Every tradition eventually asks what was there before anything was. The answers usually take one of two shapes: a creator who existed prior and made the rest, or a nothing out of which something inexplicably came. Sanatan thought entertains both and settles on neither, and the reason is worth following, because it is not evasion. The suspicion, stated in the oldest layer of the Veda, is that the question contains a defect.
The defect is the word before. Before is a temporal preposition, and it requires time to already be running for it to mean anything. If time is itself part of what came into being, then asking what happened before that is asking for a location on a road that does not extend that far. The question smuggles in the very thing it claims to be reaching behind, which is why it feels answerable and never quite gets answered.
Modern cosmology arrived at a structurally similar difficulty from an entirely different direction. The current estimate places the observable universe at about 13.8 billion years, and the standard response to what preceded that is that the question may not be well-formed, since the framework in which before has meaning does not extend past the boundary. This is a genuine structural parallel and it should be held as exactly that, a resemblance in the shape of the problem, not evidence that an ancient text anticipated a modern measurement.
What the tradition does instead of answering is describe a condition rather than an event, and then admit the limits of the description. That admission is the subject of the hymn this series turns to next. To follow the enquiry from its source, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 2 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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