In a hymn that spends most of its length denying things, one phrase stands out as positive: anid avatam svadhaya tad ekam. That One breathed, windlessly, by its own power. It is the only description offered of what was there, and it is constructed so carefully that each element cancels a possible misunderstanding as soon as it might arise.
Breathed is the first move, and it is a choice with consequences. Breathing indicates something alive rather than inert, which rules out reading the origin as dead matter that later somehow produced life. Windlessly immediately withdraws the physical sense, since breath without air is not breath in any ordinary meaning; the word gives the image and then removes the mechanism. By its own power, svadhaya, rules out an external cause, an operator, a prior mover. And That One, tad ekam, refuses even to supply a name.
The grammar carries the same restraint. Tad is a neuter demonstrative, which in a language with grammatical gender is a deliberate refusal to make the origin either he or she, and ekam is a number rather than a description. The hymn will not personalise, will not gender, will not characterise. What it will say is that whatever was there was single, alive in some sense the word breath gestures at, and dependent on nothing. Everything the later tradition says about the fourth state and about consciousness without an object is an unpacking of this reticence rather than an addition to it.
One positive phrase in an entire hymn, engineered so that it cannot be over-read. To see how later texts expanded on it, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 5 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
Series I: From the BeginningThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline