India Brief: Hindu Ideas of Creation

In this BBC Radio 4 program they cover the Hindu religions ideas of creation which is something I wanted to research into as part of my India Brief for my time there next month. I want to look into how animals are embedded in their culture and religion as part of my COP3 research but also to investigate and document my experience there through reportage illustration and I think it is essential to get as much of a basic knowledge of the people/area as possible before I go!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k289f

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Hindu ideas about Creation. According to most Western religious traditions, a deity was the original creator of the Universe. Hinduism, on the other hand, has no single creation story. For thousands of years, Hindu thinkers have taken a variety of approaches to the question of where we come from, with some making the case for divine intervention and others asking whether it is even possible for humans to comprehend the nature of creation. The origin of our existence, and the nature of the Universe we live in, is one of the richest strands of Hindu thought.

With:

Jessica Frazier
Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University

Gavin Flood
Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford.

Producer: Thomas Morris.

I also found some more information on some of the symbols used in Indian culture in my book:

THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS

REFLECTIONS ON ARCHETYPAL IMAGES

TASCHEN

The EGG

'The Indian image of a cosmic egg goes back to the Vedas. Brahmanda, the egg of Brahma the Creator, contains the phenomenal world. Hiranyagarbha is the golden womb, germ or embryo, luminous incubator. The egg's shell bifurcates, like two bowls, into earth and sky; the yolk is the sun. It is a primal scene: an ovum in a sea of sperm; the daily birth of the sun out of eastern waters massaged by wind; breath/spirit moving with the waters of life,, and light emerging, making form visible; the opening of an eye.'

Ganesha

'A study in contradictions and conjunctions, as the large elephant's head on his pot-bellied childish body instantly makes clear. There are, says Paul Courtright, "more than seventy myths" (p.20) of his origins and history, which, in the Indian way, include many contradictions, but the conjunction of animal and human, of wise, mature, elephant head and dwarf or toddler's human stockiness in eleventh-century reliefs are characteristic. Bells on his feet indicate that he is a dancer. His vehicle is the rat.

 In one common myth of Ganesha's origins, he is the offspring of Shiva and Parvati, but in an unusual way. Shiva, the powerful deity of both destruction and restoration, the ascetic and yet also actively erotic god whose consort is Parvati, has refused to give her the son she desires. When he is absent in ascetic retreat, Parvati makes her own son from the dirt of the earth rubbed off her body, and loves him passionately, for he is solely hers. As the boy grows up, she appoints him guardian of her private and sacred bath, and instructs him to keep out all visitors. When Shiva suddenly returns and desires to join his consort, Ganesha opposes him, angering him until in fury he beheads the youth with his sword. Parvati is so distressed that Shiva is compelled to seek the first head he can find to restore the youth to life, and thus Ganesha owes the elephant half of his being to Shiva. But his human body is so young he is no sexual threat, despite Parvati's ambiguous attraction to him; suggested in many sculptures both by the curved rather than erect shape of his elephant trunk and by the broken left tusk whose end the figure holds.