In the dusty clearing, Prajāpati watched Death. Death watched Prajāpati, symmetrical, motionless as his adversary. Each was waiting for the right moment to overcome the other. Prajāpati practiced tapas. He generated heat within himself. Now and then, in that dark period of silent affliction, Prajāpati raised his arms. Upon which a globe of light would rise from his armpits and shoot off to bury itself in the vault of the sky. So the stars were born.
The first equivalences were the sampads that flashed across Prajāpati’s mind as he was dueling with Death. A sampad is a “falling together,” a chain of equivalences. How did they reveal themselves? Prajāpati was staring straight ahead, at Death. All around him, the world. The two combatants gazed at each other, studied each other. But didn’t move. Each was surrounded by a supporting army. Wooden spoons, a wooden sword, sticks, bowls: such was Prajāpati’s army. Frayed and frail. Around Death were a lute, an anklet, some powder puffs for making up.
How long would this tension last? As he waited, Prajāpati ran through everything that served as a frame to Death, a frame that amounts to everything that is. It was a long way to run. He penetrated the frame, in its scrolls and flourishes — and the density of decoration would sometimes hide Death from him. He thought: “This is like that, this corresponds to that, this is equivalent to that, this is that.” A vibration, a tension, a euphoria flooded his mind. If this is that, then that corresponds to this other thing — he went on. Slender bonds wrapped themselves like ribbons around this and that. The bonds stretched, invisible to many, but not to the one who put them there. With a sentinel’s eye, Prajāapati went on watching Death. But with the eye that wanders, that evokes images, numbers, and words, he went on getting things to “fall together,” sometimes things that were far apart, getting them to coincide. And the further apart they were, the more exhilarated he felt. The existent world — prickly, numb, empty — let itself be covered, taken, gathered, enveloped, in the mesh of a fabric. Oh, still a loose mesh, for sure… Yet this made it all the more exciting, that the mesh was at once so loose and so fine, as though to avoid upsetting the blind breathing of the whole. But Death? Still crouched there, waiting. Prajāpati thought: “If he kills me, what will be left?” Until now, this thought had terrified him. Prajāpati knew that everything proceeded from himself. Imagining himself as not existing meant imagining all existence nonexistent. But now he looked around. Then he saw himself from without: an exhausted, weary, wrinkled old being. All about him, everything was still new, so that looking around he could now see how every dapple of vegetation, every outline of a rock, concealed a number, a word, an equivalence: a mental state that clung and mingled with another state. As if every state were a number. As if every number were a state. This was the first equivalence, origin of all others. Then Prajāpati thought: “If I were gone, perhaps these things would no longer fall together? Perhaps the sampads would dissolve? But how could Death hurt the equivalences? How could she strike them?” Where was their body, for her to wound? They occupied no space, they couldn’t be touched. They surfaced in the mind, but where from? As he thought all this, Prajāpati felt a fever, release. He thought: “If the sampads elude me, who am myself thinking them, they will be all the more elusive for Death, who knows nothing of them. Death can kill me, but she cannot kill the equivalences.” He wasn’t aware that a clear, dry voice was issuing from his mouth. He was speaking to Death, after their long silence. Prajāpati said: “I’ve beaten you. Go ahead and kill me. Whether I am alive or not, the equivalences shall be forever.”
In the end, Mṛtyu withdrew to the women’s hut at the western edge of the sacrificial clearing. He was beaten, humiliated, but not entirely undone. Prajāpati stared out at the empty arena, the clumps of shriveled grass around the edges. He knew now that this solitude, every solitude, is illusory, is inhabited. There is always an intruder — a guest? — hiding in the women’s hut.
The brahmans of the Vedic period followed the example of Prajāpati, who had dueled long with Death, vying with him in sacrifices — Prajāpati, who had been about to give up the game for lost, exhausted, inadequate, when the sampads flashed across his mind, numerical equivalence, geometry stamped on light, and then he saw how the vast dispersion of all that lived, but above all that died, could be articulated in relationships that did not deteriorate. What the mind sees, when it grasps a connection, it sees forever. The mind may perish, together with the body that sustains it, but the relationship remains, and is indelible. By creating an edifice of such connections, the brahmans imagined, as their forefather Prajāpati once had, that they had beaten Death. They persuaded themselves that evil was inexactitude. And thus died the more serene.
To bring forth “this,” idam, was a long torment for Prajāpati. And likewise to have it become “all this,” idaṃ sarvam, including the flies and the gadflies for which he was later reproached. Little by little he was overcome by a tremendous lassitude. A being would appear, and immediately some joint of his would come loose. The lymph shrank in his body like water in a puddle under a scorching sun. As his joints were coming apart, came apart, one after another, he gazed at bits of himself, spread out on the grass, like alien and incongruous objects. Suddenly he realized that all that was left of him was his heart. Beating, begrimed. As he struggled to see himself in that scrap of flesh, he realized he no longer recognized himself. He shrieked like a lunatic: “Self! Self, ātman!” Impassive, the waters heard him. Slowly they turned toward Prajāpati, as though to some relative fallen upon hard times. They gave him back his torso, so that it might once again protect his heart. Then they offered up a sacrificial ceremony to him, the agnihotra. It might turn out useful, someday, they said — if Prajāpati should ever wish to reassemble himself in his entirety.
As his children were hurrying away, Prajāpati had glimpsed a head of tawny, waving hair, a white shoulder, a shape that cast a spell. “Oh, if only she would come back…,” he thought. “I would like to join myself to her…” Everyone else had gone. Generating creatures seemed the most pointless of procedures. Before they appeared, he experienced a tension, a spasm within. But the creatures appeared only to disappear, in a cloud of dust. Then, in his loneliness, Prajāpati took a bowl and filled it with rice, barley, fruit, butter, honey. He looked like a beggar fussing with his few belongings. He offered his bowl to the void. “May that which is dear to me come back into me…,” he whispered. It was a windless night. Directly above the bowl he had placed on the ground trembled the light of Rohiṇī, the Tawny One, who ever so slightly shook her hair. One day they would call her Aldebaran.
One question tormented the Progenitor: Why were his children so irreverent, why had they fled from him? And the gods too, why did they pretend not to know him? There was no one to explain, everybody had gone. Prajāpati was left with the corrosive sensation — something that had always dogged him — of not really existing. He looked around in perplexity. All creatures were sure they existed except him, who had given them their existence. Without him, “this” would never have been, but now he felt superfluous in respect to the world, like milk spilled while being carried from one fire to another, milk that one then tosses away on an ants’ nest. Scarcely had he given birth to the other beings when Prajāpati realized he wasn’t needed.