1.
THE river and its waves are one
surf: where is the difference between the river and its waves?
When the wave rises, it is the water; and when it falls, it is the same water again. Tell me, Sir, where is the distinction?
Because it has been named as wave, shall it no longer be considered as water?

Within the Supreme Brahma, the worlds are being told like beads:
Look upon that rosary with the eyes of wisdom.
 

2.
WHERE Spring, the lord of the seasons, reigneth, there the Unstruck Music sounds of itself,
There the streams of light flow in all directions;
Few are the men who can cross to that shore!
There, where millions of Krishnas stand with hands folded,
Where millions of Vishnus bow their heads,
Where millions of Brahmâs are reading the Vedas,
Where millions of Shivas are lost in contemplation,
Where millions of Indras dwell in the sky,
Where the demi-gods and the munis are unnumbered,
Where millions of Saraswatis, Goddess of Music, play on the vina--{p. 59}
There is my Lord self-revealed: and the scent of sandal and flowers dwells in those deeps.

3.
ALL things are created by the Om;
The love-form is His body.
He is without form, without quality, without decay:
Seek thou union with Him! {p.75}
But that formless God takes a thousand forms in the eyes of His creatures:
He is pure and indestructible,
His form is infinite and fathomless,
He dances in rapture, and waves of form arise from His dance.
The body and the mind cannot contain themselves, when they are touched by His great joy.
He is immersed in all consciousness, all joys, and all sorrows;
He has no beginning and no end;
He holds all within His bliss.
 
 

1. No one author sat down with a laptop to write this work. The writer, if there was one, is named, Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, but his scribe's name is Ganesha, a half-man, half-elephant god, who is the god of writers, the nicest god ever invented.

2. Don't be frightened with the narrator within narrator within narrator chinese box effect.

3. For a start, why don't you guys just read the first three or four pages several times? Then start
an informal dialogue. (I can arrange to be non-critical. You may say anything on the BB! Be free!)

4. Also take a look at the scribe's picture and read a little bit about him.  Ganesha Picture.

5. It may be useful to remember this detail about the origins of this epic: There are two key types of literatures in the classical India of the Mahabharata. The elite literature of philosophy (vedas, upanishads) and the lower class literature of oral narratives often narrated by servants (suta's literature), and the Mahabharata started out as suta's stories and eventually came to encompass the entire range of Indian philosophical experience, slowly being passed on from the servant class to the master class.

6. The Mahabharata is the story of a family, and what happens to it, as it is ruled by a blind father and a morally meddlesome patriarch.

7. Don't be intimidated by the difficult names. Try to visually recongize the names. Also check out the glossary in the hypertext mahabharata.

8. Frequently visit hypertext Mahabharata and get the basic story right and make an introductory posting soon (not the summary, yet), commenting on your understanding and the various difficulities, joys, discoveries, etc. Can you do this before we start the regular summary and follow-up?
 
 

AUM!

Many of you asked about the meaning of the Ganesha image...

I want to say that every image of God we see in the Mahabharata and every element of the strange iconography of the Hindu pantheon, one way or other, indicate a peculiar human striving to understand the great mystery.

Think of each of these artisitc elements in the Ganesha image (four hands, human torso, elephant body, etc) as a complex language the early Indian culture used to understand the grandeur of God's presence in the world. A four-handed god is a statement about the power of this god as human mind imagined it. The fact that Ganesha travels around mounted on a little mouse is also statement. Ganesha's younger brother Subramanian is a wonderful boy god, but he is a jet-setter; he flies around on his peacock, where as Ganesha can't go too far because he is traveling on a mouse. If you study Ganesha's four hands, you will see
a manuscript in one hand, a ball of rice, an axe, and a noose, in the other hands. So we can safely assume that Ganesha is the god of writers, of knowledge, of thinking, and of understanding, that Ganesha enjoys food (he is also the god of food-lovers which makes him my favorite god) indicating his love for the wonder of existence in this world (Is there anything better in this world? I would say even sex is only a distant second. Money is just a weak element of food.) Most people in India worship Ganesha because he has the axe which he uses to cut through the noose, the trap, the trappings of maya. He gets people out of trouble. Ironically, if you don't please him, he'll also put a trap on you; put you into great difficulties. So he is not black or white god. He is a funny god. He is also smart as a whip. Remember the little story at the beginning of Mahabharata where Ganesha and the author of Mahabharata negotiate the dictation.  Just think of his answers to Vyasa, who also tricks him into becoming a scribe.

His brother Subramanya is a serious god. (He could very well be a Western god.) I want to tell you a little anecdote about the two and their parents. If you don't know their parents, it would be hard to truly grasp Mahabharata. So let me tell you how the divine configuration works.

Ganesha's father Shiva is part of the Hindu trinity.

1.    Brahama (the creator of reality)

2.    Vishnu (the sustainer of reality) He is also called Narayana. Narayana has a special     bond with humanity. Whenever truth is violated on earth he comes to the earth as an avtar and corrects the problem. The Mahabhata is also a story about Narayana's avatar as Lord Krishna.  The Kuru family feud in that sense is a metaphor for an enormous violation of truth.
(ALI ASHWORTH asked, who is Narayana? If any of you can help, I would appreciate it!)
 

3.    Shiva (the god who dissolves the reality so that Brahama could refresh reality)

The three gods above are essentially one divine essence, and that essence is the stuff that makes all of this world and the other worlds and anything and everything. So the basic Hindu belief is that THERE IS NOTHING BUT GOD. Please think about the significance of a statement like that. There is nothing but God.

The powers and attributes of all the three supreme gods above could be desribed with words like Reality, Truth, Brahman.

See, there are thousands of gods and demi-gods and divine-humans. Why not?
IF THERE IS NOTHING BUT GOD, WHAT IS WRONG IN IMAGINING GOD IS SO MANY WAYS?

Let's come back to the anecdote about Ganesha and his brother and their parents, Lord Shiva and his consort, Parvati:

Somewhere Lord Shiva and Parvathi found a fruit, and right away the children wanted the same fruit. Sure, they could have cut it into two and given one half to Ganesha and the other half to Subramanya.

Instead, Shiva and Parvathi decided upon a contest between the two boy gods.

They promised to give the Fruit to the first kid who circumambulated the universe.

The instant he heard of the contest-rules, the exuberent Subramanya took off on his divine peacock. A long journey indeed.

Anxious to cover the earth, the skies, the heavens and the netherworld,  he traversed the vast expanses of the universe, before his brother ever got to starting his journey.

But Ganesha, a bit lazy most of the times, Ganesha whose vehicle is only a little mouse, nonchalantly walked around his parents, and claimed he'd won the contest.

Ganesha asked for the Fruit.

      "Why?  You haven't even started your journey?"
      "What? I've actually completed my journey around my universe. Mom and Dad, you are my universe," Ganesha replied.

The parents were astonished. Why be astonished?  If his universe were to be at the feet of his parents, why not give him the fruit?

It took Ganesha only a few moments to go around his universe. And with the trip, he won the Fruit, whereas for years and years his practical minded brother flew around in his business jet and came home only to hear his elephant half-brother's hiccup.

So what is the meaning of this story? I would like to hear your responses.

In any case, all I wanted to say in response to your initial postings is that we must be able to see the image of Ganesha as a language.

If we shed our Judeo-Christian and Islamic fear of idolatory (indeed any image of God must make a human being nervous), if we try to understand the language of the sculpture and art underlying the iamge of Ganesha, then we can unlock the mystery of the Mahabharata, only a little bit at a time.
 

6/5/99

MAHABHARATA questions for follow up comments:

Before you start your posting on the Bhagavat Gita, please look around on the websites I have linked above. If the Mahabharata is taken in the same spirit as the Old Testament, the Gita is considered with the same seriousness with which people speak of the Gospels. Even non-religious people consider the Gita to be the best summation of the non-Western philosophy of vedanta or advaita (not two), which is essentailly about recognizing our being "not two" from Brahman, the supreme power.

Of course, most of us are born into this world thinking that we are important, intelligent, handsome, rich, kind, white, black, male, female, poor, Western, Asian, "better", "civilized", etc, but all such thoughts are just misunderstandings of who we really are. All of Mahabharata is about that colossal misundertanding, and in the Bhagavat Gita, the one without that misunderstanding (such a person is called "guru"--I know we use the word very very lightly in our time) tells Arjuna (who actually fainted seeing the complexity of the illusory world) that you need to learn some things. The basic counsel is to Arjuna is to attain "Yoga" (don't think of it as a mere excercise technique), a unitive understanding of the illusory nature of the reality of our existence here in the world. Krishna tells him not to think that there is "two." You might remember several really frustrating moments in the Mahabharata when
Krishna seems to indicate that he knew Arjuna sometime, somewhere, somehow....
 

As you read the Gita verses, please think of the moment these verses are placed in the Mahabharata.

In our textbook, we hear Sanjaya mention the Lord's song. You have the advantage of reading several extracts from the Lord's song.

In this follow-up posting for tonight, (tomorrow morning the latest), comment on your insights and questions and reflections on the connections between the Mahabharata and the Bhagavat Gita.

This posting is not your main posting on the Gita due on June 5, but your final follow-up posting on the Mahabharata.

Since you did two summaries, a second follow-up posting is not necessary for Mahabharata.
 
 
 

Focus on six of the most important characters when you make your second 200 word summary: What roles do these characters play in the great battle at Kuruskshetra? Who survives? Who perishes? Who kills whom? Why? How? What is this all about? That we ought to fight our battles? Or that we shouldn't?
 

1. Bhishma--patriarch whose meddling "in this world" causes so much unrest
2. Yudhistira--the good-hearted, naive, eldest prince, uncompromising on dharma
3. Arjuna--the most practical of the 5; if he were the oldest, the story would've been different
4. Draupadi--fated to be married to 5 brave men who can't protect one woman
5. Karna-- a brother to the Pandavas, the great aggrieved warrior who does all wrong
6. Krishna--God's avatar, working as a driver for Arjuna

1. The birth of Bhishma and his role in the shaping of the dynasty
2. The youth and education of the Pandava and Kaurava princes and the circumstances leading to the family feud.
3. Duryodhana's attempt to kill the Pandavas in the forest by setting fire to their house
4. Winners and losers in the game of dice. Why can't the Pandavas refuse to play the game?
5. The forest refuge and the thirteen year exile
6. Krishna's role in the battle? What does Arjuna really learn from the cousel of his charioteer?
7. Aswathama's massacre of the Pandavas
8. The deaths of Karna, Duryodhana, Bhishma
9. The family reunion after the war in the presence of the blind king, Dhritarastra.
10. Yudhistira's dream of his father Dharma and the events leading to his coronation.

Our next reading, The Bhagavat Gita (read all the sections in the Masterpieces of the Orient, pp.156-68) is a brief poem within the Mahabharata, clearly added on in later centuries. Read the Gita in the context of this epic, and consider the epic battlefield as a metaphor for our lives here and now, a  metaphor for the grand illusion of living and dying.
 

Robert Fitch pointed out this in his posting: That Bharata is a mine of gems like the deep Ocean.
Whoever hears it, and understands even a small bit of it, escapes the chains he has forged by deeds of good or evil; he finds success, for Mahabharata is excellent, and holds the power of victory!"(5)

Also I wanted to say that every element of Ganesha iconography has a meaning.

The image is telling the devotees something. What?

What could be the meaning of the little mouse upon which the fat and ugly gluttonous god made of Parvati's dirt travels? (I made this a difficult sentence, didn't I?)
What could be the meaning of the long, long elephant nose? The big ears. The broken tusk?

Here is Carrie's comment:

The first thing that really caught my attention (besides a man being born from a drop off his mother, and then getting his head cut off by his father, having it replaced by an elephant's head, and telling about it) was the reference to reincarnation.

Carrie Williams and Shelley Green, I want to use your reference to the birth of the Kuru grandpa Bhisma as the starting point of another important discussion: The highlighted passages are crucial to the meaning of Mahabharata.

On p 10, it says "Mahabhisha began to perspire and this never happens in heaven  until one is ready to be reborn." It then goes on to state "The beautiful Ganga wishfully followed his soul with her heavenly eyes as it fell back to Earth and entered the womb of Pratipa's Queen." I thought this was a beautiful sentiment. That entire story about the goddess being in love with  Santanu really was nice.

The second thing that struck me was that Santanu wanted to remarry and his son wished him happiness. I was really moved by what Santanu said to Bhishma: "Death will never come to you, so long as you wish to live. He will dare to approach you only when you have given him permission." I think this can be said about all of us. We don't die until we have reconciled with the fact that we are dying...at least that's what I believe. Maybe I should practice this religion.

Have you checked out this character, Bhisma?  The circumstance of his birth. His father's love for the goddess Ganga? Her love for him even before he was born? The strange promise of killing all the children as a condition for their marriage?

The child's life is spared, and he grows up to become Bhisma, the austere, brave, self-sacrificing prince, who renounces the throne for his father's happiness.
 

In exchange for his great sacrifices, he gets the highest boon:

"Death will never come to you, so long as you wish to live. He will dare to approach you only when you have given him permission."
 

As long as he wishes to live death won't even come near him!

Bhisma will die only when he has given permission to death!

If you re-read p.11, you will see that Bhisma was one of the vasus, a demi-god, who was cursed to be born into the midst of human life. It was to escape this fate that they cut a deal with Ganga to have them killed right at birth. Only Bhisma is spared because Santanu pitied the drowned sons. So here is a man who is cursed to live.

Yet, what are his powers? He can die at will. Yes. He can escape it all. All it would take is a willful thought. Yet, he lives and lives and lives.

We could say that the basic Hindu philosophy is all about getting out of life, but Bhisma, the one who could get out of his life at will, any time, of all people, it is the same Bhisma, the same self-sacrificing ex-god gets too involved in the world. He meddles with everyone's life, even private lives of the people he "helped."
 

Not only that he lives tooooooooo long, he gets into other people's business. He is involved in life too much. Way too much.

In some ways, Mahabharata is about how messy it could get if you get involved in life too much. In some ways, it is about all that we talked about in our discussion about Western Values. Getting too involved in this world, climbing mountains, building great towers, technology, hardware, software, making money, fighting wars.....In some ways, it is about the futility of our grand undertakings.

In some ways, it is about the dizzying, virtiginous experience of getting carried away by it all, and I do not know of any other character in Mahabharata who is so fundamentally responsible for the horror of the battle of Kurushetra as Bhisma, who is the only one who could pull the plug, at will, who was not even meant to be here, for all the other cursed vaus died right at birth and escape the mahamaya, the grand illusion of this world. But, alas, Bhishma endures so much pain throughout the battle, for he chooses a bed formed by arrows shot on his back instead of instant death, for the poor chap like all of us can't call it quits, the one who didn't even want to be born!

Everything I have said above has been said to make another statement about the underlying philosophy at the heart of the Mahabharata and of the entire Indian, perhaps, even the Asian, non-Western tradition:

this world is something you ought to approach carefully;

this world is something you ought to avoid if you can;

if you are caught in the web of birth, you live the right life so that you don't get caught
again and come back into life;

sure, go can away into the forest, escape into Paradise, for this world ultimately won't give you happiness or a lasting sense of fulfillment. You can argue about it all you want, but the fact will remain that this world is a bit too much if you think about it. For Christians and
other religious traditions (by the I am an Indian Catholic; Christianity has been in India right from the beginning of Christiany. My name Thomas comes from Apostle Thomas, known as the Apostle of the Indies)

Shelley, it is quite significant that you picked up on the leit motif of seclusion into the forest

You wrote: The second chapter was my favorite. I noticed by the time I reached the second chapter that the  idea of living in seclusion in the forest was common. Hmmm...

You wrote: I think the most interesting goddess I found so far is Ganga. I liked how she fell in love with Mahabhisha who was reborn as Santanu and waited for him to be old enough to marry.
I liked also how she helped the others that were reborn by killing them as babies. I didn't feel like it was wrong at all - I felt that she was doing them a huge favor....SHELLEY GREEN, you did it.
If we miss the point that instant return to heaven upon rebirth is a huge favor, then the rest of the Mahabharata could be rather puzzling, and even pointless or without morals.

The moral of the story has nothing to do with the outcome of the battle.

Jennifer Goldberg comments also indicate the radical difference in the world view emerging in this epic:

I find quite interesting the personification of landscape and the role of animals in the text. This shows how integral the surrounding world is to Indian culture. I am always disappointed with Christianity's
over-the-top emphasis on humans as the center of the world. Reading the Mahabharata is refreshing in this respect.

Jennifer, your comments on the concept of dharma is very important. Please, everybody, focus on this word dharma.

This is how Jennifer describes dharma:  I don't pretend to quite understand it yet, but I do recognize that dharma differs according to one's station in life. I like that. This system takes into account individual differences and prescribes rules according to those differences. This avoids oversimplifying human interaction (and social status). Everyone must abide by his/her moral system, but his/her moral system isn't the same as everyone else's. Inspiring.

I would like to see the whole class pursue your own definition of the word dharma as you progress with this epic, which is about dharma.

There are several connotations:
dharma=individual's personal duty in this world, cosmic duty, justice, responsibility, religion, truth,etc.

What is the meaning dharma according to your understanding of the story?

If there is a hero in this epic, that is eldest of the Pandava brothers, the heir to the Kuru throne,
and his name is Dharmaputra, the son of dharma. Also called Yudhistira. The god of Dharma

Josh Urban mentions a parallel to David and Goliath?  Mabye not, but it was interesting to read of their battle.

What is your take on Bhima (don't confuse him with his grandfather Bhisma) and the second of the five Pandava brothers? He is a big fellow. Simple. Not very intelligent. He is actually the cook of the family, too. He is also the one who thinks his dharma is to take on the bullies.

Dawn Stage mentioned some confusion:

I was a little confused with the 100 kid thing however, I thought that Gandhari had not actually been pregnant with 100 children but that they were made in a jar. Can this be explained a little better.

What confusion? That they are the first test-tube babies? That they came as one mass of unpersonalized evil, cut and shaped into human beings by the poet Vyasa himself? If the poet said he did all this to his characters, then we all know these are merely literary techniques.

I think the gods intervention of their favorite child (Everybody, please name the characters in your postings so that we build a more specific series of discussions) brings upon the constant challenge of the book.

Are you talking about Dhuryodhana the eldest of the 100 princes?

Dawn Stage also said this about Bhisma:

I think the gods intervention of their favorite child brings upon the constant challenge of the book. I too was impressed with the child's wish that his father be happy and able to marry the girl that he wanted. I was impressed with his ability to sacrifice his happiness for someone else.

Think of the larger context and the consequences of his sacrifices, his insistence on having his way, his unswerving righteousness which causes problems for others, especially important is the fanaticism
about his actions in this world, given the fact that he didn't even want to come into this world in the first place.
 

Candy Moehn asks: Did the Forrest symbolize refuge, renewed strength or a safe place to call upon the Gods? I would also like to know about the role of "butter"; it was used differently
throughout the story. The hundred bronze jars were filled with clear butter, ball of flesh divided yielding 100 sons and 1 daughter.

Your Butter questions are interesting.

Imagine this story is about 2500 years old. Butter made from milk curd was the most important fuel they had. An all-purpose fuel, source of energy for the cowherding tribes they were. Don't think of the butter here as the salted butter cubes. Butter here means clarified milk-fat which is used to create sacrificial fire.  They used butter to make the flammable house in which the Kauravas expected to trap and burn their Pandava cousins so that they wouldn't inherit the kingdom.

"Time leaves nothing true forever". That is a statement that all of us really can think about, said CANDY MOEHN.

Yes, excellent. I'd love to see you all post your favorite quotes like this.

What I like the most about this reading thus far is the "oneness." Everything matters. Everything has an impact on everthing else... the circle of life, wrote MICHELLE MARTIN.

does the passage describing how the milk-sea turned to salt water suggest creation? And the desire for amrita, the nectar of immortality, also suggests elements of Gigamesh?

Remember that, it is Narayana who decided to churn the milk-ocean. Even the asuras (demons)
took part in the churning, which indeed is a creation story. So it seems that section is very important, especially because of what it says: the world is caused by the churning of gods and demons, good and evil, that it is better not to be in it at all....?

I am also having trouble distinguishing between gods and mortals. I see
a list will be necessary.

a list of all Indian gods, mortal gods and immortal gods?

Are you kidding? Can make a list of all the grains of sand?

ALI ASHWORTH SAID thus in her wonderful posting:

The beginning still has me a bit confused. I don’t think I’m even 100% sure who is telling the story, who has heard it, etc

Let me help you out:  In some ways, it may be even better not to worry about who is telling the story because the dizzying, labyrinthian sense about the story which is purely in my view a sense about the nature of the terrible bewilderment of this worldly experience.

We could say the whole story is narrated by Sauti, (Remember my comments about Mahabharata's origins as a literature of sutas, the servant class).

Sauti says, he heard the story narrated by the poet Vyasa himself, written down by Ganesha, the god of writers; Sauti tells the story of how Ganesha came to be born and how Vyasa convinced him to be his scribe. Sauti tells this story not in his voice, but in the voice of Ganesha himself.

Sauti early on says he heard the story at the palace of Janemejaya, who was offering a snake-sacrifice becase his father Parikshita was killed by the snake-god Naga. We are given a hint about Parikshita's father--he is Dharmaputra alias Yudhistira, the hero of Mahabharata, who becomes the Kuru King at the end of the triumphant battle, but soon he went away into the forest, leaving little Parikshita to rule the kingdom which he rules for 60 years, at the end of which this unfortunate incident (he wounded a snake) took place that eventually caused his death at the hands of the snake god, which makes it his son Janemajaya's duty to avenge his father's death. It is at this sacrifice to lure the snake god into the sacrificial fire that Sauti listens to the Mahabharata story.

Sauti had heard about the Janemejaya's upcoming snake sacrifice and had gone there to check it out.

Sauti is a poor wandering ministrel, who is looking for some food and hospitality and an opportunity to perform a story, not to mention hear other stories.
 

Sauti tells the story that even at this snake-sacrifice, the gods intervened and in effect re-restablished an amicable balance between the natural world of the serpents and that of men..Sure, this happy moment calls for story telling and boasting about one's ancestors. That is the occasion of the story of Mahabharata.

The writer Vyasa himself appears and congratulates Janemajaya. Remember Vyasa is at least 150 years old, and he has seen so much. He knows much, too. He is actually the stud--the poet creates all his characters--who fathered Janemejaya's great-grandfather Pandu, his brothers Dhritarashtra and Vidura, whose children Pandavas (5)  and Kauravas (100) fought the great battle of Kurukshetra, at the end of which Yudhishtira became the king, whose son Parikshit died of a snakebite, and it is Parishit's son Janemejaya who is now getting ready to ask Vyasa for the stories of old times.

You see, how it is all put together?

Again, old old Vyasa can't tell all of it, so his assistant Vaisampayana who learned the stories from Vyasa is going to tell the story, which the wandering story teller Sauti hears soon after the snake sacrifice has been concluded rather amicably.

Even Vyasa only listens to this story that he himself has created in his mind from his experience and dictated to Ganesha, and taught to Vaisampayana in his later years.

And Sauti tells Saunaka in Naimisha forest that the first story he heard from Vaisampayana while he sat in the company of Vyasa and the King Janemejaya was the story of the king's great-great grandfather Bhisma, who started it all. He created so much action in this world. So much, whereas he didn't even want to come into the world, and he could have gotten out of this world at any given moment, too, but the grand illusions of the world kept him going, urging newer battles, newer actions.

Get it?