Meaning in the Mahabharata Part II

IN this series of articles, I'm working on outlining the "meaning of mahabharata"

Dear Readers: Thanks for your patience. As some of you may know I'm involved on a project to create materials for understanding India's great epic, the Mahabharata. I like to work on ideas and present them on the blog sometimes. It's like a writer's journal for me that helps me organize themes. I write to learn. So as I write more and more on this theme, I begin to see what it is I'm looking for.  Here's some ideas on the Mahabharata. This is part of a series.

India under the spell of Mahabharata

India today is under the spell of the Mahabharata. The strands of the saga are woven into the very thread of the civilization. So many traditions in literature may be traced back to this monumental book of divine inspiration. The poem is beyond time. No one can discover its origin or the date. Neither does it have a date of expiration. It has been invoked throughout Indian antiquity up until the present day. What then is the magic hold that this book has had on generations? What is its miracle? To Sanskrit scholars and Western literary critics it is a mystery. And yet, for the common man or woman in today’s India there is no mystery at all. They know that the Mahabharata is a divine work. That it sprang from the mind of Vyasa to the ivory pen of Ganesh. It recounts the warlike needs of their ancestors, the godlike heroes of a past age. They all know the story: on the one hand are the Kauravas-- outwardly pious, but inwardly envious. On the other are the Pandavas, inwardly righteous and sworn to serve Krishna. The righteous sons of Pandu are always helped by their friend Lord Krishna. They fight a holy war to put an end to injustice. It is the end of the Golden age when gods would walk with men, a good time when people were happier and more honest.

Divine questions, divine answers

There is something in the poem far nobler than a romantic story about a lost paradise and golden age--kshatriya princes fighting for a forgotten kingdom--a simple tale of ancient love and war. The meaning may seem mysterious to critics and poets; but for the common man of the Indian subcontinent, there is no mystery to the Mahabharata. It is the very soul of dharma.  While it plays out as a long answer to the question posed by King Janamejaya, the book leads us on a journey to the very soul. That great king asks the Sage at the snake sacrifice: “O Vaishampayana how arose the quarrel among those men of unblemished deeds? What was the cause of that great war which destroyed so many lives?” His answer enthralls the King for many days. But his answer always revolves around the question of truth, dharma, and the ultimate goal of life.

India’s great epic

It might seem strange that the answer to such an easy question might run into an epic work of 100,000 Sanskrit verses. And yet, how much ink has been spilled about the causes and effects of the second world war? One may argue that there is no need for any digression in the work of this kind. The 100,000 couplets of the Mahabharata are eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, 3 1/2 times longer than the entire Christian Bible of old and New Testament. But the length of the work owes to the fact that the skeleton of the Mahabharata supports thousands of other tales as well as a massive didactic material meant to educate one on all aspects of Dharma.

A labyrinth of treatises

The story of the Pandavas and the Kurus winds its way through a Byzantine labyrinth of elaborate treatises on everything from religious sacrifice to moral law and ethics; from philosophy and metaphysics to the geography and cosmography of the ancient world, as well as digressions into a myriad of legends, mythological tales, and Hindu doctrine. And yet, the author never loses sight of his goal. In spite of his many digressions, he moves the drama forward, always keeping the goal in mind.

The story may be interpreted on multiple levels. On the mundane or worldly level it is a story of rivals; of palace intrigue, of death-defying heroes, seductive heroines and damsels in distress. The good guys are antiheroes; they might have come straight out of the film world of Star Wars or a graphic novel in the Marvel universe.

Dharma at the center of the work

There is a phrase in Sanskrit  यतो धर्मस्ततो जयः' yato dharmas tato Jayaḥ "Where is dharma, there is victory". It is the motto of India’s Supreme Court and the leit motif of the Mahābhārata. The idea of dharma illuminates the entire work from beginning to end. To take the Mahābhārata as a mundane story is to miss its core teaching.  

Dharma is taught everywhere throughout the book, implicitly in the lives and examples of the characters, and explicitly through the morals to its stories and the teachings of the saints and sages found in the work. We must leave aside a mundane reading of the work and try to understand its spiritual component. But even this is problematic. Even if we read on the level of dharma, there are still multiple layers of interpretation.

For dharma itself may be seen as both ethical and divine. That is, there is social or moral-ethical dharma insofar as how we act, how we live, how we treat others. "How do we live in society?" is a question for ethical or social dharma. But in the end, Krishna tells us to reject the ordinary ethical values of social dharma for a higher spiritual truth. How do we keep these in balance? This is, in essence, the central moral question of the Mahabharata, one that Vyasa will revisit again and again in his telling of the story.

Limiting ourselves for a moment to the purely ethical level, the best representative of ordinary or social dharma dharma is Bhishma as the Perfect Man, the perfect hero.

He is placed by birth and circumstances in the station of a warrior and a king. He sacrifices his kingdom for his father’s happiness. He rules only as regent, so that his younger brothers may become king. And yet he is the emblem of a perfect warrior, an example of chivalry. As a warrior he follows the code. He is capable of ruthless force, but only in the service of Dharma.

And he does his duty in a spirit of detachment free from personal interest, uncontaminated by ego, lust, and anger. Bhishma acts selflessly. as a knight in shining armor, his example illuminates the path for his descendents: King Arthur, the Knights of the round table, Lancelot, Galahad, and Percival and even the matchless Don Quixote the unexcelled champion of Miguel de Cervantes and classical Spanish literature.

Greatness of character

Bhishma shows the greatness of character that we expect from the Samurais of Bushido, From the Celts and Vikings, and even modern heroes like the Jedi Knights of Star Wars or the superheroes of the Marvel universe.

Bhishma disagrees with the war; it is not his fight. He bears the Pandavas no enmity and in fact sees their call for justice as righteous.

But, when war comes against his advice, he is duty bound as a soldier to help his monarch. With duty as his standard, he becomes general of the Kurus. Since he has pledged to fight for Duryodhana he carries out his pledge and fights nobly. His death is remarkable. The surviving warriors on both sides put away their weapons and armor, and leaving aside their hatred, approached him to hear his final teachings.

Bhishma greeted them all with his blessings. Tortured by his wounds, impaled on a thousand arrows, and burning with fever, he taught his students. An emblem of self-control and yoga, he had been blessed with the boon that death would never come to him as long as he desired to live. Bhishma had conquered his ego, he had conquered sexual desire and gave out his wisdom until his dying breath. Bhishma’s life and example teach us that of the different aims of life, duty, dharma is supreme: yato dharma tato jayaḥ.

Bhishma’s heroic sense of duty disdains name and fame. He has no interest in love or money. He exalts duty above all else. And yet, his duty is to the mundane world of noble kings. He sees them as God’s representatives on earth. For Bhishma, service to the monarch is service to God.

But in the end, this is not the highest conception. In fact, it is only a beginning.

What confuses so many about the inner meaning of the Mahābharata is that Vyāsa’s concept of dharma functions on different levels at the same time. He returns to the idea of dharma again and again, firmly establishing dharma as the most important value. But what is dharma?

Next up: What is dharma?

India's Greatest Epic

History of the Mahābhārata

by Michael Dolan, B.V. Mahāyogi

Long before the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, long before the ancient Greeks, a war was fought on the plains of Northern India: the Kurukṣetra War. This war and its antecedents form the story of Mahābharata, the story of Greater India and the rise and fall of the Aryans. 

Antiquity of Mahābhārata

The Aryan civilization found its denouement in the Kurukṣetra war, the internecine battle between the sons and grandsons of the great warrior Bhiṣma, arguably the bloodiest battle in the ancient history of the world. The exact age of the war is unknown, however the Sanskrit Mahābharata was known to Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great.  Having conquered a part of the region west of the Indus River somewhere around 500 BC, Alexander sent the spoils of his conquest to his library in Alexandria.

Among the treasures of Alexander’s Eastern conquest were books in Sanskrit, including the grammar of Panini, the Upaniṣadic texts, the original Vedas in Sanskrit, and the Mahābharata. The traditions of the poet Vyāsa, nominal composer of the work, were celebrated in ballads, song, and theatrical works long before the time of Alexander. Scholars tend to date the work from the time of Alexander since the work was brought home to Greece at that time. But while it is difficult to assign a date to the Mahabharata, they must have been written at least hundreds of years before their discovery by the Greeks.

Dates and Conservative Estimates

Since the events celebrated in epics often take place long before they are recorded in literature, a conservative estimate of the age of Mahābharata takes us back to at least 1000 years before the modern Christian Era (CE). According to some traditions, the work is far older. Some historians give the date as early as 3109 B.C. Many researchers cite the lack of certifiable artifacts dating from this time as evidence that the antiquity of these stories is exaggerated, however the ancient text itself demonstrates an incredible wealth of detail about the civilizations that once occupied the Indus River valley extending to the region of the Ganges Delta – so claims that indicate origins in ancient antiquity cannot be easily dismissed.

The great Kurukṣetra war ended in the total destruction of the dynasty of the Aryans who populated the region. While different theories exist as to the racial characteristics of the Aryan peoples so many thousands of years ago, it is hard to imagine today exactly what happened. We may rely only on the text itself and the traditions of India for clues. Our story takes place on the  plains of Kurukṣetra in Punjab, Northwest of present day Delhi.

Time travel

We must cast our vision back into time, back thousands of years far before the time of Shakespeare, before the time of King Arthur, before the Aztecs sacrificed their virgins and warriors to the sun god, before the dark ages. The heros of Mahabharata fought their battles and made their offerings to the gods centuries before the fall of the Roman Empire, even centuries before Jesus Christ taught in Galilee.

To apply our imagination to the stories of the Mahabharata, we must return  to a time before Alexander the Great sat at the feet of Socrates to learn Algebra and the philosophy and etiquette of kings. We must travel back into the past before the Egyptian Pyramids of Giza dominated the valleys  of the Nile river basin.

And now that we have journeyed into the past, we must then turn our vision farther east, beyond the Pyramids of the Nile. Past the Hindu Kush. We must travel to the other side of the world, the Orient, all the way to the wild, mystical foothills of the Himalayas, to a time in ancient history sometime after human beings crawled out of the ice age and began organizing themselves into agricultural communities.

The Mohenjo-Daro civilization

Farming took place with the domestication of oxen, horse, and elephant. The domestication of the cow, the cultivation of rice, bananas, and wheat were achieved by the Mohenjo-Daro civilization that grew near the now-extinct basin of the Saraswati River.  (http://www.mohenjodaro.net/

A civilization was born from agricultural cultivation. Gradually towns and cities arose. How South Asia came to be populated with citizens and their kings is an enigma shrouded in mystery.

 But how the ancient kings of the Aryan civilization ruled, did battle, and celebrated peace, how they thrived and were finally ruined are the subjects of our story. Their lives have been recorded in the meters of Vyasadeva’s poetry as Mahabharata.

Kings of Hastinapura: Pandu and Dhritarasthra

Paṇḍu and his blind brother Dhṛtaraṣṭra were the respective kings of Hastinapura, the place of the elephants. Modern archeologists have placed the ruined walls of the palaces of Hastinapura nearby the original city of New Delhi. At the time of our story,  Hastinapura was the seat of the ancient rulers of India. When King Paṇḍu died, before his time, his brother Dhṛtaraṣṭra reluctantly became regent-king ruling until the next generation was fit to inherit the kingdom. A rivalry grew between  his nephews, the sons of Paṇḍu, along with his own hundred sons headed by the eldest; Duryodhana.

The sons of Paṇḍu  were called the Paṇḍavas . Of the five Paṇḍavas, Yudhiṣthira also the eldest, was a man of righteousness and truth. Bhīma was a powerful warrior, mighty and stong, with a warriors appetite.

Arjuna was to become  the greatest archer who ever lived. Their two younger brothers were the twins: Nakula and Sahadeva: both handsome, elegant, masters of poetry, lovers of women and noble warriors.

Summary of the Story

Our story begins as Vyasa, visits the ruins of the battlefield. Bhishma begins to tell his own story about the succession to the throne of Hastinapura. The story of the Mahabharata may be summarized as follows:

Before the pious rule of Bharata and his descendants, the ksatriyas or warrior class had committed many abuses. Before the golden age of Bhishmadeva, these ruthless dictators persecuted brahmaṇas, raped the land, destroyed rivers and forests, plundered and killed the innocent. They demanded tribute in the form of gold and silver. They raped virgins and violated the principles of religion. The earth was soaked in blood and the rivers ran red.

The story goes that the earth had been overburdened with the weight of militaristic kings. The earth was exhausted with wars. So it was that once upon a time, Bhumidevi, the earth in the form of a cow, came to pray to Vishnu and beg for help against these injustices. In those days, the earth was exhausted from exploitation. It was Kṛṣṇa who decided to alleviate the suffering of the earth. He set into motion a sequence of events that would culminate in the Kurukṣetra War, the First Great War of Kings.  

Our story begins with the end of the great Kurukṣetra war. Amid the ruins of the killing fields huddle a single handful of battle-scarred warriors. Their shields are bent, their quivers exhausted, their faces bloody. They are covered in sweat and blood, and the dust of the war-grounds. 

Their limbs are scarred, their bodies torn with arrows. These are the five Paṇḍavas, victorious in the battle, the new lords of Hastinapura. They are among the only survivors of the devastating war. They have defeated the envious Kauravas, but at what cost? This is the story of Mahabharata.

 The Mahābhārata tells the story of the rule of the kings of India in the line of Bharata in ancient times. Within its pages we see the clash of heroes, the seduction of saints, fiery heroines, and the teachings of mystics. With dark mysteries and deep wisdom teachings, this saga of heroes has held readers spellbound for generations. What is the secret meaning at the heart of Mahabharata?

India's Greatest Epic

Compared with the Ramāyana, "The Mahabharata" is considered to be the more recent of India's two great epics. It is by far the longer. First composed by the Vyasa in verse, it has come down the centuries in the timeless oral tradition of guru and sishya, profoundly influencing the history, culture, and art of not only the Indian subcontinent but most of south-east Asia. At 100,000 couplets, it is seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined: far and away the greatest recorded epic known to man. "The Mahabharata" is the very Book of Life: in its variety, majesty and, also, in its violence and tragedy. It has been said that nothing exists that cannot be found within the pages of this awesome legend. The epic describes a great war of some 5000 years ago, and the events that led to it. The war on Kurukshetra sees ten million warriors slain, brings the age of godly kings to an end, and ushers in a new and sinister age: this present kali yuga.

 What is Kali-yuga?

Sometime around 3102 B.C. the planets entered the age of iron. Known in the ancient Vedas as Kali-yuga, this would be a dark night of the soul. The march of time would see the rise and fall of civilizations and a final descent into barbarism. Will we see fulfilment of the prophecies of Vyasa for Kali-yuga? Only a close reading of the epic will reveal its inner truths.

The Bhāgavad-Gītā

The inner mystery of India's Great Epic is found in the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God. Between two armies, Krishna expounds the eternal dharma to his warrior of light, Arjuna. At one level, all the restless action of the Mahabharata is a quest for the Gita and its sacred stillness. After the carnage, it is the Gita that survives, immortal lotus floating upon the dark waters of desolation: the final secret! With its magnificent cast of characters, human, demonic, and divine, and its riveting narrative, the Mahabharata continues to enchant readers and scholars the world over. This new rendering brings the epic to the contemporary reader in sparkling modern prose. It brings alive all the excitement, magic, and grandeur of the original - for our times.

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Infinite Regression: Mahabharata and the Matryoshka

The Infinite Mahabharata

a talk by Michael Dolan, B.V. Mahayogi

Here's a partial transcript of today's Video Tutorial. You can read while you watch the video.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Vyasa is the author of Mahabharata. He is the greatest story-teller ever.

And Vyāsa tells us the greatest story ever told. The literature of the Western world including the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare are eclipsed by the Mahābhārata. 

At 100,000 Sanskrit verses it is longer than those three combined. And no western literature can touch the deeper themes of the Mahābhārata which include both karma and dharma, the arrow of time and the creation of the universe, as well as ethics and the path to enlightenment. As a history Mahābhārata includes the stories of all the great kings of India since the beginning of time.

If its themes are profound, the structure of the Mahabharata is in fact infinite. It involves a number of different frame stories; so many in fact that the reader becomes lost in a kind of alternate universe in space and time. Arjuna found that a day with the gods may last 10 years of time on earth, thus discovering relativity a thousand years before Einstein.

And reading the Mahābhārata we discover ourselves as time travelers as well. And travel in time is possible not only physically, but metaphysically--as we find ourselves unravelling the past lives and karma of so many of the characters. The work contains so many digressions and frame stories used to illustrate its greater themes that we find ourselves wandering through a hall of mirrors whose images reveal the vertiginous phenomenon of infinite regression.

The literary techniques pioneered by Vyāsa later permeate such oriental narratives as the 1,001 Nights of Scheherazade which employs a number of frame stories in an almost infinite regression. We all know the story of the virgin girl who entertains a sadistic and murderous king with her tales of adventure. The thousand nights contain a number of “frame” stories or “stories within a story.” But why a thousand and one?

Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that the "One" night in the title refers to the night on which, exhausted, Scheherazade can't think of another story to tell. She has entertained the king for a thousand nights with her stories. But she will be raped and murdered the moment she runs out of tales.

On the 1001st night, she begins again. She tells the king her own story: "Once upon a time, there was a girl named Scheherazade," and when she comes to the part where she is asked to entertain the king, she begins again with the first story. She discovers the infinite story within a story.

Scheherezade creates a Möbius strip of tales, an endless loop where every thousand nights, she recapitulates her own story. Borges called the 1001 nights a labyrinth of labyrinths, a circular novel of endless concantenations, an infinite and circular story, "un cuento circular y infinito."

.With his use of frame stories, Vyāsa’s Mahabharata anticipates the 1001 Nights by over a thousand years. While long at 100,00 verses, the Mahabharata is not an infinite. But the text doubles back on itself like a Möbius strip through its different versions. There is the original version of Vyāsa, called “Jaya,” an Ur-text of some 5000 verses. This has been edited by Vaishampayana who gives a more expanded version at the snake sacrifice of Janemejaya, a descendant of the Pandavas who is determined to destroy all serpents in revenge for the death of his father, the grandson of Arjuna who was the grandson of Vyāsa.

Vaishampayana’s version is repeated by Suta or Sauti or Suta Goswami before the assembly of sages at the forest of Naimisharanya after the dawn of the Kali age. And Vyāsa returns to edit Suta’s version and give us a final version. So Vyāsa gives the final version of the tale told by Suta who learned from Vaishampayana who learned from Vyāsa. The Mahābhārata shows a Borgian espejismo, or "infinite and circular regression," in far more subtle ways, not only through space and time, but through its description of karma.

If the Mahābhārata story folds into itself in infinite regression, it teaches an understanding of karma through its very form. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” says Newton. Searching out the original cause of all action involves a different form of infinite regression, one that looks at karmic cause and effect.

Karma, the endless cycle of action and reaction, of psychic cause and effect is one of the great themes of the Mahabharat. Vyāsa’s genius demonstrates that any one human story is a story of infinite regression. We all live a tangled series of lives. Each life has a certain dependence on the actions and reactions of our former life. And even as we live off the reactions of our past life, we create new karma for our next life.

Karma is not infinite in an absolute sense. The soul is eternal and will one day escape the circle of birth and death. But karma binds us in that circle, the Möbius strip of action and reaction. The sisyphean task of birth, death, and rebirth is not eternal, but it is endless as long as we refuse to seek out immortal life.

Vyāsa’s shows his genius as a story-teller dealing with the problem of karma. A hero, cursed in a former life, struggles through the karmic reaction in this finding a happy ending only in the next. A villain, blessed with good karma from his last life, squanders his chances and is reborn in misery. Vyāsa’s time frame goes beyond a single life and may include multiple incarnations. His exploration of karma reflects the wheel of birth and death itself. Heroes become villains, friends become foes, and foes become friends.

Vyāsa teaches that to ferret out why we are in a particular situation according to our karma is subtle: it involves the action and reaction of our past life. Salvation will be found when we halt the cycle of repeated birth and death and find harmony in yoga.

As the narrative found in the Mahabharata often contemplates the actions and reactions that take place over a number of past lives its scope in time and is infinite. This Vyāsa’s achievement much more ambitious than any other epic.

One of the principal characters, Bhishma, for example has taken his birth as the result of a curse; he's being punished for having stolen the mystic cow of the sage Vasistha. And so, often before we can proceed in the action of the story, we pause to contemplate the back story and past lives of the characters and heros. just as we think we know a particular individual in the story we discover the past life of that character. The whole effect is that of a Russian doll, a Matryoshka. We open a larger doll only to find a smaller doll within, one that contains a still smaller doll. It is as if we are sitting in a barber's chair looking at the mirror before us and seeing the mirror behind us as the mirrors revealed an infinite number of selves. The effect of infinite regression allows us to contemplate our place in the universe as an individual soul passing through a myriad number of incarnations.

The temporal planes found in Mahabharata easily eclipse the Bible, Homer, or 1001 Nights; not only is there a cast of thousands of characters, but our understanding of their past and former lives is endless in scope.

The study of Mahābharata began before the birth of Alexander the Great and continues today. It is not the story of a thousand or even a million and one nights, but the perpetual story of karmic incarnation and reincarnation, billions of days and nights long.

And even when the narrative of the Mahābharata does not venture into the past lives of the protagonists in the battle of Kurukshetra, the constant digression into the ancient dynasty of King Bharata continues the effect of infinite regression.

Besides being a great story-teller, Vyāsa is also India’s greatest prophet. In his prophesies, Vyasa foresees the decline of human civilization throughout the Iron Age of Kali Yuga. He saw the emergence of whole civilizations based on greed and exploitation. He knew that coming wars would create much more horrific bloodshed than Kurukshetra and predicted the coming of the atomic age.