Nasadiya Sukta (Rig Veda 10.129): The Creation Hymn That Asked Who Knows?

The creation hymn

Of all the hymns of the Rig Veda, Rig Veda 10.129 — the Nasadiya Sukta — is perhaps the most widely quoted in modern philosophical writing. It is a meditation on the origin of everything that is, and it ends not with an answer but with a remarkable, sceptical question.

Read the full hymn here: Rig Veda 10.129.

The famous opening

Then there was neither what is nor what is not. There was no > air’s expanse nor heaven beyond it. What stirred? Where? In > whose protection? Was water there, fathomless, deep?

The Sanskrit nāsadāsīn no sadāsīt tadānīṃ — ‘then there was neither asat (non-being) nor sat (being)’ — gives the hymn its name. The first move is negative: the hymn refuses to begin with either of the two metaphysical poles it is later asked to reconcile.

The unsettling final verse

Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, > or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the > highest heaven, only he knows, or perhaps he does not know.

This is one of the most astonishing utterances in any ancient religious text: the hymn entertains the possibility that even the highest god might not know how creation came about. The Nasadiya is not an act of doubt about the divine; it is an act of intellectual honesty about a question the Vedic poet considers genuinely hard.

Where it sits in the Veda

The Nasadiya is the 129th hymn of Mandala 10, the philosophical Mandala. It sits a few hymns away from the Purusha Sukta (10.90), which gives a very different cosmogony — a primordial Cosmic Person from whose dismemberment the world is fashioned. And it is in the same Mandala as the Hiranyagarbha Sukta (10.121), the ‘Golden Embryo’ hymn that proposes yet another picture. Mandala 10 is, in effect, the Rig Veda’s first essay in comparative cosmology — multiple incompatible accounts of creation stacked next to each other, with no attempt at harmonisation.

Why it still matters

Long before the Upanishads framed the question as Brahman, before Buddhist sunyata, before any of the later schools of Indian metaphysics, the Nasadiya Sukta had already established the basic Indian habit of taking the question of being seriously and refusing easy answers. Carl Sagan opened Cosmos with this hymn for a reason: it sounds astonishingly modern. It is also characteristic of the Vedic mind — confident, poetic, ritualistic and, in the next breath, ready to admit it does not know.