Sri Brahma Ji

Nabhadas could have opened his garland of India's bhaktas with any of the hundreds of names he was about to string together, yet he chose to begin at the beginning of everything: with the shape out of which time itself first unspooled. Before there was a saint to praise, there was the one who had to be shown how to pray. The Puranas tell it this way: in the utter hush before creation, when there was no earth, no sky, and no memory anywhere, a lotus rose on a long stalk from the navel of Bhagavan Vishnu as he lay upon the cosmic ocean, Kshirsagar, resting on the coils of the serpent Shesha. Inside that lotus a form stirred and opened its eyes for the first time, and found nothing around it but water, darkness, and silence. There was no mother to name him, no teacher to instruct him, nothing to explain why he existed at all. This is the first and most human thing about Brahma, the Pitamaha, the grandfather of all beings: before he was the maker of worlds, he was simply alone, and afraid, and did not know his own purpose.

So he did the only thing left to a being with no one to ask: he went looking for the root of his own existence. He climbed down the long stem of the lotus, searching for where it was planted, descending for what the texts say was a span of years no mortal mind can hold, and never found the bottom of it. He returned to the flower having discovered nothing outwardly, but somewhere in that failure the seed of tapasya had been planted in him. He turned his gaze inward instead of downward, and in the stillness that followed, Bhagavan himself appeared and breathed the knowledge of the four Vedas into him, one stream of sound for each face that would later be his. It is from this moment that Brahma became Vidhi and Vidhata, the Ordainer, the one who from that day is said to inscribe upon every forehead its portion of loss and gain, of life and death, of honour and disgrace. Even Ram, in the Ramcharitmanas, will later remind Lakshman that these things rest in Vidhi's hand alone; the tilak on this very entry repeats the same line, as though it were the oldest sentence in the language.

Having received the Vedas, Brahma had to people the worlds, and true to the strangeness of divine parenthood, his first attempt did not go as planned. From his mind he brought forth four sons, Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana, and Sanatkumara, intending them to be the first fathers of creation. Instead, the four Kumaras took one look at the work assigned to them and refused it outright. Eternally five years old, wrapt entirely in the beauty of Hari, they chose to wander the three worlds in ceaseless contemplation rather than marry and multiply, and no persuasion of their father's could turn them from it. Brahma did not curse them for it; he let them go, and in their going, they became some of the most revered rishis in the tradition, the pattern for every renunciate who ever chose Bhagavan over the world. Undeterred, the Creator tried again, and this time succeeded: from his mind came Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, and Vasishtha, the seven great sages, the saptarishi who would go on to father the lineages of gods, demons, and humankind alike, and from him too came Narada, the wandering singer of Vishnu's names, and Daksha, who would become a great Prajapati in his own right. Through these mind-born children, one universe of frustrated ambition and one of quiet triumph, the work of creation finally found its footing.

It is in this same period that the Puranas tell a harder story, one that later ages have not been eager to repeat but that cannot honestly be left out. Brahma brought forth from his own being a woman of such radiance that the texts call her Shatarupa, she of a hundred forms, and elsewhere name her Saraswati, the goddess who would become the patroness of speech and wisdom. Struck by what he had made, Brahma could not keep his eyes from her, and as she circled around him trying to escape his gaze, he grew a face to watch her in every direction, north, south, east, and west, and finally a fifth face turned upward when she tried to rise above him. It was at this point, the tradition says, that Shiva intervened, judging the infatuation of a father for his own creation to have crossed every bound of dharma, and with a single motion severed the fifth head from Brahma's shoulders. From that day the Creator has had only four faces, one for each Veda, and Shiva is said to have pronounced that no home in the three worlds would build him a temple. It is a hard episode, and the Puranas do not tell it to flatter Brahma; they tell it, if anything, to show that even the source of all forms can lose himself for a moment in the beauty of his own handiwork, and that no one, however exalted, stands outside the reach of correction.

A second story, just as old, gives another reason for the same silence in the temples of India. Vishnu and Brahma once fell into dispute over which of them was the greater, and Shiva settled it by manifesting between them as a column of fire without beginning or end. Vishnu took the form of a boar and burrowed downward to find its base; Brahma mounted his goose and flew upward to find its crown. Neither succeeded, but on his way down, Brahma passed a ketaki flower drifting from far above and persuaded it to bear false witness that he had indeed reached the summit. Shiva, unwilling to be deceived, revealed the lie, and cursed both the liar and the flower that had lied for him: the ketaki would never again be offered in his worship, and Brahma, a second time, was told he would go without shrines. Whether it is this pillar of fire or the sorrow of Shatarupa that truly explains why Brahma's temples are so few, the Puranas never settle between themselves, and it is honest to say so rather than to pretend the tradition speaks with one voice. What both stories agree on is the humbling itself, administered to the very being who had just finished humbling the void.

One place, at least, remembers him. At Pushkar in Rajasthan, where legend says a lotus fell from Brahma's own hand and struck the earth into a lake, he is said to have arrived to perform a great yajna, a sacrifice that could only proceed with his wife seated beside him. When Savitri was delayed, Brahma, unwilling to let the auspicious hour pass, married a local woman named Gayatri on the spot and completed the rite with her at his side. Savitri arrived to find another in her place, and her fury is remembered as having reduced her husband's worship to this single town alone, so that Pushkar became, in the words the pilgrims still use, the only Brahma temple in the world. Gayatri is said to have softened the curse just enough to let Pushkar become the king of India's holy crossings, and to this day two hills rise on either side of the lake, one holding Savitri's shrine, still said to burn with her old anger, and the other holding Gayatri's, gentler and lower, so that even the story of the curse becomes, in the end, a place people still walk to.

But none of this, however dramatic, is the reason Nabhadas set Brahma at the head of a garland of devotees. The tilak on this very entry says it outright: it is not creation that earns him his place here, but a single recurring posture. Whenever the earth grows too heavy with cruelty to bear, the tradition says, Bhumi herself, the goddess of the earth, takes the form of a cow and comes weeping before Brahma, unable to carry the weight of tyrant kings any longer. It happened before Krishna descended, when Bhumi came trembling to the Creator's court under the crushing rule of Kamsa and his allies; it happened again in the age before Rama, when the gods and sages, unable to bear Ravana's arrogance a moment longer, gathered before Brahma with the same complaint. And in both stories Brahma does not attempt to fix the world with his own hand. He does what a true devotee does: he gathers the weeping cow, the frightened gods, the exhausted sages into a single assembly and leads them, as their appointed head, to the shores of Kshirsagar, to stand before Vishnu and beg. It is only after Brahma's prayer that the avatar is promised, whether as the two dark and fair hairs that will become Krishna and Balarama, or as the sons soon to be born to a king in Ayodhya. He is, in this telling, not the highest authority in the universe but its most faithful messenger, the one being trusted by gods and earth alike to know exactly where to take a grief too large for any of them to solve alone.

This same office as boon-giver reveals, without any softening, that Brahma's law is impartial rather than kind. It was Brahma who granted Hiranyakashyap his terrible near-invulnerability after ages of tapasya, a boon that would later require Vishnu to descend as Narasimha to undo it; it was Brahma, too, who answered Ravana's long austerities with the very power that made him, for a time, unconquerable by gods and demons alike, blind as he was to the plain mortal who would finally end him. Brahma does not ask whether the one performing tapasya is saintly or wicked before granting what the discipline has earned; he administers a law of pure cause and consequence, sugam and agam, a boon easy to obtain for the sincere and impossibly hard for the insincere, but granted all the same once the price is paid. It is the same law that once answered Vishwamitra, a king who abandoned his throne to out-discipline the sage Vasishtha, with the rarest title in the tradition, Brahmarshi, a seer born a warrior who became, through nothing but unbending tapasya, equal in station to the sages born from Brahma's own mind. Whether the fruit of that law becomes nectar or poison depends entirely on the hands that receive it, and it is exactly this the old couplet on Brahma means when it says that for saints he becomes sudha and the moon itself, while for the wicked the very same churning yields only venom and Varuni's wine: one bhavsagar, one ocean of becoming, tasting utterly differently to the one who drinks it in reverence and the one who drinks it in greed.

This is why the tilak insists, almost as if anticipating an objection, that though Brahma stands supreme and foremost among every path of faith conceivable, Nabhadas still places him within the company of those who merely propagate dharma rather than at some solitary peak above it. It is a deliberate demotion, and a profound compliment at once. The point being made is that greatness, even at the scale of a universe, is not measured by the power to act alone but by the discipline never to try to act alone, by the reflex, at every crisis, to fold one's hands rather than to grasp at control. Brahma inscribes every soul's portion of joy and sorrow before it is born, and yet when sorrow finally overwhelms the earth he wrote, he does not consider his own pen sufficient to erase it. He leads the weeping to Bhagavan's feet instead. That, more than any lotus, any curse, any Veda breathed into being, is the teaching Nabhadas asks the reader to bow toward, in the very first line of the tilak: I bow to the dust of Vidhi's feet, who made this ocean we are all still learning to swim. The dust at those feet has seen every proud god humbled and every earnest seeker answered, and it asks only one thing of whoever reads this far: that they too learn, sooner than the Creator himself did, to stop searching for the root of the lotus alone, and instead simply pray.