Pottery is made with corded decoration.

c. 2500 The emergence of civilization in the Indus Valley lowlands at the early cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, centered in the Indus River plain between what is now Pakistan and northwestern India; walled towns develop.

Earliest known woven cotton cloth found in Mohenjo-Daro.

2000 Collapse of Indus Valley civilization.

1500 Indo-Aryan nomadic invaders arrive and settle northwestern India.

Composition of the Sanskrit hymns of the Rig-Veda begins (completed c. 900).

1030 Aryans in India expand down the Ganges Valley.

c. 1000 Aryans establish small states in India.

c. 900 Composition of late Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads begins.

c. 800 Rise of urban culture in Ganges Valley.

c. 600 Sixteen Aryan kingdoms are spread across northern India.

Emergence of Hinduism.

563 Birth of the Buddha.

540 Birth of Mahavira, founder of Jain religion.

c. 500 Religious law codes composed.

Caste system introduced in India.

c. 483 Death of Buddha.

c. 400 Composition and compilation of epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana.

326 Alexander the Great crosses the Indus River into India; farthest advance of his empire.

321 Chandragupta founds Mauryan Empire.

297 Chandragupta, the first man to unite the Indian subcontinent, abdicates in favor of his son, Bindusara.

273 Reign of Ashoka after he seizes throne.

262 Ashoka converts to Buddhism; renounces violence; Buddhism becomes state religion.

232 Ashoka dies.

c. 100 Composition of seven-hundred-verse Bhagavad-Gita.

W.

hen the first atomic bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico's desert in July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer-the brilliant young physicist who directed the Los Alamos laboratory-recalled the moment like this: We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same.... I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says, "Now I am become Death the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.*

Consider that scene. One of the most significant moments in human history has just occurred. and it is marked not by a passage from the Bible, or a Greek philosopher, or Shakespeare, but by an obscure reference from an ancient mythic tradition. To many Westerners accustomed to Judeo-Christian doctrines and the rationalism that began in Greece and flowered in Europe's Enlightenment, India's mythic legacy remains inscrutable. It is a magical mystery tour of the exotic and wondrous. A blue-tinged god with surplus arms. An elephant-headed deity who rides around on the back of a rat. A terrifying goddess adorned with severed body parts. A monkey king who would be at home in The Wizard of Oz. An awesome divinity who dances the world into destruction. And a thousand-year-old temple adorned with a host of X-rated figures in bewildering contortions.

It is the unfurling of millions of yoga mats in gyms around the world, turning a three-thousand-year-old path to enlightenment into the latest fitness craze. It is "Instant Karma" and the Kama Sutra combined, a picture muddled for many Westerners by saffron-robed groups hustling spare change at the airport as they chant "Hare Krishna."

And what is the story with those "sacred cows"?

Occupying a triangular peninsula about the size of continental Europe that juts down from Asia's landmass into the Indian Ocean, India is a place of enormous physical contrasts-extraordinary mountains, a great desert, broad plains, winding rivers, tropical lowlands, and lush rain forests watered by life-giving but sometimes destructive monsoons. Part of this diverse country's fortunes in ancient times lay in the fact that it was largely set apart by its physical boundaries-the Arabian Sea and a large desert, the Thar, to the west; the Bay of Bengal to the east; and to the north, the towering, snowcapped Himalayas that separated India from China.

Yet remote, obscure India beckoned to the West for centuries. First for its silks and spices. Then, later, for its approach to contemplating the "Big Questions"-eternity, good, evil, and the meaning of life. With a cosmic view completely at odds with traditional Western thought, India has long been interested in the transcendent and the immortal, the idea that creation and destruction are an endless cycle, that the soul is an essence searching for perfection through reincarnation. These ideas found expression in what mythologist Arthur Cotterell has called "a range of myth and legend which is unrivaled anywhere else in the world."

The roots of those Indian myths are also very old, stretching back more than 4,500 years to the broad plains of the Indus River Valley. Once centered in what is now the border region between northwestern India and southern Pakistan, the ancient Indus Valley civilization flourished for a thousand years. Most likely, it was anchored by a very ancient, fertility-based, goddess worship, as well as the worship of cows deemed sacred for the milk they provided and the dung that helped fertilize their crops. This civilization lasted until a group of warlike nomads swept in around 1500 BCE. Speaking a language called "Sanskrit," which is at the root of all other Indo-European languages, these new arrivals probably originated near the Caucasus Mountains in central Asia. They called themselves arya (meaning "kinsmen" or "noble ones"), and eventually came to be known as Aryans.* Just as the people later called "Mycenaeans" had barreled into Greece bringing some of their own gods with them and absorbing some of the local deities they found, the Aryans conquered the remnants of the Indus civilization and imposed their "alpha male" pantheon of gods on the locals. That is, at least, the prevailing view; another school of thinking holds that this was a kinder, gentler Aryan migration.

Once settled, the Aryans spread to the south and east, eventually extending their rule over most of India. Over time, the gods and culture of the Aryans gradually combined with those of the existing local cultures, and what Westerners later called "Hinduism" evolved from this ancient marriage. Although the Aryans never developed a great and voracious imperial government intent upon world conquest-just as no dominant state emerged in ancient Greece-their myths eventually knit together the people of this vast and diverse "subcontinent" as no single state or government bureaucracy ever could. Their beliefs and sacred rituals, the Sanskrit language, the holy temples to the cosmos of gods and goddesses-and the unshatterable "caste" system their beliefs cemented rigidly in place-formed the soul of Indian culture.

Yet to talk about "Hinduism" as a monolithic religion is a mistake. It has no pope or hierarchy. No founder or central prophet. No uniting creed. No Vatican or Mecca or Jerusalem. As it exists today, Hinduism-along with its two most significant offshoots, Buddhism and Jainism-is a complex collection of beliefs with a vast pantheon of gods and differing schools of thought. Its dizzying diversity has led writers such as historian Ninian Smart to comment, "Even to talk of a single something called Hinduism can be misleading because of the great variety of customs, forms of worship, gods, myths, philosophies, types of ritual, movements and styles of art and music contained loosely within the bounds of the religion...It is as if many Hinduisms had merged into one. It is now more like the trunk of a single ordinary tree; but its past is a tangle of most divergent roots."

From those ancient roots-the stories, legends, and ancient myths-comes a vibrant, pulsing religion with a collective consciousness that has few parallels in other cultures or belief systems, either East or West.

MYTHIC VOICES.

Scholars of India are puzzled by why their culture, so ancient, so rich in sculpture and architecture, in works of mythical and romantic literature, should have been so lacking in critical historical writings. Some suggest that the ancient Indian works of history written in Sanskrit may, for still unexplained reasons, have suffered wholesale destruction. A more plausible explanation is that they never existed.... The main interest of Hindu Indians in their past was not in the rise and fall of historical empires, but in the rulers of mythical golden age.... The lack of a historical record reveals not merely the Hindu preoccupation with the transcendent and the eternal, but also the widespread sense that social life was changeless and repetitive.... In a society that did not know change, what was there for historians to write about? When real events were recorded, they were usually transmuted into myth to give them a universal and enduring significance.

-DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Discoverers If the slayer thinks he slays, If the slain thinks he is slain, Both these do not understand; He slays not, is not slain.

-Katha Upanishad How do we know what the ancient Indians believed?

The Egyptians left us their Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamians their Gilgamesh. The Greeks gave us Homer and Hesiod. The Celts left stories that were later preserved by monks. But when it comes to the myths of ancient India, we have a vast collection of mythic and religious writing that dwarfs all others. If anybody deserves the sobriquet "people of the book," it may well be the compilers of India's vast libraries.

When the Aryans arrived in the Indus Valley sometime between 1700 and 1500 BCE, they brought along Sanskrit, the oldest known written language of India. Although Sanskrit died out as a "living language" by about 100 BCE, it was used-like the Latin of medieval Europe-as the "learned language" of poetry, science, philosophy, and religion. Forming the core of Hinduism's beliefs and practices, the collections of Sanskrit hymns, poetry, philosophical dialogues, and legends all exist in an imposing set of texts that include, most significantly, the Vedas and Upanishads, the epic poems Ramayana and the Mahabharata-which contains an important section called the Bhagavad-Gita-and the Puranas.

The oldest sacred Sanskrit writings, the Vedas were thought to be composed beginning about 1400 BCE over a period of nearly 1,000 years, an era in India's history called the "Vedic period." The Vedas are considered to be older than the sacred writings of any other major existing religion, including the Hebrew Old Testament. Only the ancient Egyptian pyramid texts are older. Like many mythic and religious documents, the Vedas probably first existed in oral form for centuries, and may go back as far as 4000 BCE. Hindu tradition holds that they were composed in 3500 BCE, in the time of Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, before they were finally written down by some anonymous scribes.

There are four Vedas, beginning with the oldest and most famous, the Rig-Veda. (The later Vedas include Sama-Veda, Yajur-Veda, and Atharva-Veda.) Written in archaic Sanskrit and first translated for the West by Max Muller in the mid-nineteenth century, the Vedas have been studied not only for their religious significance, but for their connection to the early history of the Indo-European languages, including the Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Slavic language families, which are derived from archaic Sanskrit. Ancient Sanskrit is also the original source for many languages spoken in modern India, including Hindi and Urdu. To many Westerners, Sanskrit is more obscure and indecipherable than Greek or Latin. But many linguists consider ancient Sanskrit a highly polished and systematic language with precise rules of grammar.

The word "Veda" means "knowledge," and sacred knowledge in particular. Roughly equivalent to the Hebrew Psalms of the Old Testament, the Vedas are poetic collections that provided the songbook for the holy rites of the early Vedic religion. The Rig-Veda contains more than one thousand hymns, totaling more than ten thousand verses-an enormous number, compared to the 150 biblical Psalms.

Later additions to the Rig-Veda include two other important texts, which were composed as commentaries on the Vedas-the Brahmanas and the Upanishads.

Brahmanas are long prose essays; they explain the myths and theology behind the sacred rituals that include offerings to gods, chanting, pilgrimages, and acts of charity or self-denial, such as food taboos. According to Devdutt Pattanaik's Indian Mythology, "The human custodian of these manuals was known as the brahmana. As keepers of Vedic lore...brahmanas served as the link between the material and spiritual realms. They knew the secret of the cosmos.... As people, communities and tribes mingled and merged, the Vedic brahmanas tried to retain their superior position and their spiritual purity by not sharing food or their daughters with nonbrahmanas." Organized around this priesthood, the system came to be called Brahminism, led by the Vedic priests who came to be known as Brahmins (also spelled Brahmans), a hereditary priesthood occupying the highest place in society. And just as Christianity's sacred religious language, Latin, was written and read almost exclusively by the priesthood, Sanskrit became the preserve of the Brahmins. Knowledge is, was, and always has been Power.

Upanishads are deeply philosophical works, one hundred and eight of which have been preserved; they appeared between 800 and 600 BCE and formed a basic part of Hinduism as it evolved. "Upanishads" roughly means "sitting near devotedly," or "to sit close to." They were composed, like certain works of Greek philosophy, as dialogues between a teacher and student.

At the core of the Upanishads is the notion of Brahman, the divine universal power that lives in the whole of creation, including the human soul, which is believed to be eternal. Expressing the idea that knowledge brings spiritual uplift, the Upanishads also introduced the notion that one lifetime is not enough to gather all the necessary knowledge. By accumulating knowledge over many rebirths, one can finally be rejoined with Brahman and achieve moksha, the ultimate "release" or "salvation" that is the true goal of all human beings.

Another key source of India's myths is the Mahabharata, one of the longest literary works in history, more than seven times the combined length of the Iliad and the Odyssey. One of India's two epic poems, the Mahabharata was said to have been dictated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom. In fact, it is a collection of Sanskrit writings by several authors who lived at various times, and parts of it may be more than 2,500 years old.

Mahabharata literally means "Great King Bharata," and the poem recounts a cataclysmic family feud between the descendants of King Bharata-two related families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, who lived in northern India, perhaps about 1200 BCE. The Pandava brothers lose their kingdom to their Kaurava cousins and engage in a mighty struggle to win it back.

The main narrative of the Mahabharata is frequently interrupted by other stories and discussions of religion and philosophy, one of which is the enormously important work called the Bhagavad-Gita. Perhaps the most widely read, beloved, and significant piece of Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita (Song of the Lord) is presented as a conversation between the warrior hero Arjuna and the god Krishna, who has taken the mortal role of Arjuna's chariot driver. The Gita, as it is known, sets forth Krishna's teachings to Arjuna, who faces a moral crisis as the two armies prepare to do battle.

The second of India's two epic poems is the Ramayana, which supposedly describes events that took place 870,000 years ago. The poem contains 24,000 couplets-again, originally written in Sanskrit-and attributed to a sage Valmiki, who wrote it about 500 BCE. Very simply, it is the story of Rama, a prince whose father exiles him for fourteen years because of a dispute over the throne. Like the Iliad, it is largely about a war over a woman, as the main plot line is about the conflict between Prince Rama and a demonic king called Ravana, who kidnaps Rama's beloved wife, Sita. The Hindi translation, written by the poet Tulsidas in the late 1500s CE, remains the most popular version of the Ramayana today.

Finally, there is a large collection of Sanskrit texts called Puranas, which were compiled between the early centuries of the Common Era and as recently as the sixteenth century. Mainly written in verse, they present an encyclopedia of Hindu lore, often taking the form of a dialogue-just as the works of Plato do-between a sage and a group of disciples. There are eighteen major and eighteen minor Puranas, and each is a long book that consists of various stories of the gods and goddesses, hymns, cosmology, rules of life, and rituals. Essentially extensive references and guides to religion and culture, the Puranas also describe the Hindu beliefs about Creation and how the world periodically ends and is reborn.

Just as many Christian churches traditionally used a catechism to teach their basic tenets, the Puranas were used to disseminate Hindu religious principles and practices to the majority of illiterate people as well as those prohibited from the older Vedic traditions, including women and the socially inferior people in India's strict caste system. Many of the Puranas are especially important in understanding myth, because they were composed to explain the connection between particular places with mythological events, such as the origin of a sacred site where a deity had manifested itself.

Words, of course, are not all that we have to go on when it comes to India's vast mythology. Along with the thousands of Hindu temples still in active use, there is archaeology. During the late-nineteenth-century era of British colonial rule in Pakistan and India, British scholars were the first Westerners to discover vestiges of whole cities full of ancient artifacts buried in huge earthen mounds in the Indus Valley region. By the 1920s, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a previously unknown civilization, now called "Harappan," in the area's two central cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. (More recently, other significant discoveries have been made at sites including Kalibangan, Lothal, and Surkotada-in India and Pakistan.) Arranged around a citadel, and built on a grid, these carefully planned cities featured paved streets and underground sewage drains. Excavations have also revealed large baths with connecting rooms, where ancient purification rites may have taken place, along with prominent phallic symbols and large numbers of statues of goddesses, suggesting an early focus on fertility rites. With a uniform system of weights and measures, and covering a larger geographical area than either the civilizations of Egypt or Sumer did, Harappan civilization had broken down by about 1700 BCE. There are few records or historical clues to explain this decline, but the breakup may have been due to changing river patterns that disrupted local agriculture and the Indus Valley economy.

The demise of the Harappan civilization roughly coincides with the arrival of the Aryans. And from the fusion of these two ancient cultures came the eventual rise of Hinduism-a mythology, a religion, and a philosophy that completely shaped India's future and identity.

MYTHIC VOICES.

In Vedic religion, people had experienced a holy power in the sacrificial ritual. They had called this sacred power Brahman. The priestly cast...were also believed to possess this power. Since the ritual sacrifice was seen as the microcosm of the whole universe, Brahman gradually came to be a power which sustains everything. The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence.

Brahman cannot be addressed as "thou" it is a neutral term, so it is neither he nor she; nor is it experienced as the will of a sovereign deity. Brahman does not speak to mankind. It cannot meet men and women; it transcends all such human activities. Nor does it respond to us in a personal way: sin does not "offend" it, and it cannot be said to "love" us or be angry. Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate.

-KAREN ARMSTRONG, A History of God By the Lord all this universe must be enveloped, Whatever moving thing there is in this moving world.

Renounce this and you may enjoy existence, Do not covet anyone's wealth.

Even while doing deeds here One may wish to live a hundred years; Thus on thee-this is how it is- The deed adheres, not on the person.

-from the Upanishads What role did myth play in ancient India?

A better question might be, "What role didn't myth play in ancient India?"

Although there is oddly no equivalent word for "myth" in India's numerous languages, few other places were as engulfed and pervaded by their myths as was ancient India. From the vegetarian diet many Indians embraced, to their view of the Ganges River as sacred water, to the rigid social classes into which their people were divided, religious ideas born of myth completely dictated life in ancient India. As Anna Dallapiccola writes in Hindu Myths, "Myths permeate the totality of Indian culture, mementoes of mythical events dot the whole country, old myths are told anew and new myths are created...Each story is connected to many more, one more exciting than the previous; each merges in an ocean of stories."

The power of myth in ancient India's everyday life grew out of the Vedic traditions, which formed the heart of the country's religious practices for centuries. Stretching back to before 1500 BCE, when the Vedas were written, the Vedic traditions were steeped in an older generation of gods, but were ever-present in the actions of priests who petitioned the gods for favors by chanting and making offerings of flowers, food, and gifts. They also oversaw such rites of passage as marriage, childbirth, and death, and-perhaps most important-made sacrifices at fire altars in the hopes of currying the favor of the gods. Tolerant of local customs and beliefs, the Vedic priests-later the Brahmins-accommodated the local cults that worshipped trees, snakes, mountains, rivers, and other regional deities as they spread across India. Bringing these localized cults into the Vedic fold not only expanded the number of worshippers in India, it also swelled the vast pantheon of gods.

With the introduction of the Upanishads between 800 and 500 BCE, a striking shift in India's mythic mind-set took place. The emphasis was no longer on the simple, ancient belief in sacrificing to individual gods who could provide protection, send a good husband, or bring rain to make the plants grow. The emergence of the Upanishads ushered in a new era of far more abstract belief, in which the many gods of ancient times were reduced to the single concept called Brahman, and the emphasis was placed on escaping an endless cycle of death, rebirth, and reincarnation in order for the human soul to link with Brahman, the Absolute Godhead.

Making that cosmic leap involved another notion introduced with the Upanishads-that of karma, the law of cause and effect which dictates that every action has consequences that influence how the soul will be reborn. Unlike the Egyptian or Christian notion, in which proper behavior might guarantee a pleasant afterlife, this Indian concept-simply put-held that living a good life means the soul will be born into a higher state in its next incarnation. An evil life did not mean eternal damnation but a rebirth of the soul into a lower state, possibly even as an animal. This ongoing cycle of life-death-reincarnation continues until a person ultimately achieves spiritual perfection, at which point the soul enters a new level of existence called moksha ("release" or "salvation"), in which it is joined with Brahman, the divine godhead.

As these more abstract religious concepts took hold, the old rituals were not abandoned, but made part of a new order that was contained within a concept called dharma-an all-inclusive sense of moral and spiritual "duty" with implications of truth and righteousness as well. In essence, dharma means the correct way of living. Maintaining dharma is believed to bring rhythm to the natural world and order in society. When dharma is not upheld, the result is uncertainty, natural disaster, and accidents-what Star Wars would call "a great disturbance in the Force," or as Lemony Snicket of children's book fame might put it, "A Series of Unfortunate Events." Essential to maintaining dharma was careful adherence to sacred religious observances and the social order. Every man was supposed to do his duty as defined by his station. For women, as Devdutt Pattanaik notes, "There was only one dharma: obeying the father when unmarried, the husband when married, and the son when widowed." Not exactly a modern feminist's idea of Nirvana, but certainly in line with the notions of most other male-dominated ancient societies.

The core of Brahmanism's order was the Brahmin social structure, which evolved into the Hindu caste system. A highly rigid division of social classes, the caste system may have existed in some form before the Aryan invaders-or immigrants-arrived in the Indus Valley. But as the Aryans and their descendants gradually gained control of most of India, the caste system was used, at first, to limit contact between themselves and the aboriginal people known as Dravidians. The Sanskrit word for caste means "color," and it is widely thought that the tall, fairer-skinned, and possibly blue-eyed Aryans imposed this system on the darker-skinned aboriginal Dravidians.

The three original divisions later became four principal castes-gradually divided into many layers of subcastes-each with its own rules of behavior, particularly regarding marriage. Marrying outside of one's caste-like an English aristocrat marrying a "commoner"-just wasn't done. It was not dharma.

On top of the caste system were the Brahmins, the priests and scholars concerned with spiritual matters; next came Kshatriyas, the rulers and warriors who administered the society; beneath them were the Vaisyas, the merchants and professionals who managed the society's economy; and then the Sudras, the laborers who serviced the society. For centuries, one large group has ranked below even the lowest, Sudra caste. Known as Dalits ("broken" or "ground down"), they were the "untouchables" who performed the most menial tasks and existed outside the four castes-giving us the English word "outcast."*

Just as priests ruled the European medieval world, and the imams and ayatollahs dictate to modern Islamic governments in places like Iran, the Brahmin caste of priests, philosophers, and scholars held the high ground in ancient Indian society. Elite and powerful, they attained and held their status through religious principle. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, his groundbreaking view of human history, Jared Diamond coined the word "kleptocracies" to describe powerful ruling classes and the ways in which they were able to transfer wealth-and power-from commoners to themselves. Far from limited to India's Brahmins, Diamond's fairly cynical view of these systems neatly sums up the underpinnings of the caste system: "[One] way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion."

Whenever myth morphs into religion, elaborate rituals usually emerge.* This was certainly apparent in India, where the sacred Ganges, a river originating high in the Himalayas and revered as the physical manifestation of the goddess Ganga, had been associated with purification since ancient times. Bathing in the waters of the Ganges is still a lifelong ambition for Hindu worshippers and, each year, thousands visit such holy cities as Varanasi (Benares) and Allahabad in pilgrimages to do just that. Temples line the banks of the Ganges and ghats (stairways) lead down to the river, where the pilgrims come to bathe and carry home some of its water. While some come only to cleanse and purify themselves, the sick and crippled come-just as thousands of Christian pilgrims flock to such "miraculous" sites as Lourdes-hoping that the touch of the water will cure their ailments. Others come to die in the river, because the Hindus believe that those who die in the Ganges will have their sins removed.*

Another later symbol of the order permeating Indian society was the construction of Hindu temples, which began to be built around 300 CE, during the period of the Gupta Empire (c. 320550 CE), a period known as India's Golden Age for its accomplishments in literature, science and mathematics, the arts, and architecture. Constructed to venerate a particular deity, these temples, now located across India, housed the god, whose devotees came to the temple for a glimpse of the divine in order to absorb the god's power and carry that power with them in their daily lives. When they came to the temple, worshippers expressed adoration, made offerings, and sought blessings. Often adorned with erotic sculptures celebrating the Hindu pantheon, these temples represented another step in India's evolving society. As Devdutt Pattanaik points out, "Not satisfied with approaching the divine through trees, animals, rivers, and natural rock formations, the kings sponsored the making of idols of Gods and Goddesses in metal and stone that were enshrined in temples. Between 800 and 1300, vast temple complexes came into being. They were controlled and managed by brahmins, who once again came to dominate society.... Caste hierarchy manifested in the temple tradition too, with caste based on occupation determining whether one was allowed to enter the temple or not. With rituals came the idea of pollution. Those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy-sweepers, cobblers, and other menial laborers-were the most polluted."

MYTHIC VOICES.

In the beginning a lotus bloomed. Within sat Brahma. He opened his eyes and realized he was all alone. Afraid, he sought the origin of the lotus he sat on. It emerged from the navel of Vishnu, who slept in the coils of the serpent Ananta-Sesha on the surface of a boundless ocean of milk. Having been formed by Vishnu, Brahma set about creating living beings.

-VISHNU PURANA There was neither being nor nonbeing then, neither atmosphere nor the sky above. What stirred? Where? Under whose protection?

There was neither death nor immortality then. Day was not separate from night. Only the One breathed, without an alien breath, of Himself-and there was nothing other than He.

Was there below? Was there above?