Sep 18, 2004, 12.00am IST
The origin of the concept of Ganapati, the elephant-headed God, is related to the origin of the universe. What was the origin of the universe like?
The universe was not there in the beginning. Or, if it were there, what had then become of it? One view is that it had shrunk to a bindu. Bindu means point. The universe had contracted to a point. That is just its way. Now it contracts; now it expands.
It is a perpetual cycle stretched over billions of human years. Expansion is creation and contraction is dissolution.
In geometry, a point has position but no dimensions. The position of a thing is in relation to other things in space. Since bindu is the contraction of the whole universe, of the whole time-space-mind continuum, it can have no position.
Since it has no dimensions, and since it is the contraction of time-space-mind, the mind just cannot grasp it. For the three-dimensional mind to grasp a thing, that thing, too, has to be 3-D.
For the mind, a thing without dimensions doesn’t exist at all. That’s why the bindu is beyond comprehension and equal to nothing.
For the bindu to burst into being again, to stretch out its withdrawn dimensions and thus to expand again, it needs a bang-start. The spark for this bang-start comes in the form of desire.
The bindu desired to expand again, to burst into being again, to be manifest and to multiply. Desire heated it up to a fireball bursting with desire. At the extreme height of heat and pressure, it just exploded.
This explosion of bindu is called Bindu Visphota. The explosion stretched forth, well outside its withdrawn dimensions. It started to expand. It ceased to be nothing. It bounced back into being.
The present 3-D space is the volume expansion of bindu. This volume expansion is called Saguna (dimensioned) Brahmn. This Saguna Brahmn is the 3D-isation of Nirguna (dimensionless) Brahmn, that is, the original bindu.
Saguna Brahmn and Moola Prakriti (the original nature) are one and the same. Sankara has acknowledged their being synonymous.
All that occupies the 3-D space is its own local temporary warps. Warping or curvature of space-time is called vivarta. By warping itself, Nature creates all.
Space is prakriti; it is occupied by its own vikriti (deformity). This, in essence, is the cosmogony and cosmology of Vedanta.
The sound of the initial explosion, the bang-start of bindu, was likened to the trumpeting of an elephant.
Bindu trumpeted like a cosmic elephant in the beginning, and the universe is the 3-D expansion of the sound energy of that initial cosmic trumpeting.
In Sanskrit, the word for the trumpeting of an elephant is brimhita or brihatika.
The word Brahmn was originally derived from this brimhita. Bindu, the spacestuff, is Brahmn, and Brahmn is a cosmic elephant making a cosmic trumpeting to inaugurate Creation.
Since this cosmic elephant is the cause and Lord of all ganas - groups, bonds, assemblages - in the universe, it was called Ganapati. That is the origin of the concept of Ganapati or Ganesha.
We are familiar with Ganapati Mandala, a diagram consisting of two transverse equilateral tri-angles with a point in the middle. The point in the middle is bindu, the trumpeting elephant.
The two transverse triangles with their six vertices represent the volume expansion of bindu - the emergence of the 3-D space, of moola prakriti, of creation.
What expands bindu into volume is its big brimhita bang, represented by the space enclosed by the transverse triangles and surrounding bindu.
K M Gupta
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