Earlier Phase of Hinduism

In the earliest phase of Hinduism, Vedic hymns were chanted mechanically during rituals known as yagna to involve divine power and change the workings of the world. Kings were the patrons of these grand ceremonies. Then a revolution took place. Sages such as Yagnavalkya and kings such as Janaka challenged the mechanical chanting of mantras. They focused on the ideas being communicated through the hymns. As a result, a thousand years after the Vedas was compiled, the Upanishad came into being. This body of scripture is know as Vedanta, the pinnacle of Vedic wisdom. It states the creation involved the splitting of the primal being who is identified as Purusha.

A thousand years after the Upanishad, another revolution took place. People became increasingly theistic. Like the mechanical rites of earlier times, the speculations of the Upanishad did not satisfy the emotional needs of society. There was need for divinity that was not merely an abstract force invoked during yagna or an abstract idea to be analyzed by metaphysicians. There was need for a concrete divinity that could be embodied and personified so that it responded to the human condition in human terms. To answer these needs, epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and chronicles known as the Puranas came into being. These told the stories of gods and demons, Gods and Goddesses. In them, Purusha was personified as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva while Prakrit as personified as Saraswati, Lakshmi and Shakti. Storeis of the Gods and Goddesses were in effect narrative expressions of the interactions between spiritual demands and material needs, between the conscious being and the enveloping environment, between the divine within and the divine without, between Purusha and Prakriti.

In the epics and the Puranas, Brahma is God who creates the world. There are many versions of how this happens, suggesting no one is sure how things began because even the god came later.

myth = mythya

A Handbook of Hindu Mythology

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik