The Womb of The Absolute: Gestational Ontology and the Physiological Grammar of Creation in Vaidika Brahmavidya

Abstract

This paper develops gestational ontology, an original framework for reading the physiological cosmology of Vaidika Brahmavidya. It is an attempt to arrive at a systematic answer to the classical Vedantic problem of how an undifferentiated Brahman generates a differentiated cosmos without itself acting. Using the arguments from Bhagavad Gita, the Shatapatha Brahmana, the Nasadiya Sukta, and the Isha and Chandogya Upanishads, the paper argues that in these texts the governing method is neither allegory nor static microcosm-macrocosm correspondence but the deployment of embryogenesis as the operative grammar of cosmogony itself. Reading the Brahmana triad of Uktha, Pratishtha, and Sama against Peircean semiotics, the Agni-Soma dialectic against both Whiteheadian process philosophy and the modern discourse of “Vedic science,” and the Yosha-Vrisha gender polarity against the tradition’s own admission that androcentric cosmology cannot finally hold, this paper extends Vaidika Brahmavidya’s physiological hermeneutic into a comparative theoretical idiom and argues that its systematization of Krishna’s sixteen kalas performs, in a physiological register, the same doxographic labor early modern Sanskrit intellectuals performed for Indian philosophy as a whole.