Great Bharata, Volume I, page 1
PREFACE
Imagine a global catastrophe. Choose your scenario — nuclear Armageddon, climate cataclysm, or perhaps the second coming of a huge asteroid, like the one that devastated Earth 66 million years ago, abolishing dinosaurs and reinventing our planet.
In our imaginary scenario, miraculously, humanity survives but cannot regenerate our lost civilization in its technically advanced form. Before our scientific and industrial revolutions, humans lived for many thousands of years on this planet in a comparatively simple, basic state. Now, once again, thousands of years pass, but another scientific revolution does not occur.
In that distant future, some of our own books survive. These texts describe the high-tech wonders, the medical miracles, of our present age. But in the distant future, humans living a rudimentary life have no analogues to our technology. So, they do not believe our books and their claims — that one just points and clicks and hills explode, rockets roar into space. One moves a cursor and the blind can see, the lame can walk. For the simple future people who cannot recover or reinvent our world, a true description of our world is mere primitive mythology.
Ancient Sanskrit texts teach that something very much like this has already happened. Many thousands of years ago, a wonderfully advanced subtle science, surviving today only in its most surface remnant as physical yoga, produced a celestial civilization on our planet. Interplanetary intercourse flourished. But a catastrophic world war drained Earth’s spirit and resources. Time itself, in a cosmic form unknown to us today, consumed human virtues that sustained exalted human culture.
Long ago, the Mahā-bhārata and the Bhāgavatam, casting their gaze into the future, asserted that it is we today, with all our proud technology, who are the fallen future people. It is the ancients who built a truly advanced, but now lost, civilization. Yet these same primordial texts assure that hope exists, for they bequeathed to us histories of their fabulous world. These texts also assert that we can recover the higher consciousness of their long-lost civilization, if we can but hear their voices.
Yet because we have no experience of such an advanced world, we tend to reject their accounts and assurances as mere myth — fables and fantasies. Those ancients would tell us that their stories are true and real. But as millennia passed, history decayed into legend, legend sank into myth.
We now embark on a literary voyage that I hope will restore our vision of glorious ancestors and a more enlightened world. While we cannot expect to reconstitute that world in all its powers, we can and should endeavor to reclaim the deepest wisdom that great souls, with great compassion, gave to us in the form of sacred texts.
But how can we be sure that such a world ever existed? I address that natural doubt in the Introduction. Wise people the world over see our desperate need to restore peace and wisdom to a troubled world. Hoping to do my part, I wrote this book. Through its pages, may a forgotten world be recalled to our collective memory. That world, described in Great Bhārata, can be our shining guide.
INTRODUCTION
The words Great Bhārata translate the Sanskrit Mahā-bhārata, the title of an ancient and extraordinary text that claims to tell the immemorial history of South Asia, of the Earth, and indeed of our universe. One of the world’s largest books, the Mahā-bhārata is three times the size of the Old and New Testament combined, and seven times the combined Iliad and Odyssey. Its myriad Sanskrit verses have greatly influenced South Asia and beyond for thousands of years.
The Mahā-bhārata is often said to focus on an earthly dynastic struggle between two royal families. This depiction is true, but incomplete. In fact, the text weaves its chronicle on three distinct but interlaced levels — earthly, cosmic, and spiritual.
1. Earthly. The text does describe a dynastic struggle between the Kurus and Pāṇḍavas, two powerful royal families.
2. Cosmic. In that royal fight, Earth is merely a proxy battleground for a conflict of cosmic proportions, a true war of the worlds.
3. Spiritual. As the Bhagavad-gītā explains in the Mahā-bhārata’s Book Six, chapters 23-40, the earthly and cosmic events produced profound spiritual consequences for those involved, and for us today.
The word Bhārata derives from Bharata, a king so celebrated that the land he ruled became known as Bhārata, the land of Bharata. In its native languages, India still bears the name Bhārata.
Naturally, political boundaries have shifted since ancient times. In its original sense, Bhārata referred to South Asia and some areas beyond, and to a magnificent civilization that flourished in these and other regions of the world.
Who composed the Mahā-bhārata and when? Does it describe real historical events, or mere mythology? What does it ultimately teach?
For centuries, two distinct communities have given very different answers to these questions. One approach, which I will call secular scholarship, has grown over the last several centuries, chiefly among Western, and Western-trained, scholars.
The other, and far older, approach emerges from within the ancient Sanskrit culture itself. I will call this method devotional scholarship. It sees the text as sacred, historical, and revelatory.
Let us keep in mind that neither secular nor devotional scholarship on the Mahā-bhārata is uniform or monolithic within their respective communities. Both groups have always engaged in vigorous internal debates.
There are also significant points of agreement between secular and devotional scholars, such as the belief that the Sanskrit text of the Mahā-bhārata available to us today in various regional recensions is not a pristine, original text. I will speak more about that later.
Further, these two types of scholarship — secular and devotional — do not exhaust all the historical approaches to understanding the Mahā-bhārata. Some scholars simply strive to describe secular and devotional claims in the most neutral way possible, rather than giving critical, non-literal interpretations, or making ultimate metaphysical claims.
Yet, despite these three factors — a) internal debates among both secular and devotional scholars; b) important agreements between these two groups; and c) attempts to maintain interpretive neutrality, it is still most practical and realistic here to focus on the two primary forms of Mahā-bhārata scholarship — secular and devotional, for these are by far the two most influential approaches. They reveal the competing metaphysics of the spiritual and secular approach to the text, and perhaps to life itself.
It is important to note that here and throughout this Introduction, I use the term metaphysics (or its cognate metaphysical) as applied to the teachings of Aristotle in his treatise of that name.1 “Aristotle says that ‘everyone takes what is called wisdom (sophia) to be concerned with the primary causes (aitia) and the starting-points…(981b28), and it is these causes and principles that he proposes to study…” Similarly, Aristotle claims that he will discuss “a science that studies things…that are eternal, not subject to change, and independent of matter. Aristotle states that such a science is theology,… the “first” and “highest” science.”2
For over 1500 years, Western philosophy took the topics discussed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics to be the proper subjects of metaphysics, as they continue to be for some contemporary philosophers. Since Aristotle, the first cause or unmoved mover has often been identified with God in some form.
This Aristotelian notion of the first and most important area of philosophy closely matches the teachings of the Bhagavad-gītā,3 and we must pay close attention to Kṛṣṇa’s treatise if we are to grasp the significance of the Mahā-bhārata, the Bhāgavatam, and many other ancient Sanskrit texts.
In fact, we can grasp essential differences between secular and devotional approaches by comparing their metaphysical stances, and also their epistemologies. By this I mean the views of both groups on the kinds of things, beings, or objects that exist; and how, or to what extent, we can know those things, beings, objects.
Devotional scholars claim that there are higher beings, realms, and powers in and beyond the universe. We can know these through yoga meditation, devout study, devotion, and other means. In this view, the purpose of our lives is to attain that higher understanding. Texts such as the Mahā-bhārata aim to help us do so.
In contrast, secular scholars tend to believe that such higher beings, realms, and powers either don’t exist, or if they do, cannot be objectively verified and are thus not relevant to scholarship. One can thus most reliably and appropriately explain the stories and worlds of the Mahā-bhārata in terms of the secular sciences.
More specifically, for several centuries, Western scholars and their acolytes in other regions have repeatedly interpreted India and its culture through the West’s protean, historically shifting lenses of ontological and epistemic assumptions.
Early generations of Western Indologists often saw Indian culture through the dogmatic lens of Christian colonialism. As colonialism and Christianity fell out of academic favor in the West, materialistic ideologies rose to replace them. Blown by the winds of academic assumption, and fashion, secular scholars tried to force the Mahā-bhārata and other Sanskrit works through a host of secular prisms — Marxist, evolutionist, Freudian, historicist, logical positivist, structuralist, feminist, post-colonialist, post-modernist, and many others, mixed and matched to produce endless intellectual flavors.
A common theme of these diverse approaches was that Western-trained scholars understood best the sacred traditions and literature of South Asia. Those inside the tradition were academically impaire
In response, devotional scholars insist that despite its problematic text history, the Mahā-bhārata provides its own profound epistemic and interpretive lens, especially in its spiritual core, the celebrated Bhagavad-gītā.
To be fair, there have always been secular scholars who strive for strict neutrality, and thus assert that academics should not presume to judge the truth value of claims made by other cultures and their literature. One should rather aim for neutral description, as far as that is possible. Some Western scholars went even further, insisting that cultures and traditions are best grasped through the eyes and voices of those who live inside them.
This wide range of views led to the insider-outsider debate within the Western academy. Does the insider, the believer or practitioner, best understand a tradition? Or does the academically trained outsider best understand the ultimate truth of works like the Mahā-bhārata? That such debates go on within secular scholarship is a credit to its integrity.
Fortunately, there is a growing recognition among both secular, or outsider, scholars and devotional, insider, scholars that their different perspectives can be complementary and mutually enriching. We must also give credit to neutral scholars who seek to conscientiously track and document the views of both secular and devotional scholars, thus providing valuable information to all concerned.
I have personally learned from all three — secular, devotional, and neutral scholars. All three groups have aided me in my own work on the Mahā-bhārata. I am a devotional insider who has benefitted greatly from an excellent outsider education. Good scholarship does not pit believers and non-believers against each other in a zero-sum game. Indeed, both secular and devotional scholars have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the Mahā-bhārata, in fields such as archeology, linguistics, philology, history, political and social science, literature, philosophy and theology, and religious studies. The gifts of both groups have been legion. And if I succeed in my purpose, readers of many worldviews will enjoy the story I seek to tell in this work.
Indeed, various visions of this epic story existed even in ancient times when the events reputedly took place! We find evidence of this in another sacred ancient history that describes the same period and many of the same events — the highly revered Bhāgavata-purāṇa, also known simply as the Bhāgavatam, which at times gives a different version of events found also in the Mahā-bhārata. I have used the Bhāgavatam extensively, along with the Mahā-bhārata, in my attempt to understand this history.
The Bhāgavatam claims that when Kṛṣṇa appeared long ago as the central character of the Bhāgavatam and the Mahā-bhārata, different people had different beliefs about his ultimate identity.
For instance, “…sages experienced Kṛṣṇa as absolute spiritual bliss; those devoted to his service saw Kṛṣṇa as the highest deity; those deep in illusion saw him as an ordinary man; and in their youth, those with great piety played with the child Kṛṣṇa.”4
Similarly, “When Kṛṣṇa entered the wrestling arena with his older brother, the wrestlers saw him as a thunderbolt; men saw him as an excellent man; women saw him as Cupid incarnate; the cowherd men saw him as one of their own; wicked kings saw him as a punisher; his parents saw him as their child; the Bhoja ruler saw him as death; the unwise as a mere ruler; the yogīs as the highest category of truth; the Vṛṣṇi clan as their highest deity.”5
Thus, the Bhāgavatam assures us that even when Kṛṣṇa lived in our world, some people saw him as a unique spiritual being, others as a human being with special abilities. There have always been insider and outsider views of Kṛṣṇa, who appears prominently in the Mahā-bhārata and the Bhāgavatam.
We could say that today, in one sense, we are all outsiders to an ancient culture with values and norms quite different from our own. The devoted will reply that beneath the surface of different cultures, there are eternal spiritual truths intrinsic to the soul. So, changing customs are mere external vehicles to express unchanging spiritual truths in different times and places. Seen apart from their spiritual content and purpose, ancient external cultures may well appear to us as strange and nonrational.
I have spoken of secular and devotional scholarship. Most of us are reasonably familiar with the basic assumptions and methodologies of the secular approach, and the inductive analysis it spawns and regulates. Therefore, we will take a closer look at some of the basic assumptions and methodologies of devotional scholarship. I will begin with my simple analogy of the ant and the arm.
Imagine that a harmless ant is crawling on your forearm. In one sense, the ant knows far more than you about your arm’s terrain, as it precisely navigates every freckle and hair, every groove and bump. However, the ant has no idea that your arm even is an arm, or that it belongs to a human person, or what a human person is. Similarly, physical science has achieved a wonderfully precise knowledge of reality’s physical surface. But it cannot grasp the multi-dimensional reality beyond that surface. Only in higher states of consciousness can we behold the ultimate reality of life and our place in it. Like the ant navigating your arm, empirical investigations are confined to the surface dimension of a multi-dimensional universe.6
My late friend, the brilliant scientist Richard Thompson, gave us another analogy to illustrate the same epistemic point. A man heads to an office located at 10 Main Street. Arriving at that address, he enters the building and searches every door, but cannot find the office. He doesn’t know that he is on the ground floor of a multi-story building. The office he seeks is indeed at 10 Main Street, but on a higher floor.
Similarly, the Bhagavad-gītā teaches that spiritual practice is like a cognitive elevator that lifts us to higher levels of awareness. There we can perceive higher dimensions of reality, not merely its surface.
From the devotional perspective, why does empirical science necessarily bump up against unyielding cognitive barriers? Because the empirical method requires controlled observation and controlled experiment. Thus, by its own rules, the empirical method can only study an object to the degree that a scientist controls access to, or manipulation of, the object under study. This method, logically, cannot study those aspects of our universe that are knowable, but beyond our control. The fundamental error of dogmatic empiricism is to assume, a priori, that we can only know what we can control.7
Coming from, and helping to fashion, the ancient culture that developed yoga and deep meditation, the Mahā-bhārata claims that we can know a larger and richer reality — not by trying to control it, but by opening our minds and hearts to life’s higher dimensions. We thus directly experience a higher nature so beautiful, sublime, and real that to doubt it becomes self-evidentially irrational, indeed absurd. The Bhāgavatam famously focuses even more intensely on the methods and results of profound spiritual meditation. For its part, the empirical method has led to amazing discoveries that greatly improve human life when applied wisely. This method also provides us the sheer intellectual satisfaction of unraveling the fantastic engineering of our world, from the micro to the cosmic.
However, great discoveries, whether physical or metaphysical, often bestow power, power tends to bring pride, and pride can make one foolish. This is true whether the deluded party is a scientist or a priest. Thus, we should try to approach this great epic with an open mind.
The Mahā-bhārata has held South Asia spellbound for thousands of years. Thus, we would do well to approach the epic with an open mind. In doing so, we might assume that the epic is a single, ancient text, available to us today. However, that is not exactly the case.
Therefore, we will now consider textual problems that complicate our attempt to understand the Mahā-bhārata. Naturally, secular and devotional scholars have different ways of approaching and resolving these problems.
