The Maker of Everything

Near the end of the Rigveda, among its last and latest hymns, a poet stops praising and begins to ask.

He has a name for the one he is asking about. He calls him Vishvakarman, the one whose work is everything. Older poets had used that word as a compliment for Indra or for the Sun. This poet uses it as the name of somebody he cannot see.

He begins with a picture. In the beginning, he says, there was a priest. He was a seer, and he was our father. He sat down to a sacrifice, and what he put into the fire was all that exists. Then he came down among the things he had made, wanting to possess them.

The picture is no sooner drawn than the poet starts to doubt it.

"What was the place he stood on?" he asks. "What held him up, and how?"

No answer comes, so he describes the maker again, more strangely this time. He has eyes on every side. He has a face on every side, arms on every side, feet on every side. He is the one god. He has arms, and he has wings as well, and when he makes the earth and the sky he welds them together, the way a smith joins two pieces of hot metal.

A smith needs metal, and a carpenter needs timber. The poet sees the difficulty and puts it as plainly as he can.

"What was the wood? What was the tree, from which they shaped the earth and the sky?"

He does not pretend to know. He turns to his listeners.

"You who think," he says, "ask it in your own minds. What did he stand on, when he set the worlds in place?"

Then, having asked what nobody can answer, he does what a person at a sacrifice can do. He prays. He asks the maker to come to the rite himself and to teach his friends his highest and his lowest forms. He calls him the lord of speech, swift as thought, and asks him to help with the work in hand.

The second hymn tries again, by another road.

Its poet calls the maker the father of the eye, wise in mind. He made the two worlds, the poet says, and when their eastern edges had been made fast, heaven and earth spread wide apart. He is the maker and the disposer. He knows every creature and every place. It was he, and he alone, who gave the gods their names, and all other beings come to him with their questions.

Then this poet, too, reaches further back, to a time before the sky and before the earth, before the gods and before their rivals.

"What was the first seed," he asks, "which the waters held, and in which all the gods could be seen together?"

This time an answer is given, and it is no easier than the question. The waters did hold that first seed, the poet says. All the gods were gathered in it. It rested on the navel of the Unborn, the One in whom everything that exists is held.

Having come this far, he turns round and looks at the singers, at the people like himself who make hymns and chant them, and he tells them the truth about their trade.

"You will not find the one who made these creatures," he says. "Something else has come up between you and him."

And he gives the last line to them. The chanters of hymns, he says, go wandering about wrapped in mist, with stammering lips, and they are not satisfied.

The poet leaves the maker of everything there, with the questions still open.

The Brahmanas know a man called Vishvakarman.

They give him a father's name, Bhauvana, and they make him a king. The Aitareya Brahmana lists him among the great rulers of old who received the royal anointing of Indra. The sage Kashyapa anointed him, it says, and after that he went round the whole earth conquering, and offered the horse sacrifice.

The Shatapatha Brahmana tells what he did next. There is a rite called the Sarvamedha, the sacrifice of everything. It lasts ten days. The first offerer of it, the text says, was the Self-existent himself, who reasoned in this way:

"There is nothing lasting in austerity. I will offer myself in all creatures, and all creatures in myself."

In that rite a man gives up all that he has. Whatever lies in his kingdom, land and people together, is shared out among the priests, one quarter of the sky to each.

Vishvakarman Bhauvana performed it. Kashyapa was his priest. When it was done, the Brahmana says, he had passed beyond all beings and become everything here.

But one thing remained to settle. He had promised the land to Kashyapa as the priest's fee, and the land had not been asked.

The Earth herself answered him. The old texts quote her verse, and they say that she sang it.

"No mortal may give me away," sang the Earth. "You were foolish, Vishvakarman, son of Bhuvana. I shall sink down into the middle of the waters. Your promise to Kashyapa was made for nothing."

That is where both Brahmanas leave it. They do not say whether the king was ashamed, or whether Kashyapa ever received his fee. They keep the verse.