Hindu Cosmology

Sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC, in the northwestern territory of the Indian subcontinent that archaeologists call the Indo-Gangetic region, priests of a tradition that already had centuries of oral history began to compose the hymns we know today as the Rigveda. These hymns are the oldest religious texts that have been transmitted uninterrupted to the present—older than the Torah in its written form, older than any Greek or Mesopotamian religious text of comparable complexity, transmitted for at least three and a half thousand years first by oral memorization and then by writing with a fidelity that modern philologists describe as extraordinary. What those foundational texts put at the center of their cosmology was not a god who judges, nor a god who punishes, nor a god who establishes conditional alliances with his people. They put a question in the center. The Creation Hymn of the Rigveda — the Nasadiya Sukta, Hymn 129 of Book A religious tradition that begins with that question — with the possibility that not even the origin of the cosmos itself knows exactly what it did — is a tradition that has a relationship to uncertainty radically different from any other.

What makes Hindu cosmology unique among all the world's religious cosmologies is neither its antiquity nor the complexity of its pantheon—which has three hundred and thirty million gods according to the popular formulation, although Advaita Vedanta theologians point out that this figure should not be taken literally but as an expression of the infinite capacity of the absolute to manifest itself in different forms. What makes it unique is the answer it gave to the most fundamental question of existence: why is there something instead of nothing? The answer that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity give to that question is teleological — there is something because God created it for a purpose. The answer that Hinduism gives — specifically in the tradition of Shaivism and in the texts of the Bhagavata Purana — is radically different and much more difficult to sustain without the Western mind resisting: there is something because Brahman — the absolute principle of the universe, that which is before anything is — plays. The universe was not created for a purpose external to itself. It was created because the nature of the absolute, when it is completely free and completely full, is to express itself. And that spontaneous expression has a name: lilac.

The Sanskrit word lila — pronounced leelah — appears in the texts of the Bhagavata Purana, composed in its current form probably between the 9th and 10th centuries CE but preserving theological and narrative material from significantly earlier periods, as the central cosmological principle that explains why the universe exists. Lila is usually translated as divine game or pastime, but these translations are unsatisfactory because in Spanish the game has connotations of triviality — something that is done when there is nothing important to do. The Sanskrit lilac means something more precise: action that arises from plenitude, not necessity. The dancer's dance that is so big that it overflows the limits of the body. The song that the musician sings not because someone has hired him but because there is something inside that needs to come out. The play of the child completely absorbed in what he or she is doing, without audience, without external purpose, without expected result — pure being-doing. That's lilac. And Hinduism teaches that the entire universe — galaxies, atoms, human beings, time, matter, consciousness — is the lila of Brahman. Not the work of a craftsman who builds according to a plan. The dance of something that expresses itself because its nature is to express itself.

The consequences of this cosmological principle for the understanding of individual life are completely different from those of any other religious tradition. If the universe is lilac—if it is a spontaneous expression of the absolute—then individual life is not an error, it is not a fall from a state of original grace, it is not a test designed to evaluate the obedience of the individual. The individual is a form that the absolute has taken to experience itself from within. The medieval philosopher and commentator Adi Shankaracharya—who lived from about 700 to 750 CE and who before his death at the age of thirty-two had founded four monasteries, written commentaries on the most difficult texts of the Vedic canon, and reformulated the entire philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta with a clarity that no previous commentator had achieved—used in his Vivekachudamani, the Jewel of Discrimination, an image that has survived thirteen hundred years. because it is difficult to improve it: the human condition is that of an ocean that has forgotten that it is an ocean and experiences itself as a wave. The wave is real. It has a shape, a height, a direction, a speed. But its substance is exactly the same as that of the ocean that produces it. There is no real separation between the wave and the ocean—only the illusion, while the wave form lasts, that there is a boundary between what it is and what the whole is. That illusion — which Sanskrit calls maya, usually translated as illusion but which modern scholars prefer to translate as the creative power that produces forms — is what Advaita Vedanta identifies as the cause of human suffering. Not sin. Not disobedience. The confusion between temporal form and eternal substance.

Hinduism does not have a single answer about the meaning of life because Hinduism is not, strictly speaking, a religion in the way that Islam or Catholicism are religions — with an identifiable founder, a closed canonical text, and a centralized doctrinal authority. It is a tradition that scholars prefer to call sanatana dharma—the eternal order—and that has produced for three and a half thousand years a variety of philosophical and practical systems that differ from each other in fundamental points but that share a structure of values and an attitude toward experience that makes them recognizably part of the same intellectual family. Within that family, the text of the Mahabharata — the epic in two hundred thousand lines of Sanskrit verse that scholars date in composition to between 400 BC and 400 CE, although it contains considerably older material — and the texts known collectively as the Dharmashastra formulated the four ends of human existence that tradition calls purusharthas: the four goals that define what it means to live well.

The first is dharma — the most difficult word to translate from Sanskrit, which dictionaries render as duty, moral order, righteousness, cosmic law, and which none of those translations fully capture. Dharma is the principle that each thing has a nature of its own, a way of being that corresponds to what it is, and that acting from that nature rather than against it is the fundamental condition of a coherent life. The dharma of a doctor is to heal. The dharma of a warrior is to protect. The dharma of a father is to nurture. Not as an external imposition but as the natural expression of what each one is. The Bhagavad Gita — the philosophical poem at the heart of the Mahabharata, the conversation between the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra that has generated more philosophical commentary than any other text in the ancient world — articulates dharma with a formulation that has been quoted for two and a half thousand years: "Better is one's own imperfect dharma than another's dharma well fulfilled." It's not about being the best at something. It's about being genuinely what you are.

The second end is artha — material well-being, wealth, power, the ability to act effectively in the world. What makes the inclusion of artha among the four ends of human existence extraordinary is that no other religious tradition of the ancient world gave money and power the status of the legitimate goal of life with the same directness as Hinduism. Kautilya's Arthashastra — the treatise on politics and economics composed in about the 4th century BC, contemporary with Aristotle and the first codification of Confucian thought — is the most detailed text the ancient world produced on how to acquire and manage material power, and was written within the same intellectual tradition that produced the Upanishads. There is no contradiction between the two in the Hindu system of thought. Voluntary poverty as a spiritual path is a legitimate option — sannyasa, total renunciation, is the fourth ashrama or stage of life. But the renunciation of someone who never had anything to renounce is not spirituality. It is simply poverty. Artha – the achievement of material well-being by appropriate means – is a duty towards oneself and those dependent on one, not an obstacle to the sacred.

The third is kama — pleasure, desire, beauty, the sensory experience of the world. Vatsyayana's Kamasutra - probably written between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE and usually reduced in the West to its sexual content, which constitutes approximately a quarter of the total text - is actually a treatise on kama in its broadest sense: the art of aesthetic experience, cooking, intelligent conversation, the garden, music, poetry, and yes, also sexuality, as legitimate and refined expressions of the human capacity to feel pleasure. No other philosophical or religious system of the ancient world wrote a text of such length and sophistication on the art of enjoying life and included it among the foundations of a well-lived existence. Kama is not the trap or the temptation or the obstacle. It is one of the four purposes. The life that ignores or represses it is no more spiritual. It is more incomplete.

The fourth end is moksha — the liberation from the cycle of rebirth, the return of the wave to the ocean, the recognition that the separation between the individual and the absolute was always an illusion produced by maya. It is the ultimate goal in the sense that when it is achieved, the other three cease to be relevant — not because they are bad but because they are no longer necessary. But Hinduism does not prescribe any speed for that process. The cycle of rebirths — samsara — can last millions of lifetimes. The eschatological urgency that characterizes Islam and Christianity — the idea that this life is the only chance, that the final judgment is coming and that one must be prepared — has no equivalent in Hindu cosmology, which works with time scales that modern astrophysicists would have recognized more easily than medieval theologians. A kalpa — Hinduism's unit of cosmic time — is equivalent to 4.32 billion years, roughly the age of the solar system. There is time. Urgency is not the right way to respond to lila.

What makes this articulation of the four ends unique among all the philosophies of the ancient world — and what comparative philosophy specialists such as the Indian thinker Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in his Indian Philosophy (Allen & Unwin, 1923), identified as Hinduism's most original contribution to universal philosophy — is the refusal to hierarchize. All the other major religious traditions of the world order their ends: eternal salvation above temporal well-being, spirit above body, renunciation above enjoyment. Hinduism says that the four ends are real, that all four are necessary, that a life well lived integrates them all in the proportion appropriate to each person's stage of life, and that the error is not in desire but in confusing temporary desires with the ultimate goal. I'm not asking you to stop wishing. I ask you to know what you are while you desire. That position — philosophically sophisticated, psychologically honest, radically non-moralizing in its fundamental structure — is what has allowed Hinduism to be the oldest religious tradition in the world that remains active not as a museum relic but as a living system with more than one billion two hundred million practitioners who recite the same Vedas that their ancestors recited three thousand five hundred years ago and who simultaneously develop artificial intelligence systems in Silicon Valley without feeling that there is a contradiction to be resolved between the two things. Because Brahman plays.

And if Brahman plays, then artificial intelligence, meditation, the Mahabharata, quantum physics, the Kamasutra, and YouTube recommendation algorithms are all, in some sense that physics has not yet fully formalized, different expressions of the same lila.

The wave is not separated from the ocean.

It never was.

Documented sources:

Rigveda — Nasadiya Sukta, Hymn of Creation, Book X, Hymn 129, ca. 1200 BC Critical edition: Jamison, Stephanie W. and Brereton, Joel P. The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Bhagavata Purana — ca. 9th-10th centuries AD Reference edition: Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Srimad-Bhagavatam. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1972-1980.

Shankaracharya, Adi — Vivekachudamani (The Jewel of Discrimination), ca. 700-750 AD Critical translation: Madhavananda, Swami. Vivekachudamani of Shankaracharya. Advaita Ashrama, Kolkata, 1921.

Mahabharata — ca. 400 BC — 400 AD Critical edition: Sukthankar, V.S. et al. The Mahabharata: Critical Edition. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, 1933-1971.

Bhagavad Gita — included in the Mahabharata, Book VI (Bhishmaparva). Translation reference: Sargeant, Winthrop. The Bhagavad Gita. SUNY Press, 1984. ⁶ Kautilya—Arthashastra, ca. 4th century BC Translation: Kangle, R.P. The Kautiliya Arthashastra. University of Bombay, 1965-1972.

Vatsyayana — Kamasutra, ca. 2nd-4th centuries AD Critical translation: Doniger, Wendy and Kakar, Sudhir. Kamasutra. Oxford World's Classics, 2002.  Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli—Indian Philosophy, 2 vols. Allen & Unwin, London, 1923. Reference philosophical synthesis on the purusharthas and Advaita Vedanta. ⁹ Zimmer, Heinrich — Philosophies of India. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Princeton University Press, 1951 (Bollingen Series XXVI). Analysis of the concept of lilac and its cosmological function. 

Flood, Gavin — An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Standard academic reference in English on Hinduism as a philosophical and religious system.