From the introduction to Great Bharata: The Invasion Begins, Volume 1
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.
- Earthly. The text does describe a dynastic struggle between the Kurus and Pāṇḍavas, two powerful royal families.
- Cosmic. In that royal fight, Earth is merely a proxy battleground for a conflict of cosmic proportions, a true war of the worlds.
- As the Bhagavad-gītā explains in the Mahā-bhārata‘s chapters 6.23–40, 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, some areas beyond, and to a magnificent civilization that flourished there, and influenced 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.
Yet, despite these three factors — a) internal debates among both secular and devotional scholars; b) important agreements between these two groups; and c) the existence of other approaches to the text — it is still most practical to focus here on the two primary forms of Mahā-bhārata scholarship — secular and devotional.
We can grasp essential differences between secular and devotional approaches by comparing their ontologies and epistemologies, that is, the views of each group on the kinds of objects we can know to exist, and how we can know those knowable things.
Devotional scholars claim that there are higher beings, realms, and powers in and beyond the universe. We can know these through yoga meditation, devotion, and other means. Indeed the purpose of our lives, and the ultimate purpose of texts like the Mahā-bhārata, is to help us attain that higher knowledge.
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, 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 impaired by their metaphysical beliefs and could not see the forest for the trees. Thus most secular scholars called the Mahā-bhārata mythology. The Mahā-bhārata called itself history. Most Western approaches agree that the Mahā-bhārata‘s descriptions of super-natural beings, powers, or places are mythology, and should be explained in terms of human disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, history and anthropology.
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 were always some secular scholars who asserted that academics should not presume to judge the truth value of claims made by other cultures and their literature. Nor must they believe or embrace the metaphysical claims of every tradition they study. One should rather aim at neutral description.
Some Western scholars went 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 the Academy 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 spiritual 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 stories reputedly took place! We find evidence of this in another sacred ancient history of the same period and many of the same events, the highly revered Bhāgavata-purāṇa, also known simply as the Bhāgavatam. 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.”1
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.”2
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 different values and norms than 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 its 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 empirical 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, including ourselves. Like the ant navigating your arm, empirical investigations are confined to the surface dimension of a multi-dimensional universe.3
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 intractable 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, a priori, 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.4
Coming from, and helping to fashion, the ancient culture that invented 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 and sublime 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, physical or metaphysical, often bestow power, power tends to bring pride, and pride makes one foolish. This is true whether the deluded party is a scientist or a priest.
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 threaten to complicate our attempt to understand the Mahā-bhārata. Naturally, secular and devotional scholars have different ways of approaching and resolving the epic’s problematic text.
Endnotes
1. itthaṁ satāṁ brahma-sukhānubhūtyā dāsyaṁ gatānāṁ para-daivatena māyāśritānāṁ nara-dārakeṇa sākaṁ vijahruḥ kṛta-puṇya-puñjāḥ [BP 10.12.11] ↩
2. mallānām aśanir nṛṇāṁ nara-varaḥ strīṇāṁ smaro mūrtimān
gopānāṁ sva-jano ‘satāṁ kṣiti-bhujāṁ śāstā sva-pitroḥ śiśuḥ
mṛtyur bhoja-pater virāḍ aviduṣāṁ tattvaṁ paraṁ yogināṁ
vṛṣṇīnāṁ para-devateti vidito raṅgaṁ gataḥ sāgrajaḥ [BP 10.43.17] ↩
3. The arm-ant analogy occurred to me one day while sitting on a sandy path on a North Florida farm, New Raman Reti, near Gainesville. An ant actually did crawl on my arm, inspiring the analogy! ↩
4. The empiricist equation, knowable = controllable, entails circular reasoning and self-contradiction, and so is not a logically valid equation. This was one fatal flaw of logical empiricism, also known as logical positivism. Most academic philosophers therefore abandoned it many decades ago. ↩