Saraswatī is a personification of knowledge and creative energy. Stories connecting to Saraswatī give us an insight as to how ancient Vedic philosophers tried to articulate vast ideas like the power of knowledge and creativity through this goddess. Such stories mention that at the beginning of the universe when everything was in a fluid state of chaos and extreme flux, Saraswatī was the force that brought order to the universe with the mantra ‘knowledge reveals possibilities in problems’.
Early Vedics further constructed her in the collective psyche as the mother of all arts. The arts—from painting, music, literature, performance and all its countless current forms—were described as the highest form of expressing knowledge with Saraswatī-consciousness as the source.
This screen-print depicts Saraswatī vision of the c. 700 BCE Indian Vedic sage Yājñavalkya. Yājñavalkya proposed and debated metaphysical questions about the nature of existence, consciousness and impermanence, and expounded the eliminative doctrine of neti neti (not this, not this). It’s from an early 20th-century devotional illustration from India.
Encountering Saraswatī: two-coloured screen-print
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