Vipassana

Mahabharata

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i am speechless. Too profound to be overlooked by millions of hindus. YOU WROTE THE MAHABHARATA. has anybody read or watched the storyline? im dumbstruck by the profundity. It is in Hindi so the majority will not know what im talking about. 

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a bunch of god like entities drowning babies, impregnating women, trading / selling / Using women as gifts, but all this is done in the most bizarre yet understandable paradigm.. and im only in the 8th episode of this old series 

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Osho on Mahabharata

Nietzsche loved two books and borrowed from them immensely. The first was Manu's SAMHITA and the other was the MAHABHARATA. This book is perhaps the greatest as far as volume is concerned; it is huge! I don't think that the BIBLE, the KORAN, DHAMMAPADA, TAO TE CHING can even compare with it as far as volume is concerned. You can only understand me if you put it by the side of ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. Compared to the MAHABHARATA the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA is just a small book. It is certainly a great work, but ugly.

Scientists know perfectly well that there have been many very huge animals on the earth in the past, almost mountainous, but very ugly. MAHABHARATA belongs among those animals. Not that you cannot find anything beautiful in it; it is so big that if you dig deep you can certainly find a mouse here and there in the mountain.

Those two books influenced Nietzsche immensely. Perhaps nothing was more responsible for Friedrich Nietzsche than those two books. One was by Manu, and MAHABHARATA was written by Vyasa. I must concede that both books have done a tremendous amount of work, dirty work! It would have been better if these two books had not been written at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche remembers both books with such respect that you would be amazed. Amazed, because this was the man who called himself "anti-Christ." But don't be amazed, those two books are anti-Christ, in fact they are anti-anything that is beautiful: anti-truth, anti-love. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche fell in love with them. Although he never liked Lao Tzu or Buddha, he liked Manu and Krishna. Why?

The question is very significant. He liked Manu because he loved the idea of hierarchy. He was against democracy, freedom, equality; in short he was against all true values. He also loved Vyasa's book MAHABHARATA because it contains the concept that only war is beautiful. He once wrote in a letter to his sister, "This very moment I am surrounded by immense beauty. I have never seen such beauty." One would think that he had entered the garden of Eden, but no, he was watching a military parade. The sun was shining on their naked swords, and the sound which he calls "the most beautiful sound I have ever heard..." was not Beethoven or Mozart, not even Wagner, but the sound of the boots of the marching German soldiers.

Wagner was Nietzsche's friend, and not only that, but something more: Nietzsche had fallen in love with his friend's wife. At least he should have thought of the poor man... but no, he thought that neither Beethoven, nor Mozart, nor Wagner, nobody could compare with the beautiful music from the boots of the German soldiers. For him swords in the sun and the sound of the parading army were the very ultimate in beauty.

Great aesthetics! And remember, I am not a man who is against Friedrich Nietzsche as such; I appreciate him whenever he comes close to truth, but truth is my value and my criterion. "Swords in the sun..." and "the sound of the marching boots"-when he goes away from truth, then whatsoever he is, I am going to hit his head with a naked sword. And how beautiful it looks: the naked sword, and the sound of the head of Friedrich Nietzsche being cut off, and the beautiful blood all around....

This is what his disciple, Adolf Hitler, did.

Hitler got Manu's ideas from Nietzsche. Hitler was not a man who could have found Manu on his own, he was a pygmy. Nietzsche was certainly a genius, but a genius gone astray. He was a man who could have become a Buddha, but alas, he died only as a madman. I was telling you about the Indian obsession, and in that reference remembered Nietzsche. He was the first in the West to recognize the idea of "eternal recurrence"; but he was not honest. He did not say that the idea was borrowed, he pretended to be original. It is so easy to pretend to be original, very easy; it does not need much intelligence. And yet he was a man of genius. He never used his genius to discover anything. He used it to borrow from sources which were not ordinarily known to the world at large.

Who knows Manu's SAMHITA? - and who cares? Manu wrote it five thousand years ago. And who bothers about MAHABHARATA? It is such a big book that unless one wants to really go insane one would not read it.

  Osho ~ Glimpses of a Golden Childhood

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@Prabhaker I've heard a myth that if a man reads the entire Mahabharata in 18 days he WILL go insane

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3 minutes ago, Vipassana said:

I've heard a myth that if a man reads the entire Mahabharata in 18 days he WILL go insane

I've never tried to read it, and people in India usually don't keep Mahabharata at home.

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Quote

You want the truth? You cant handle the truth 

                                                               - The Truth 

 

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@Monkey-man

The great Indian war - that is the meaning of Mahabharata. Then evil would be victorious over good. We say that truth wins - satyameva jayate. There were two camps, at the time of the Mahabharata. Goodness does not fight for the sake of fighting, it fights simply to prevent evil from winning.

The Mahabharat is a weird kind of war, where Krishna is on one side and the whole of his own army on the side of the enemy. Obviously this man does not seem to relish fighting. He is certainly not a hawk, not a warmonger. He has no stake in war, but he is not an escapist either. Since a state of war is there, he offers himself to the Pandavas and his army to the Kauravas so that you don't blame him later. It is an extraordinary situation in which Krishna puts himself. Really, the structure of his whole makeup, his individuality, is unique.

And the Mahabharat itself is an exceedingly uncommon kind of war where, as fighting stops every evening, people from both sides get together, exchange pleasantries, inquire about one another and pay condolences to the bereaved. It does not seem to be a war between enemies, it looks like a play that has to be played, a drama that has to be enacted, an inevitable destiny that has to be accepted happily. Not a trace of enmity can be found after sunset when the two enemies visit each other, chit-chat and play together, and even drink and dine together.

Not only Krishna, there are many others who find themselves in the same strange situation. Members of the same family have divided themselves and joined the two warring camps; even intimate friends find themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield. And what is most amazing is that, after the war ends, Krishna sends the Pandava brothers to Bhisma to take a lesson in peace from him -- from Bhisma, who is the top general of the Kauravas' army, their commander-in-chief. They have to take a lesson in peace from the general of the enemy's forces, and they sit at his feet as his disciples. And Bhisma's message is known as the chapter on peace in the epic of the Mahabharat. It is amazing, it is miraculous that one goes to the enemy to learn about peace. An enemy is a lesson in war, not peace, and you need not go to him to take a lesson. But here Bhisma teaches them the secrets of peace and righteousness.

It is certainly not an ordinary war; it is extra ordinarily extraordinary. And the soldiers of this war are not ordinary soldiers. That is why the GEETA calls it a dharma-yuddha, a righteous war, a religious war. And there is a very good reason to call it so.

Krishna does not deliver the GEETA with a view to persuading Arjuna to fight. No, he delivers it only to reveal to him his true nature, the nature of a warrior.
Source: Krishna - The Man and His Philosophy

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Interesting, so life on earth is battleground. I also thought about this, if you think about any aspect of life - it’s just constant war, against your inner demons or against demons of others.

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