Does the Universe Have a Purpose, or Is It Just Process?

Leibniz asked 'why is there something rather than nothing?' The Prashna asked it first.

Prashna and Svetasvatara Upanishads vs Aristotle and Leibniz. Is the cause time, nature, necessity, chance, the elements, or spirit?

Seven Words in Hanover

Hanover, 1714. The court of the Elector of Brunswick. An old philosopher in a long curled wig sits at his writing table by candlelight, surrounded by stacks of paper that no one in the court reads. His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He has invented calculus, but the credit is going to Newton in London. He has built mechanical calculators, drafted plans for libraries and academies, written more letters than any other thinker of his century. Tonight, in a short essay he is calling the Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, he is writing down the question that has followed him his entire life. He puts it in seven words.

'Why is there something rather than nothing?'

He writes the line and then writes the next sentence, which is the harder one. 'For nothing is simpler and easier than something.' If non-existence were the default, the universe should not be here. And yet here it is. Galaxies, grass, the candle burning beside his ink. The question is the largest a human being can ask, and Leibniz is the first European to put it this nakedly. The essay will be read after his death. It will become one of the founding texts of metaphysics. Leibniz himself will die two years later, in 1716, mostly forgotten by the court he served.

Twenty-three centuries before Leibniz dipped his pen, in a forest hermitage on the other side of Eurasia, six men had already sat down with the same question and asked it of an old rishi named Pippalada. The Upanishad records their names: Kabandhi Katyayana, Bhargava Vaidarbhi, Kausalya Asvalayana, Sauryayani Gargya, Saibya Satyakama, Sukesha Bharadvaja. They had spent a year in tapas before Pippalada agreed to take their questions. Kabandhi spoke first. His voice was steady but his question was Leibniz's, asked in older words. 'From where, revered sir, are all these creatures born?'