“He whose powers were measureless, being thus requested by the great sages, whose thoughts were profound, saluted them all with reverence and gave them a comprehensive answer, saying: Be it heard! This universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea or dispelling the gloom. He, whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the external organs, who has not visible parts, who exists from eternity, even he, the soul of all beings, whom no being can comprehend, shone forth in person. He, having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance, first, with a thought, created the waters and placed in them a productive seed; that seed became an egg bright as gold, blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams; AND IN THAT EGG HE WAS BORN HIMSELF IN THE FORM OF BRAHMA THE GREAT FOREFATHER OF ALL SPIRITS. The waters were called nara, because they were the production of Nara, or the spirit of God; and, since they were his first ayana, or place of motion, he thence is named Nayrayana, or moving on the waters. From that which is, the first cause, not the object of sense, existing everywhere in substance, not existing to our perception, without beginning or end, was produced the divine male, famed in all worlds under the appellation of Brahma. In that egg the great power sat inactive a whole year of the Creator, at the close of which, by his thought alone, he caused the egg to divide itself; and from its two divisions he framed the heaven above and the earth beneath; in the midst he placed the subtile ether, the eight regions, and the permanent receptacle of waters.