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Hello, the Brumanda Poor Anna, an important Hindu text written over a thousand years ago,

contains an account, one of many, of the beginning of the universe.

The book describes a huge golden egg from which you merge the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars.

From it also springs for the foreheaded God Brahma, who creates all the people and creatures on earth.

This gracious story is well known in Hinduism, but it's not the only one.

Unlike Christianity and other religions, Hinduism does not have a single story about the beginning of the universe,

instead offering a rich and intriguing series of possible explanations.

For centuries, one of the central concerns of Hindu philosophy has been how a God could have created the world,

and whether there's something that humans can ever comprehend.

When we discuss Hindu ideas of creation are Jessica Frazier, lecturer in religious studies at the University of Kent,

and a research fellow of the Oxford Center for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford,

Chakravati, Ram Prasad, Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University,

and Gavin Flood, Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford.

Jessica Frazier, I've just hinted Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions have a fundamentally different approach

in many ways to the universe.

Can you explain what the major differences are?

Well, if you look at the first few millennia BCE, what we get is almost every culture around the world

is thinking about the nature of the universe and the origins of the cosmos itself.

What's distinctive in the differences that they develop over the next few millennia

...