Verse 12

¹²By a fate that reasoning cannot get to the bottom of, and by the highest, the Person, and the unblinking one, time, a stirring arose out of the Bhagavan, and from the three strands the great principle came to be. ¹³From that great principle, in which passion is chief and which fate had urged on, the beginning of the elements was born with its three marks, and it sent forth space and the rest, five in number. ¹⁴One by one they could not bring forth a thing made of elements, so they came together by the working of fate and sent out a golden egg. ¹⁵That shell of an egg lay in the water of the sea with no self in it for a thousand years and more, and the Lord came and dwelt in it.

¹⁶From his navel came a lotus with the wide blaze of a thousand suns, the dwelling of every rank of living thing; and there the self-ruler came into being of himself. ¹⁷Entered by the Bhagavan who lies in the store of water, he shaped the ordering of the worlds as it had been before, out of the settled form he had himself.