Hymn to Viśvakarman, the All-Maker
Rigveda X.82 is a sūkta (hymn of praise) from Maṇḍala 10 of the Rigveda, one of the 1,028 hymns organized within the ten books of the oldest Veda. The Rigveda was composed approximately 1700–1100 BCE in Vedic Sanskrit and preserved through oral transmission across millennia.
This is a Good Works Translation produced for the Good Works Library from the Sanskrit of the Śākala recension. It is one of two hymns (with X.81) addressed to Viśvakarman, "the maker of all," and it moves from his shaping of heaven and earth into a set of cosmogonic riddles about the first embryo of creation and the god no one can fully know.
1. The father of the eye, wise in mind, brought forth ghee for these two that bow low. When the first, ancient bounds had been made firm, then heaven and earth spread out wide.
2. Viśvakarman, vast in mind, immense, the ordainer, the disposer, and also the supreme seer — their offerings rejoice together with the sacrificial food, in the place where they call him the one beyond the Seven Seers.
3. He who is our father, our begetter, who is the disposer, who knows the abodes and all the worlds — he who alone gave names to the gods — to him the other creatures go with their questions.
4. The ancient seers sacrificed wealth to him together, like singers offering abundance, in the unmanifest and manifest realm where they set him in place — he who fashioned all these beings together.
5. Beyond heaven, beyond this earth, beyond the gods and the asuras — whatever there is: what, then, was that first embryo which the waters held, in which all the gods together beheld themselves?
6. That very embryo, the first, the waters held, in which all the gods came together; the one thing set upon the navel of the unborn, on which all the worlds rest.
7. You gods do not know him who begot these worlds; something else has come between you and him. Wrapped in mist and idle talk, the reciters of hymns wander about, satisfying only their own breath.
Translator's note: verse 1's "these two that bow low" (ene ... nannamāne) is left conservative — it most likely refers to heaven and earth, named explicitly at the end of the same verse, but the Sanskrit itself does not spell out the referent. Verse 7's asutṛpaḥ ("satisfying their own breath/life") is rendered literally rather than smoothed into an interpretive gloss.
Colophon
Rigveda X.82 is drawn from the Śākala recension of the Rigveda, composed approximately 1700–1100 BCE. This is a Good Works Translation rendered verse by verse from the Sanskrit text printed below. Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation.
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Source Text: ṛgveda X.82
Sanskrit source text from the Aufrecht edition (1877) via GRETIL (Van Nooten & Holland input). Presented here for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.
cakṣuṣaḥ pitā manasā hi dhīro ghṛtam ene ajanan nannamāne |
yaded antā adadṛhanta pūrva ād id dyāvāpṛthivī aprathetām || 1 ||
viśvakarmā vimanā ād vihāyā dhātā vidhātā paramota saṁdṛk |
teṣām iṣṭāni sam iṣā madanti yatrā saptaṛṣīn para ekam āhuḥ || 2 ||
yo naḥ pitā janitā yo vidhātā dhāmāni veda bhuvanāni viśvā |
yo devānāṁ nāmadhā eka eva taṁ sampraśnam bhuvanā yanty anyā || 3 ||
ta āyajanta draviṇaṁ sam asmā ṛṣayaḥ pūrve jaritāro na bhūnā |
asūrte sūrte rajasi niṣatte ye bhūtāni samakṛṇvann imāni || 4 ||
paro divā para enā pṛthivyā paro devebhir asurair yad asti |
kaṁ svid garbham prathamaṁ dadhra āpo yatra devāḥ samapaśyanta viśve || 5 ||
tam id garbham prathamaṁ dadhra āpo yatra devāḥ samagacchanta viśve |
ajasya nābhāv adhy ekam arpitaṁ yasmin viśvāni bhuvanāni tasthuḥ || 6 ||
na taṁ vidātha ya imā jajānānyad yuṣmākam antaram babhūva |
nīhāreṇa prāvṛtā jalpyā cāsutṛpa ukthaśāsaś caranti || 7 ||
Source Colophon
Sanskrit text of the Rigveda, Śākala recension. The standard scholarly edition is the Bombay Oriental (Vishva Bandhu, 5 vols., 1963–66). IAST transliteration available from GRETIL (Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages) and Vedaweb (University of Cologne). Both sources are open access. IAST transliteration from the Aufrecht edition (1877) via GRETIL (Van Nooten & Holland input, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).