A striking number of creation accounts across cultures begin with light: darkness, then illumination, then form. The Indian accounts characteristically begin with sound. In the beginning was vibration; from vibration, differentiation; from differentiation, the elements, of which the subtlest is space and its property is sound. Light arrives later in the sequence, as the property of fire, which is the third element to emerge rather than the first thing to exist.
The reasoning is not arbitrary. Light in the ordinary sense requires a source, a medium and something to fall upon, so it presupposes a space already differentiated into places. Sound as the tradition uses it is not a wave in air but vibration as such, which needs no illuminated surface and no observer positioned across from it. Beginning with vibration lets the account describe something happening before there is anywhere for it to happen, which is precisely the difficulty the Shabda Brahman doctrine exists to handle.
There is a loose structural echo in modern cosmology worth naming carefully. The earliest observable structure in the universe, recorded in the cosmic microwave background, consists of density fluctuations that physicists routinely describe as acoustic oscillations, pressure waves in the early plasma, and the universe was opaque to light until roughly 380,000 years in. Structure was propagating as vibration before anything could be seen. This is a real resemblance in shape and it is not evidence that the Vedic composers knew any of it, and the tradition is not strengthened by pretending otherwise.
Beginning with sound rather than light is why mantra, not image, became this tradition’s primary instrument. To see how sound is treated as substance rather than signal, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 17 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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