Hindu Ideas of Creation

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Hindu ideas about Creation. According to most Western religious traditions, a deity was the original creator of the Universe. Hinduism, on the other hand, has no single creation story. For thousands of years, Hindu thinkers have taken a variety of approaches to the question of where we come from, with some making the case for divine intervention and others asking whether it is even possible for humans to comprehend the nature of creation. The origin of our existence, and the nature of the Universe we live in, is one of the richest strands of Hindu thought.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Jessica Frazier 9 episodes
  Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford
• Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad 5 episodes
  Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University
• Gavin Flood No other episodes
  Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford

Reading list

• Hindu Myths
  Wendy Doniger (Penguin, 2004) Google Books →
• An Introduction to Hinduism
  Gavin Flood (University of Cambridge, 1996) Google Books →
• Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices
  Julius Lipner (Routledge, 2010) Google Books →
• Studies in Hinduism: Vedism and Hinduism
  Gerhard Oberhammer (ed.) (Austrian Academy of Science Press, 1997) Google Books →
• Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras
  Andre Padoux (SUNY Press, 1990) Google Books →

Related episodes

• The Upanishads
  
  8 Nov, 2012 290 Other religions
• Karma
  
  23 Jun, 2024 290 Other religions
• Deism
  
  8 Oct, 2020 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• Chance and Design
  
  13 Feb, 2003 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• The Universe’s Origins
  
  20 May, 1999 520 Astronomy
• Lakshmi
  
  6 Oct, 2016 290 Other religions
• The Universe’s Shape
  
  7 Feb, 2002 520 Astronomy
• The Bhagavad Gita
  
  31 Mar, 2011 290 Other religions
• Human Origins
  
  27 Apr, 2000 560 Fossils and prehistoric life
• Human Evolution
  
  16 Feb, 2006 560 Fossils and prehistoric life

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b03k289f

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k289f

Auto-category: 294.5 (Hinduism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The Bhrumandapurana, an important Hindu text written over a thousand years ago, contains an account, one of many, of the beginning of the universe.