Prajāpati

Summary

Prajāpati, "lord of creatures", is the creator of the Vedic texts from whom everything came forth, who fell apart after he had created and was made whole again by the sacrifice. The whole work of the Vedic fire-altar became the rebuilding of him.

Hymn 10.121 of the Rigveda ends every verse with a question, "What god shall we adore with our oblation?", while it describes the golden germ who in the beginning was the only lord of all that was born, who fixed earth and heaven, and whose are the mountains and the sea; in its last verse it answers: "Prajāpati, none but you comprehends all these created things." The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa then tells his story at length. In the beginning there was only water; the waters toiled and grew hot, and a golden egg came forth and floated for a year; at the end of the year a man, Prajāpati, came out of it and broke it open; after another year he tried to speak, and said bhūḥ, which became the earth, bhuvaḥ, which became the air, and svaḥ, which became the sky, which is why a child tries to speak at the end of its first year. Then with the breath of his mouth he created the gods, and there was daylight for him, and with his downward breath the Asuras, and there was darkness for him. In another telling in the same book Prajāpati wished to multiply; through Agni he united with the earth and an egg arose, then with the air through the wind, then with the sky through the sun; then with his mind he united with Speech and became pregnant with the Vasus, the Rudras and the Ādityas.

When he had created all creatures, "having run the whole race", he became relaxed, his joints falling apart; the vital breath went out of him and the gods left him. He said to Agni, "Restore me!", and Agni restored him, which is why they call him Agni while he is Prajāpati. The book says that the five parts of his body that fell apart, hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow, are the five layers of the fire-altar and the five seasons, and that the Prajāpati who fell apart is the year. In another version Prajāpati said to the gods, "Restore me!", and they healed him in the fire with oblations; each oblation they offered became a baked brick and passed into him, and that is why the altar bricks are baked in the fire. Whoever builds the altar builds Prajāpati anew.

The idea his story turns on is that the creator spends himself in creating, and the sacrifice gives back what he spent. What was scattered from him into the world, earth, air, sky and seasons, is gathered in the altar brick by brick, as the year scatters into its seasons and gathers into a new year. This sets him close to Puruṣa, whose body the gods divide in hymn 10.90 so that the world comes from it; but no one slaughters Prajāpati: he wears himself out until he falls apart, and then he is rebuilt. The same book says that in the beginning seven "persons" were made into one Person, and that this Person became Prajāpati, who is the altar now to be built. The story belongs to the cosmic egg, to the cosmic body pattern and to the primordial waters. Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 6.1.1.1–5.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Prajāpati is two words: prajā, offspring, creatures, people, and pati, lord, owner, husband. The reading covers the first word. Pra answers Arabic baraʾa and barā, to create, p answering b, and from it comes al-bariyya, which Lane gives as the creation, the beings that are created, and mankind in particular. Jā in Sanskrit is from the verb jan, to be born, and Arabic has janīn, the child in its mother's womb. On this reading, proposed on the method, prajā is "the created and the born", the creature and the child, which is its meaning in Sanskrit itself: offspring, creatures, people. Prajāpati is the lord of the bariyya, which is what his story makes him: the one from whom all creatures came. The limits of the reading are set out under the linguistic root.

Linguistic Root

Al-bariyya

Monier-Williams derives prajā from pra and ja and gives its senses as procreation and birth, then offspring, children and posterity, then a creature, man, mankind, and then subjects. Of Prajāpati he says that in the Rigveda it is a title of Savitṛ, Soma, Agni and Indra, that it names a supreme god in the Rigveda only at 10.121, then in the Atharvaveda and the Brāhmaṇas, and that it was later applied to the ten lords of created beings first created by Brahmā, among them Pulastya, from whom Kubera and Rāvaṇa descend. Lane gives al-bariyya as the creation, the beings that are created, particularly mankind; some take it as originally baraʾa with hamza, while al-Farrāʾ takes it from barā, dust or earth, and barāhu Allāh means God created him. The two senses, earth and creation, meet in the stories of making humans from clay.

Janīn

Jā is from jan, to be born. Lane gives janīn as anything veiled or concealed, a buried body, and then the child in the belly. The correspondence of j and n in the Sanskrit root with j and n in Arabic is regular, and in prajā the n has dropped as it does in forms of this verb. The limit of the reading is that it makes the Sanskrit prefix pra, "forth", a whole Arabic word, and that jan has relatives in Greek and Latin meaning race and clan. As for pati, Monier-Williams gives its relatives, Greek posis, husband, and Latin potis, able; no regular Arabic counterpart meaning lord or husband has been found yet, so the reading covers only the first half of the name.

Key Mythic Narratives

Prajāpati and his daughter

The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa tells that Prajāpati conceived a passion for his own daughter, the Sky or the Dawn, and united with her. The gods held this a sin and said to the god who rules over the beasts, Rudra: "Pierce him!" Rudra took aim and pierced him, and half his seed fell to the ground. When the gods' anger subsided they cured Prajāpati and cut out Rudra's dart, for Prajāpati is the sacrifice itself; then they did not know what to do with the part torn out with the dart: given to Bhaga, it burnt out his eyes; given to Pūṣan, it knocked out his teeth; until it was appeased through Savitṛ. Elsewhere in the book a crying boy is born of the seed the year and the seasons laid in the Dawn, and Prajāpati names him Rudra. The project's Hindu essay reads the name of the Dawn, Uṣas, from Arabic aḍāʾa, to shine, as its stronger reading, and gives ʿishāʾ, nightfall, as a reading of middle strength.

Symbolic Reading

The project's essay "Rereading Indian Myths" reads Prajāpati's divided parts as "the operations of division", and sets them in its table of Indian inventions encoded in myth beside zero, the decimal system and the geometry of the altars. The book itself comes close to this: Prajāpati's five parts are the five seasons, he is the year divided into its seasons, and his altar is built with a counted number of bricks in counted layers.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the North Odin and his brothers kill the giant Ymir and make the earth of his flesh, the sea of his blood and the sky of his skull; in China Pangu dies and his breath becomes the wind and his eyes the sun and moon; in the Rigveda the gods divide the body of Puruṣa and the world comes from it. Prajāpati is like them in that the world comes from his body, and unlike them in that he is not killed and his body is rebuilt on the altar every year, as the page on the cosmic body pattern brings these stories together.

As Prajāpati comes out of the golden egg after a year, Pangu comes out of an egg like a hen's egg and the Greek Eros out of the egg of Night, as told under the cosmic egg. Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 11.1.6.1–2.