The Vishnu Purana: Book VI: Chapter IV | Internet Sacred Text Archive

CHAP. IV.

Continuation of the account of the first kind of dissolution. Of the second kind, or elemental dissolution; of all being resolved into primary spirit.

WHEN the waters have reached the region of the seven Rishis, and the whole of the three worlds is one ocean, they stop. The breath of Vishńu becomes a strong wind, which blows for more than a hundred years, until all the clouds are dispersed. The wind is then reabsorbed, and he of whom all things are made, the lord by whom all things exist, he who is inconceivable, without beginning of the universe, reposes, sleeping upon Śesha, in the midst of the deep. The creator, Hari, sleeps upon the ocean, in the form of Brahmá--glorified by Sanaka And the saints who had gone to the Janaloka, and contemplated by the holy inhabitants of Brahmaloka, anxious for final liberation--involved in mystic slumber, the celestial personification of his own illusions, and meditating on his own ineffable spirit, which is called Vásudeva. This, Maitreya, is the dissolution termed incidental, because Hari, in the form of Brahmá, sleeps there, as its incidental cause.

When the universal spirit wakes, the world revives; when he closes his eyes, all things fall upon the bed of mystic slumber. In like manner as a thousand great ages constitute a day of Brahmá, so his night consists of the same period; during which the world is submerged by a vast ocean. Awaking at the end of his night, the unborn, Vishńu, in the character of Brahmá, creates the universe anew, in the manner formerly related to you 1.

I have thus described to you the intermediate dissolution of the world, occurring at the end of every Kalpa. I will now, Maitreya, describe to you elemental dissolution. When by dearth and fire all the worlds and Pátálas are withered up, and the modifications of Mahat and other products of nature are by the will of Krishńa destroyed, the progress of