of Hinduism and was written in an ancient form of Sanskrit. The book is a collection of 1,028 poems and is grouped into 10 circles known as “Mandalas”. After reading up on some of the histories of the Rig Veda I jumped right into reading The Creation Hymn. When I read the description of the hymn I was confused as to why this simple hymn would spark “complex commentaries among Indian theologians and Western scholars”. At first, the hymn seems like any other religious text describing how the universe came to be, but towards the end, you get a sense of skepticism. In points 6 and 7 the author states that even though we might be told how the universe came to be we will never know because we were not there, neither were the gods because they came after its creation. It seems that the author of this hymn believed in gods but was not so sure about the creation story because in the last line he says that the only person that can know how the universe was created is “the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know”. He is not saying there is no God in this statement he is just saying that he might not even know how it all came to be.