The hymn has seven verses and moves in a clear sequence. The first denies both existence and non-existence, and asks what covered everything and where. The second says there was neither death nor immortality, no sign of night or day, and that That One breathed windlessly by its own impulse, with nothing else beside it. Already two of the assumptions we cannot ordinarily think without, time and duality, have been removed.
The third verse describes darkness hidden by darkness and an undifferentiated expanse, and says That One arose through the power of tapas, usually translated as heat or austerity. The fourth introduces kama, desire, as the first movement of mind and the primal seed, and states that the wise, searching in their hearts, found the connection between the existent and the non-existent. The order matters: heat, then desire, then discrimination. Nothing is manufactured; something differentiates.
The fifth verse describes a cord stretched across, with below and above, seed-placers and powers, and admits the arrangement is obscure. The sixth and seventh then turn to the question of who could possibly know, disqualify the gods as latecomers, and end in the celebrated perhaps. What is striking on a slow reading is how little the hymn claims and how carefully it stages its own limits. Later commentators read tapas here as the concentrated intensity that precedes any emergence, which is the sense the word carries throughout the tradition afterwards.
A hundred and twenty words that decline to overstate anything, composed before most world literature existed. To see what the later texts built on this foundation, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 4 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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