Carl Sagan—astronomer, storyteller, the voice that invited millions to the cosmic ocean—once paused to wonder about the vastness of Indic classical thought.
In his landmark series Cosmos he quoted the ancient hymn that you just heard.
It is from the Rigveda: the Nasadiya Sukta—the Hymn of Creation—a short poem that begins, paradoxically, with doubt.
In this episode of Legends of Vedanta, we look at that curious meeting ground between a modern scientist and an ancient hymn, both asking the same question—how did all of our existence come to be?
The Nasadiya Sukta opens with the line often translated as: “Then, there was neither existence nor non-existence.”
It asks, in a tone equal parts awe and skepticism, whether even the gods—arriving after creation—can know the origin of origins.
The hymn is neither triumphalist nor defeatist. It stages a thought experiment: imagine a moment before time, before language, before gods.
Then concede that even the gods, who come much later, may not know how it began. This is not mystical obfuscation but a form of disciplined humility.
The voice of the hymn places scepticism and awe side by side—it asks, and keeps asking.
Sagan’s admiration was methodological. He was not looking for spiritual endorsement. He was recognising a shared epistemic stance. Science, properly practised, is an exercise in provisional answers.
It honours doubt because doubt is the engine of inquiry. The Nasadiya Sukta offers the same posture in poetical form. A measured willingness to leave some questions open and to treat uncertainty as worthy of respect!
Sagan quoted that hymn not as a nod to mysticism, but as recognition. He admired what he called “a tradition of skeptical questioning and unselfconscious humility before the great cosmic mysteries.”
In other words, the hymn’s refusal to claim easy answers resonated with the scientific mind.
The Nasadiya Sukta does not assert. It stages questions. “What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?” It imagines a moment before time and language, then admits—ultimately—that perhaps even the highest seer cannot say.
That pause, that honest admission of ignorance, is not defeat. It is an ethical stance toward knowledge.
For Sagan, humility before the unknown was a scientific virtue. He taught that wonder and critical doubt are companions. To look at the night sky and to ask bravely—to test, to measure, and to revise!
The Nasadiya Sukta offered him a mirror: a culture, ancient and poetic, that could pose the same rigorous questions without pretending to own the answers.
So how does a Vedantic text and a modern astronomer talk across millennia?
They meet on method. The hymn enacts a method of thought—probing and patient. Sagan, in his own language, told viewers that the cosmos invites humility. That mystery is not an enemy of reason but its context!
Both remind us: to know the universe is to accept provisional answers and savor the questions that remain.
There is another gift in the hymn’s final gesture: even the “creator” who surveys creation may not know whether he made it or not. That radical uncertainty dissolves the arrogance of certainty.
It frees us to be curious without claiming dominion. Sagan’s Cosmos did precisely that, popularizing the joy of not-knowing while teaching how to find out.
What does this mean for us, today? In an era crowded with certitude, Sagan’s embrace of the Nasadiya Sukta is a small revolution: to allow poetry and science to be interlocutors—not adversaries.
The hymn models a way of thinking that is at once reverent and critical, and Sagan showed us how ancient voices can deepen our modern practice of doubt. Both the Nasadiya Sukta and Sagan teach the same lesson.
Neither reduces mystery. Both insist that mystery should not paralyse us but prompt investigation.
The hymn gives a language for the ethical stance of inquiry. Sagan gives it a public voice in the modern idiom of evidence and experiment. That is their common ground—a quiet, rigorous reverence for the unknown.
This episode of the Legends of Vedanta ends where the hymn begins—in the hush between existence and non-existence, in the patient courage to ask.
Carl Sagan taught millions how to look up. The Nasadiya Sukta taught us how to ask. Together they make a better the act of knowing or perhaps not knowing enough.
Join us next time on Legends of Vedanta, where old questions meet new light. And, where we bring you many such specimens from India’s five-thousand-year-old civilizational history.
Arup K. Chatterjee 