The Ground of Reality
The most common picture of God goes something like this: before the universe existed, there was nothing. Then God, existing somehow outside of nothing, decided to make something. The universe is his handiwork. He is the potter. We are the pots.
This picture has problems.
The first is logical. If the universe requires an explanation, something to account for why it exists rather than not, then God requires the same explanation. You haven’t solved the problem of existence, you’ve just pushed it one level up, behind a curtain labelled transcendent. A creator God who simply exists, needing no further explanation, is no more satisfying than a universe that simply exists, needing no further explanation. The regress stops arbitrarily.
The second is empirical. The universe doesn’t look like it was assembled by a craftsman following a blueprint. It looks like it tumbled into its current complexity through billions of years of undirected process. Stars exploding to seed heavier elements, planets cooling, chemistry bootstrapping into biology, species branching and dying and branching again. Evolution isn’t a problem for spirituality, but it is a problem for the specific image of God as designer-of-parts.
As a teenager I found both of these arguments fairly convincing, and for some years I called myself an atheist. I was arguing against a particular, and I think inadequate, idea of the divine. The demolition was real. What I hadn’t yet looked at was whether something else stood after the rubble cleared.
Gold and Water
There is a different way to approach the question. Not divine as a creator standing outside the universe and setting it into motion, but as the ground on which everything stands. Not the potter, but the clay. Not the craftsman, but the medium itself.
Take a gold necklace, a gold ring, a gold coin. Each has its own name, shape, function. You can melt the ring and pour it into the mould of a bracelet. The ring is gone, the bracelet appears. But through all of that, what never changed? The gold. The gold is not one of the objects. It is the substance of which all three are temporary expressions. It is immanent in each of them, right here, fully present, and simultaneously transcends any particular form they take.
This is a better and logically coherent analogy for the relationship between ultimate reality and the world of apparent multiplicity. Brahman is not one thing among other things. It is the is-ness itself, the pure existence on which all particular things depend for their being. The names and forms are superimpositions on top of the underlying one is-ness. A wave temporarily “borrows” its existence from the underlying water. Arising, then subsiding.
This moves the divine question from who made the world to what is the world made of. And the answer points not to some external agent but to the very nature of existence itself. Not a creator who once acted and withdrew, but the ground of being, present in and as every moment. Both transcendent, like gold transcends the particular ornament, and radically immanent. Not somewhere else, but right here, right now.
PS: Alex O’Connor makes a similar argument in this video if you’re interested.
Demotion of the Creator
Puranic-era scriptures encode this understanding in a story I find extraordinarily precise.
Once, Brahma the creator and Vishnu the sustainer fell into an argument about who was supreme. To settle it, Shiva appeared between them as an infinite pillar of light, a Jyotirlinga, blazing and boundless in both directions. He set them a challenge: whoever finds the end of this pillar will be declared supreme.
Vishnu took the form of a boar and dove downward into the depths. Brahma became a swan and flew upward through the heavens. They searched for thousands of years. Neither found an end. The light had no beginning and no limit.
Vishnu returned and admitted it. This pillar is truly infinite. I could not find its bottom.
Brahma lied. He claimed he had found the top, and produced a flower as false witness.
Shiva appeared in his full form, furious at the deception. He cursed Brahma: you are the creator, and so you will be. But you will not be worshipped.
That curse holds to this day. There is essentially one temple to Brahma in all of India, in Pushkar, Rajasthan. Meanwhile Vishnu and Shiva temples are everywhere, tens of thousands of them.
The mythological logic is transparent once you see it. The creator function, the idea that the divine is primarily the one who made things, is demoted. Not because creation is unimportant, but because identifying the divine as mainly a creator is a kind of dishonesty, like Brahma’s lie. It claims to have reached the top of something that has no top. It pretends to have fully explained existence when it has only shifted the question.
Vishnu, who admitted the infinite could not be circumscribed, becomes the primary form of worship. The divine as sustainer, as the one who holds everything in existence continuously, not the one who built it once and stepped back.
Dhar: The Ground of Being
Uday Bhawalkar’s dhrupad rendition in Raga Multani has the lyrics:
धर बंसीधर, पिनाकधर, गिरिधर, गंगाधर, मुकुटधर, जटाधर, चक्रधर, शूलधर, नरहर शिवशंकर
Dhar bansi: the one who holds the flute, Krishna. Dhar pinaka: the one who holds the bow, Shiva. Giridhar: the lifter of the mountain. Gangadhar: the one who holds the Ganga in his matted locks. Mukuta dhar, jata dhar, chakra dhar, shoola dhar. One wearing the crown, one bearing the tangled hair, one holding the discus, one carrying the trident.
The word Dhar is used repeatedly. It comes from the root sound of धृ. It means the one who holds, who bears, who sustains. The composition moves through a litany of things sustained or held by Krishna and Shiva, to unify them as the non-dual underlying reality of Harihara.
Different forms, different attributes, different stories. The same principle: the divine as the bearer of reality, not merely its originator.
Uday Ji’s Raga Bhairava dhrupad rendition makes this point even more sharply:
शिव आदि, मध, अंत
Shiva - the beginning, the middle, and the end.
नाभि के कमल ते, तीन मूरत भई भिन्न जाने, सोही नरक भोगी
From the lotus of the navel, three forms arose. Whoever considers them separate, that one experiences hell.
The three aspects of divinity, Brahma (creator), Vishnu (sustainer), Shiva (dissolver), emerge from the same source. They are aspects of a single reality, arising from the same navel-lotus of the ultimate.
The mythologies in the Puranas may be devotional symbolisms. The classical compositions of Dhrupads may be songs of Bhakti. But they are also much more than that. They are the ripened fruits of the philosophical understanding established by Vedanta.