Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 264

THE COSMIC MAN
to ask: "What was this non-existcnt?" To which it gives the answer: “Life energy (prāņa).”
Now the seven life cnergies (prāņas) spoke together: 62 "Truly, in the state in which we now find oursclves,” they said, “we shall never be able to bring forth. Let us make, therefore, out of these seven men (i.e., themselves), one man. They made those seven men [themselves) into one man. . . . He it was who became the Lord of Progeny.
"And this MAN, the Lord of Progeny, felt the desire within himself: 'I would be more! I would bring forth!' He travailed and created heat within. When he had travailed and created heat, he brought forth from himself, as his first creation, Holy Power, that is, the threefold wisdom' (the Vedas). This threefold wisdom became a solid 'standing place on which he was able to stand firm. ...
"On this solid place he then firmly stood and glowed within. He brought forth the waters, out of himself, out of speech (vāc), to be the world. Speech indeed was his; it was brought forth from him. It filled everything here, whatever is here it filled.”
This is an example of a inythological rendition of the classical Brāhmanic view of the procession of all creation, in all its aspects, from the One. Speech (vāc, i.e., the Word, lóyos) and the waters (compare Genesis 1:2) are here the self-duplication of the one unqualified Rcality-its self-manifestation as the multifariously qualified. The world of names and forms (nāmarūpa),63 and of the subject-object polarity, has been produced; the state of the pairs-of-opposites (viz. "spirit” and “matter”) has been created as an emanation, or self-splitting, of the nondual FIRST MAN. All partakes of, and participates in, his being. What would seem
62 Prana. "life breath": the seven (usually five) prānas constitute the vital energies in every creature; their departure marks the death of the individual being; cf. infra, pp. 318-319. In the present text they are personified as seven holy sages, or Rsis. 88 Cf. supra, pp. 23-24.
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