EDIFYING PUZZLEMENT: RGVEDA 10.129 AND THE USES OF ENIGMA.

• Author: Brereton, Joel P.
• Position: Hindu sacred text

The appeal of RV 10.129 is immediate and strong: its narrative is engagingly obscure; its aims tantalizingly opaque. And, especially for contemporary readers, its concluding uncertainty about the origins of things is disturbingly familiar. Aside from its human and contemporary appeal, it also stands as a critical text in reconstructions of Indian cultural history. Scholars have often presented it as an admirable and original precursor of later religious thought,(1) and indeed, the influence of the hymn is apparent in cosmogonic discourse from both the early and later Indian tradition. In what follows, I will mention cosmogonies in the Sathapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Brahmana and Aranyaka that interpret or reconfigure this hymn, but references to it are not limited to Vedic literature. For example, Krsna alludes to it during his explanation of the origin of the world in Mahabharatah 12.329.3, and the creation account that opens the Manava Dharmasastra echoes the hymn, as several of its commentators have recognized.(2)

One measure of the hymn's impact is the long shadow of scholarly literature that has attached itself to it. The list of those who have commented on the hymn constitutes an impressive roster of Vedic studies' greatest names: Geldner, Gonda, Oldenberg, Thieme, among many others.(3) In reconsidering this hymn, I hope to do more than simply intrude on such distinguished company. I am trying to advance the discussion by approaching the hymn in a different way, namely, by concentrating on its rhetorical, structural, and other formal features. The justification for this approach was best stated by Stephanie Jamison in her study of the myths of the "ravenous hyenas" and the "wounded sun."(4) In her discussion, she attends to the precise way that each myth is told and draws interpretive conclusions from its specific construction. In explaining her method, she argues that a myth's "language is the myth, . . . not an accidental form that the myth has assumed and can as easily abandon" (p. 32). And if the form of the text is critical to the meaning of the text in Vedic prose, it is even more so in Vedic poetry. For Vedic poetry, like all poetry, expresses meaning not only through its semantics but through sound, structure, metrics, and the conventions of the poetic tradition in which it is embedded. According to Roman Jakobson, poeticity, whenever it occurs, exists "when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality."(5) In the final analysis, all I am proposing to do is to consider this poem as a poem, and therefore to attend to the shape and placement of its words and to the rhythms and structure of its verses. This approach results in a more dense interpretation and one more firmly anchored in the text of the hymn. Such attention to the verbal surface of the hymn also honors the careful and exacting composition characteristic of the Vedic poets.

However, my concern is not limited to the hymn's form and conventions, but includes also its effect on its ancient audience, to the extent that it is possible to reconstruct that response. This reconstructed response is primarily a projection from the text and relies on my understanding of Vedic perspectives, literary conventions, and poetic traditions. I have tried to supplement it by attention to the actual responses to the hymn within the Vedic corpus itself in the ways that Vedic texts have used and applied the hymn.

For a hymn that is generally classified as a cosmogony, RV 10.129 is remarkably contrary.(6) In a sense, it is really an anticosmogony, for the hymn itself rules out the possibility of constructing a final description of the origins of the world. That is, after having presumably described these origins, the last two verses ask whether anyone truly does know how the world arose. The gods don't - they originated after the creation of the world (according to vs. 6) - and according to vs. 7, even the world's "overseer in the highest heaven" might not know. It is this character of the hymn that subverts many of the previous attempts to understand it, for interpreters have tried to do what the hymn explicitly says cannot be done. In one way or another, they have attempted to make it into a cosmogony, despite the hymn's direct denial that the origin can be described.

The formal features of the last verse function to underscore the hymn's lack of resolution. Line 7b, yadi va dadhe yadi va na, has only nine syllables, two syllables shy of the normal eleven-syllable line. Consider the effect of this shortening. Except for some metrical hiccups in lines 3b and 6b, the hymn has been rolling along with regular tristubh after regular tristubh. Then, at almost the end, 7b begins with a proper opening of five syllables, continues with a regular break of two syllables, but then concludes with a cadence that ends abruptly after two syllables rather than the normal four. The line stops short, as if the poet had suddenly stepped on his own metrical shoe-laces. The rhythmic incompleteness of the line stands out particularly strongly because it could so easily be corrected. We can have the expected eleven-syllable line by supplying a second dadhe,(7) a word that must be assumed in the translation anyway. It is like hearing the beat of "shave and a haircut," to which we naturally, even urgently, want to add "two bits." Whether created by accident or intention,(8) this metrically unresolved cadence is a verbal image of the unresolved cosmogony. Moreover, the metrically incomplete line anticipates the hymn's syntactically incomplete conclusion, 7d so anga veda yadi va na veda.(9) This line ends with a subordinate clause, for which there is no main clause: "he surely knows. Or if he does not know . . . ?" Thus, the metrical and then the syntactic incompleteness of the two lines act as metaphors for the unconcluded cosmogony.

Finally, note that the last verse echoes the opening of the hymn. The word vyoman "highest heaven" is repeated in the last verse for only the first time since it appeared in the opening verse, and the final na veda "he does not know" recalls the opening nasad asit. Such recursive composition, in which the beginning is repeated at the end, is common in Indo-Iranian and Indo-European poetry.(10) It normally functions to define and to close a unit of discourse by marking its beginning and end. In this case, however, the ring has the effect not of bringing the hymn to closure, but rather of suggesting that there has been no real solution to the questions posed at the beginning. The semantics of the repeated elements point to this lack of resolution: vyoman describes a realm outside of human experience and "there was not" concludes in "he knows not." Uncertainties at the beginning become uncertainties at the end.

If there is no resolution, if finally the hymn leaves its auditors without a description of the origin of things, then why was the hymn composed in the first place? To address this problem, we have to return to the beginning of the hymn and to look carefully at its narrative movement, for, I suggest, the poem's meaning is to be found more in the path it follows than the place it arrives.

The poem opens with dramatic obscurity:

nasad asin no sad asit tadanim

nasid rajo no vyoma paro yat

kim avarivah kuha kasya sarmann

ambhah kim asid gahanam gabhiram

The non-existent did not exist, nor did the existent exist at that time.

There existed neither the midspace nor the heaven beyond.

What stirred? From where and in whose protection?

Did water exist, a deep depth?

The narrative begins "at that time" (tadanim) when none of the divisions that characterize the world existed. What there was cannot be described as either asat "nonexistent" nor as sat "existent." In many translations, asat and sat are taken as abstract nouns: "non-being" and "being" or "non-existence" and "existence."(11) But formally and firstly they are adjectival, and without any contrary signal in the text or the context, that is how the hymn's earliest audience would likely have understood them.(12) Indeed, this is the interpretation of the oldest commentary on this hymn, SB 10.5.3.1: neva va idam agre 'sad asin neva sad asit "In the beginning, this (world) was in no way non-existent, and it was in no way existent."(13) The brahmana supplies a subject for the adjectives "existent" and "non-existent," namely, idam "this (world)."(14) Unlike the brahmana, however, the hymn leaves the subject unstated. Rather, it allows its audience to imagine a thing which neither exists nor does not exist.

The negations of the first line continue in line b: "There was neither midspace nor heaven" - and then give way to questions in c: "What stirred? Where? In whose protection?" Only at its end does vs. 1 move toward something more concrete. In the last line, it suggests that there might have been water, although even here the suggestion is posed as a question.(15) The form of the verse thus traces a movement from negation to question to a questionable possibility.

The second verse then mirrors the first:

na mrtyur asid amrtam na tarhi,

na ratrya ahna asit praketah

anid avatam svadhaya tad ekam,

tasmad dhanyan na parah kim canasa

Death did not exist nor deathlessness then.

There existed no sign of night nor of day.

That One breathed without wind through its inherent force.

There existed nothing else beyond that.

The verse proceeds in almost exact parallelism to vs. 1. It also concerns what was "then" (tarhi), as vs. 1 described what was "at that time" (tadanim) - indeed, the two words appear in corresponding positions at the ends of the first lines. Line 2a mimics the negations of asat and sat in the negations of mrtyu "death" and amrta "deathlessness."(16) In...