The Wish Before the Thought

A thought arrives, and a second, quieter question arrives with it: did the wanting come first, or the thinking? Most people cannot tell. An old Indian hymn gives an answer, in a few lines, about the very beginning of things. KTT counts the wanting and the thinking as thoughts, noticed or not, even when they arrive as a pull. The hymn is poetry about the origin of the world, and the sources read for this article are translations and summaries. None of them tested what comes first in a person.

The hymn

The Nāsadīya Sūkta is the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rigveda. It begins with a world in which there is neither existence nor non-existence, neither death nor immortality, only a darkness hidden by darkness and undifferentiated water. Then, in the fourth verse, desire, kāma, descends on the One. In Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s translation, desire is the first seed of manas, the faculty usually translated as mind or thought. A. L. Basham renders the line as the primal seed, born of the mind.

The poets

The next lines turn to people. The poets, the kavayas, searched in their hearts with wisdom, and found the bond of what is in what is not. They did so by looking inward, with what one translator calls their heart’s thought. Karel Werner reads the source of the hymn as visionary, a mystical or yogic experience put into words, and not the product of reasoning.

Where it ends

The hymn does not end with an answer. It asks who knows and who can say where creation came from. It concludes that the gods came after creation, and that even the one who surveys it from the highest heaven may or may not know. Some readers take this as one of the earliest records of skeptical inquiry.

What it makes of the thought

In this hymn, wanting comes before thought. A seed of manas grows out of desire, not the other way round. That is a claim about the first events of the world. Whether it describes how a thought forms in a person is KTT’s question, and the hymn does not address it.

What is not known

When the hymn was composed is not settled. It sits late in the Rigveda, in a book that scholars say sounds more like later philosophy, and dates given by popular sources vary.

What the poets meant by manas is not known. Translators render it in several ways, and the word covers more than one English word.

Whether the order in the hymn, desire first and then thought, holds for a single person is open. The hymn does not claim it.