The Nasadiya Sukta, the hundred and twenty-ninth hymn of the tenth book of the Rig Veda, opens with a construction that is difficult to render into English without losing its force. There was not the non-existent, nor the existent, then. Not asat, and not sat. Both are denied in the same breath, and the denial is not rhetorical decoration; it is doing precise logical work in the first line of the poem.
Consider what each denial removes. To say there was no sat rules out the answer that something eternal was simply always there, fully formed, requiring no account. To say there was no asat rules out the answer that there was pure nothing from which something arose, which is the other standard move and the more obviously incoherent one. The hymn closes both exits in its opening line, and everything that follows has to proceed without either.
What it offers in place of them is not a third substance but a condition: darkness concealed by darkness, an undifferentiated something the hymn calls salila, usually rendered as water, and That One, tad ekam, breathing without air by its own power. The refusal to say whether this counts as existence is maintained throughout. The tradition’s later vocabulary for this, developed over centuries, becomes the language of sat-chit-ananda, though the hymn itself is far more reticent than the systems that came after it.
Denying both existence and non-existence at the outset is the hardest possible way to begin, and the hymn begins that way on purpose. To see how the poem continues from there, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 3 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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