Before sky, before earth, before death and before what does not die — what was there? The Nasadiya Sukta, the "Hymn of Creation" found near the very end of the Rig Veda (10.129), opens not with an answer but with a hush. There was neither non-existence nor existence then, it begins. There was no air, no firmament beyond it. What stirred? Where? Under whose protection? The hymn refuses easy footing from its first breath.

It paints the primordial state as water without distinction — a fathomless, undivided expanse wrapped in darkness, "darkness hidden by darkness." There is no day, no night, no sign by which to tell one thing from another. And yet, the hymn says, That One breathed, windless, by its own power. Apart from it there was nothing.

Then comes the turning. In the beginning, the poets sing, desire (kama) arose upon That One — the first seed of mind, the earliest movement of will. The wise, searching their own hearts, found in this the bond that links what-is to what-is-not. A cord was stretched across the void; there was below, there was above; there were impulse and energy. Something had begun.

But the hymn will not let us rest in a tidy cosmology. As it nears its close, it draws back and asks the questions that have echoed for three thousand years. Who truly knows? Who here will declare it — whence this creation arose? The very gods, the hymn observes, came after the world's unfolding; so who can say from what it all came to be?

The final verse is among the most extraordinary in any scripture. The one who watches over all from the highest heaven — he surely knows. And then, astonishingly: or perhaps he does not know. The hymn ends not in certainty but in a poised, reverent wonder.

This is not the doubt of someone who has stopped caring. It is the humility of those who have looked as far as looking can reach and honestly reported the horizon. Many traditions begin their cosmos with a command or a craftsman. This one begins with a question held open — and treats that openness itself as a kind of worship.