Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata

Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata: Encyclopedia II - Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata

Background - The story has its beginning at the time of King Shantanu, three generations before Krishna and Arjuna. King Shantanu’s first wife was named Ganga, who conceived 8 sons. The first seven sons were immersed in the sacred waters of the Ganges by their mother Ganga, immediately after birth. King Shantanu pleaded for his eighth son and Ganga conceded and allowed him to live, but she in turn immersed herself into the Ganges. This son was named Bhishma. After some time, Shantanu took a second queen named Satyavati, and t ...

"[The Mahabharata] is...probably the longest single poem in the world's literature. Traditionally the author of the poem was the sage Vyasa, who is said to have taught it to his pupil Vaisampayana. The latter, according to tradition, recited it in public for the first time at a great sacrifice held by King Janamejaya, the great grandson of Arjuna, one of the heroes of the story. ...the poem tells of the great civil war in the kingdom of the Kurus, in the region about the modern Delhi, then known as Kuruksetra."

-- A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 407

"The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of a whole people. ...The whole poem has been built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and complex idea from chanber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and sculptures and inscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or semi-divine proportions, a humanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to super-humanity and yet always true to the human motive and idea and feeling, the strain of the real constantly raised by the tones of the ideal, the life of this world amply portrayed but subjected to the conscious influence and presence of the powers of the worlds behind it, and the whole unified by the long embodied procession of a consistent idea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story."

"The leading motive is the Indian idea of the Dharma. Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between the godheads of truth and light and unity and the powers of darkness and division and falsehood is brought out from the spiritual and religious and internal into the outer intellectual, ethical and vital plane. It takes there in the figure of the story a double form of a personal and a political struggle, the personal a conflict between typical and representative personalities embodying the greater ethical ideals of the Indian Dharma and others who are embodiments of Asuric egoism and self-will and misuse of the Dharma, the political a battle in which the personal struggle culminates, an international clash ending in the establishment of a new rule of righteiousness and justice, a kingdom or rather an empire of the Dharma uniting warring races and substituting for the ambitious arrogance of kings and aristocratic clans the supremacy, the calm and peace of a just and humane empire. It is the old struggle of Deva and Asura, God and Titan, but represented in the terms of human life."

-- Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL Vol.14 pp. 287-88

(See also: Mahabharata, Hinduism, Vedic Scriptures, Yoga, Body Mind and Soul)

Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata: Vedic Hindu Scriptures Dictionary on Ramayana

Ramayana

"The most ancient Sanskrit epic poem, written by the sage Valmiki. It is estimated to have been composed about 500 B.C., and contains approximately 50,000 lines. The Ramayana describes the life of Sri Rama: his banishment from Ayodhya; life in the forest with his faithful wife Sita; Sita's abduction by Ravana; the war of Rama and his allies against Ravana; defeat of Ravana and rescue of Sita; Rama's return to Ayodhya as ruler; slander of Sita by the people of Ayodhya and her banishment from the kingdom; her subsequent exoneration and final ascent to heaven, where she is joined by Rama."

-- Ramakrishna-Vedanta Wordbook

"The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem in spite of much accretion is evidently by a single hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time there is a like vastness of vision, an even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail.

...The eopic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa, an ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it in with detail from myth and folklore, but has exalted all into a scale of grandiose epic figure that it may bear more worthily the high intention and significance. The subject is the same as in the Mahabharata,, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa. All shade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single urity of the idea, the representative force in the outline of the figures, the significance of the temperamental colour and only so much admitte as is sufficient to humanise the appeal and the significance.

The poet makes us conscious of the immense forces that are behind our life and sets his action in a magnificent epic scenery, the great imperial city, the mountains and ocean, the forest and wilderness, described with such a largeness as to make us feel as if the whole world were the scene of his poem and its subject the whole divine and titanic possibility of man imaged in a few great or monstrous figures. The ethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves into a harmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of self-expression. The Ramayana embodied for the Indian imagination its highest and tenderest human ideals of character, made strength and courage and gentleness and purity and fidelity and self-sacrifice familiar to it in the suavest and most harmonious forms..."

-- Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture,

SABCL Vol 14 pp. 289-90

(See also: Ramayana, Hinduism, Vedic Scriptures, Yoga, Body Mind and Soul)

Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Patala

Patala (Sanskrit) [possibly from the verbal root pat to sink, fly down or alight]

Nethermost, farthest underneath; the reference being not so much to locality or position in space, as to quality -- grossness, heaviness, or material substance. The seventh, lowest, and most material tala. It is used in Hindu literature to signify the hells, underworlds, or infernal regions, or the antipodes or Myalba. The corresponding loka or pole is bhurloka. "Meru -- the abode of the gods -- was placed . . . in the North Pole, while Patala, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Patala have one significance and represent localities; while astronomically, they have another, and mean 'the two poles,' which meaning ended by their being often rendered in exoteric sectarianism -- the 'Mountain' and the 'Pit,' or Heaven or Hell" (SD 2:357).

Patala, from one aspect, corresponds to the lower hierarchies of the Gandha, elementals ruling the sense and organ of smell. This lowest tala is the sphere of irrational beings, including animals, having little or no sense or feeling save that of self-preservation and the gratification of the senses -- attributes of materiality which might include a vast number of the human species. Patala is also the sphere of intensely human as contrasted with human-spiritual beings, and is likewise the abode of the animal dugpas, elementals of animals, and multitudes of nature spirits, all belonging to the bipolar planes of bhurloka-patala.

In Atlantean times, America was the patala or antipodes of Jambu-dvipa, geographically. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna as Krishna's chela is said to have descended into Patala, the antipodes, and there married Ulupi, the daughter of the King of the Nagas or initiates.

The Hindu rishi Narada, representing one of the most recondite and still living spiritual influences on earth, is said to have descended in bygone times into the regions of Patala, and to have been delighted with what he found there. On his return to the celestial regions, he gave to the gods a glowing account of the beauties of the hells, stating that they abounded in everything ministering to luxury and sensuous delight. For precisely these reasons, Patala as the lowest of the talas, has been called the infernal regions or hell. To beings evolving in the spheres of matter, these spheres are extremely pleasant despite the pain and suffering that invariably accompany sojourn in all astral spheres, which the talas are. What the evolving entities lose in spiritual power, intellectual bliss, and higher faculty, is compensated for by the attachments and bonds of a sensuous character, tying them temporarily to these realms.

Mahabharata - The Significance of Mahabharata: Encyclopedia II - Mahabharata - Symbolism of Mahabharata

The Mahabharata symbolizes the Creation of the Universe, and the Creation of Man from Spirit or the Supreme Consciousness, into Matter. The discourse in the Gita is the process by which one could reverse this descent. In other words, it details the steps by which man can reascend from his limited consciousness as a mortal being, back to the immortal consciousness of his true Self, merging with the Infinite (Spirit), from whence he came. SHANTANU He is representative of God, the Para-Brahman, and the father of all creatio ...

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