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Skandha 2, adhyaya 9 · Saptah day 1
Brahma, seated on a lotus with no idea how to create, hears 'tapa' twice, does penance, and is given the whole book in four verses.
Parikshit had asked how Brahma, the creator, came by the knowledge he creates with. Shuka answers in the ninth chapter of the second book, and his answer turns out to be a story about where the Bhagavatam itself came from.
Before anything was made, Shuka says, Brahma sat on the lotus that grew from the Lord's navel and wished to create. He did not know how. He could not find the vision by which the world was to be made. While he sat thinking, he heard a word of two syllables spoken twice, close by, in the water: tapa. Its syllables were the sixteenth and the twenty-first of the consonants, and the text calls the word the wealth of those who own nothing.
Brahma looked in every direction for the speaker and saw no one. So he did the obvious thing. He took the word as an instruction meant for him, sat back down on the lotus, and practised austerity. For a thousand divine years he held his breath and mind steady, mastering both the senses that act and the senses that know.
The Lord was pleased, and showed him Vaikuntha. It is one of the loveliest descriptions in the book. Passion and darkness have no place there, nor even goodness mixed with them. Time has no power there, and maya none. There is no affliction, no confusion and no fear. Its people are dark and radiant, four-armed, dressed in yellow. Lakshmi serves the Lord's feet there. In the midst of it Brahma saw the Lord himself, surrounded by his attendants.
Brahma's heart overflowed and he bowed. The Lord, pleased, touched his hand and spoke to him with a gentle smile. Your long austerity has satisfied me, he said; ask for a boon.
Brahma's request is the request of a maker who wants to understand his material, and who is afraid of what success might do to him. Let me know your forms, he asks, the gross and the subtle. Let me understand how you create, sustain and withdraw the world by your own power, as a spider spins its thread out of itself and draws it back. And let me not be bound, or swollen with pride, by the work of creating.
The Lord answers by giving him the most secret knowledge, joined with direct realisation, together with its inner meaning and its means. Then he speaks four verses. What follows is their sense, not their wording.
The first: before creation, only I was. Nothing else existed, neither the gross nor the subtle nor the cause beyond both. After creation, all this is I. And what remains when everything has ended, that too is I. The Lord is not one thing among the things of the world. He is before it, he is it, and he is what is left.
The second explains how anything can seem to be other than him. Whatever appears with no reality of its own, while the Self, which is real, goes unseen, know that to be my maya. It is like a reflection, which shows a thing where there is none, and like darkness, which hides what is there.
The third says how the Lord is present in the world. The great elements enter every being, large and small, and yet are not confined in any of them. In the same way, I am within all beings, and I am not within them.
The fourth turns to the seeker. This much is what one who seeks the truth of the Self must inquire into: that which is found everywhere and always, by tracing it through all things and by setting all things aside.
Then the Lord told Brahma to hold to this teaching with complete concentration, and he would never be bewildered, whatever worlds he made. He vanished, and Brahma began to create.
The chain does not stop there. Brahma, the text goes on, taught this same Bhagavatam to his son Narada, who served him and asked to learn. Narada taught it to Vyasa on the bank of the Sarasvati. Vyasa taught it to Shuka, and Shuka is now teaching it to the king.
That is how the tradition reads four verses as the seed of eighteen thousand. The later books do not add a new truth to them. The prayers, Kapila's Sankhya, the stories of the tenth book and the songs of the gopis are this same Lord, who was before, who is all this, and who remains, shown in narrative instead of in statement. The Bhagavatam traces its own line of teachers back to this moment, a creator who admits he does not know how to begin, and it brings that line down to the riverbank where Parikshit is listening.
अहमेवासमेवाग्रे नान्यद्यत्सदसत्परम् । पश्चादहं यदेतच्च योऽवशिष्येत सोऽस्म्यहम् ॥Before creation, I alone was — nothing else, neither what is nor what is not, nor what lies beyond them. After creation, I am all this; and what remains when it ends, that too is I.
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