The Boar and the Tortoise

In the beginning there was water, and nothing else. The books of the Taittiriya school all start from there.

Prajapati was on the water, and he wanted there to be a world. One of these books says that he moved over the sea as a wind. Another says that he laboured and burned with effort, asking himself one question.

"How shall this come to be?"

Then he saw something. A lotus leaf was standing on the water.

"That leaf rests on something," he thought. "There is something down there."

He took the shape of a boar and plunged in beside the stalk. He went down through the water until he found the earth at the bottom. He broke off a piece of it, came back up to the surface, and spread what he had brought on the lotus leaf.

It spread, and so it is called Prithivi, the broad one. "It has come to be," he said, and so it is called Bhumi, the earth. The wind carried it out towards the four quarters, and he made it firm with gravel.

The Taittiriya Samhita tells the same thing in a few lines. He saw her, he became a boar and seized her, and then, as Vishvakarman, the maker of all, he wiped her dry. She spread out and became the earth. On that earth he toiled again and made the gods.

The Shatapatha Brahmana remembers the boar in a single sentence, spoken when the priest picks up a clod of earth that a boar has rooted up. The earth was once only a span wide, it says. A boar named Emusha raised her, and Prajapati was her lord.

The tortoise comes into the story in another of these books, the Taittiriya Aranyaka, and it does not behave as Prajapati expects.

There Prajapati is born alone on a lotus leaf. Desire stirs in his mind: "Let me create this." He burns with effort and shakes his body. From his flesh a company of sages arises. His nails and his hair become two more. And the moisture of his body becomes a tortoise, moving about in the water.

Prajapati looked at it. "You have come from my skin and my flesh," he said.

"No," said the tortoise. "I was here before."

Then the tortoise rose up as a person with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet.

Prajapati did not argue. "You were here before me," he said. "Then you make this first."

So the other took water in his cupped hands and set it down in the east. "So be it, O Sun," he said, and the sun rose there. He set water down in the south, and fire arose. He set it in the west, and the wind arose. He set it in the north, and Indra arose.

The Shatapatha knows a tortoise too, and makes it Prajapati himself. He took that form, it says, when he made living things. A live tortoise is built into the fire altar for that reason, its lower shell the earth and its upper shell the sky.

When the last age of the world had ended, the Vishnu Purana says, Brahma woke from his night of sleep and found the universe empty. The Purana is careful about who this Brahma is. He is Narayana, the supreme lord, wearing the form of Brahma, and he is called Prajapati because he brings forth creatures.

Everything was water. He reasoned that the earth must be lying somewhere underneath it, and he wished to raise her. In earlier ages he had taken the shape of a fish, and of a tortoise. This time he took the shape of a boar, a body made of the Vedas and the sacrifice, and he went down into the ocean.

The Earth saw him coming through the deep and bowed.

"Lift me from this place," she said, "as you lifted me in days of old. I came from you and I am made of you, and so is the sky, and so is everything there is. No one knows your true nature. The gods worship only the forms you choose to wear."

The boar made a low sound in answer, like the chanting of the Sama Veda. His body was as great as a mountain and dark as a lotus leaf. He set his tusks under the earth and lifted her up from the lowest regions.

As he raised his head, water streamed from his brow. It poured down through the prints of his hooves with a noise like thunder. The sages who live in the high world of the saints were blown about by his breath, and they sheltered among the bristles of his hide while he climbed, dripping.

"Victory to you, lord," they sang. "Your feet are the Vedas. Your tusks are the post of the sacrifice, your tongue is its fire, and the hairs of your body are the sacred grass. The earth sits on the tip of your tusk like a lotus leaf lifted from a pond."

He set the earth down on the great waters. She floated there like a mighty ship and did not sink. Then he levelled her and heaped up the mountains.