Prajapati, lord of creatures, is the creator god of the Brahmanas, the ritual texts that stand between the Vedic hymns and the Upanishads. His creation is not a command but a self-expenditure: he heats himself with tapas, ascetic ardour, until beings issue from him, and in the most striking accounts he exhausts and dismembers himself in the act of creating, falling apart into the world he has made, so that the sacrifice performed afterward is understood as a reassembly of Prajapati's scattered body, and this is the deep reason the ritual must be done at all. He is thus at once the sacrificer, the sacrifice and its object.
In later Hinduism Prajapati is largely absorbed into Brahma, and the name becomes a title for the several progenitors of creatures, including Daksha. The tradition's own uncertainty about creation is captured in the Rigveda's Nasadiya hymn, which asks who could possibly know how creation happened, and doubts that even the gods, or the one who watches from the highest heaven, truly do.