1.#.Opinion : Sunday, 18 Jun, 2023. 05:30 3159. /// 1.# Ancient Culture ( Samskaram ) of India ( Bharatham ) - 19. Swami Krishnananda.

=========================================================================

1.#.Opinion : Sunday, 18 Jun, 2023. 05:30. 3159. /// 

1.# Ancient Culture ( Samskaram ) of India ( Bharatham ) - 19. Swami Krishnananda.

=========================================================================

Chapter 8: India's Concept of Totality-2.

Post-19.

=========================================================================

The Upanishads are also difficult to understand. Their meditations are deep. Every little event in the world, everything that happens anywhere, is considered as an object of meditation. The Upanishads do not meditate merely on that conceptualised, ethereal Absolute. For instance, if we read the earlier chapters of the Chhandogya Upanishad, prior to the fifth chapter, fantastic forms of meditation are delineated, some of which are beyond our comprehension, and some of which look very funny, fantastic, and even meaningless from a purely historical point of view. The littlest of things, the most insignificant things, the commonplace occurrences in nature, every event in society and all thoughts in the mind are taken as objects of meditation, from which route we can gradually rise through the levels of the manifestation of nature to the highest cosmic comprehension.

Deep is the Veda, and deeper are the Upanishads. The Bhagavadgita is said to have taken up the task of making this great subject a little more easy for us because it is from an epic point of view. As I mentioned during the previous session, the Bhagavadgita forms a part of the Mahabharata, so it has an epic style, not the intuitional side of the Veda mantras or the Upanishadic proclamations.

We had occasion to take into account some of the deeper aspects of human life portrayed for us in the Mahabharata of Sri Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa. The epics are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Some people include in this list of epics another great work called the Harivamsa, which is an appendix to the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata contains eighteen books. As we have eighteen chapters in the Bhagavadgita, there are eighteen parvas, or knots, we may say, halting places, in the Mahabharata. Adi Parva is the first one, Sabha Parva is the second, Aranyaka Parva or Aranya Parva is the third, Virata Parva is the fourth, Udyoga Parva is the fifth, Bhishma Parva is the sixth, Drona Parva is the seventh, Karna Parva is the eighth, Shalya Parva is the ninth, Sauptika Parva is the tenth, Stri Parva is the eleventh, Shanti Parva is the twelfth, Anushasana Parva is the thirteenth, Ashvamedhika Parva is the fourteenth, Ashramavasika Parva is the fifteenth, Mausala Parva is the sixteenth, Mahaprasthanika Parva is the seventeenth, and Svargarohana Parva is the eighteenth. These are the eighteen books of the Mahabharata, as we have seven books of the Ramayana: Bala Kanda, Ayodhya Kanda, Aranya Kanda, Kishkindha Kanda, Sundara Kanda, Yuddha Kanda and Uttara Kanda.

The nineteenth book of the Mahabharata is the Harivamsa. It is regarded as a kind of appendix. Perhaps one of the reasons behind the division of the Harivamsa from the Mahabharata as the nineteenth book is that the life of Bhagavan Sri Krishna as incorporated in the eighteen books of the Mahabharata takes into account only the public picture of the life of Sri Krishna; his earlier life in Dvarka, Brindavan, Mathura, etc., does not find a place in the Mahabharata in spite of the fact that it is in the Bhagavata. Historians and students of the epics tell us there was no Bhagavata at the time of the writing of the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata was written first, and to have a supplement to the Mahabharata in order that the other aspects of the life of Sri Krishna may also be incorporated in the great epic, Vyasa seems to have written the nineteenth book, which contains the earlier life of Krishna including Dvarka, Brindavan, etc. So, in a way, the eighteen books of the Mahabharata plus the nineteenth one, the Harivamsa, apart from being the story of the Pandava-Kaurava war, also consist of the complete life of Bhagavan Sri Krishna.

*****

To be continued

=======================================================================