Showing posts with label mahabharat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mahabharat. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Two stories

Once my wife, Padhmawoti said couple of very interesting story, the first story "During Mahabharata war Arjuna came to meet his grandfather Bhishma Pitahma who was lying on a bed of arrows that Arjuna had shot. Bhishma Pithama was waiting for an auspicious day to leave his mortal coils. Arjuna asked: "Pitamah, where do you expect me to bury your body after you leave this earthly abode?" Bhishma smilingly said, "Bury my body in a place where I was not buried before". Accordingly, Arjuna selected a place on the banks of the Yamuna River and performed suitable rituals. As he lifted the axe to dig the ground he heard a voice, '-' which meant that Bhishma was buried here over hundred times". And the second story she said was, "Once a herd of hundred donkeys was being taken on a hill by the owner of the herd. On the way he had to rest at an inn. He was afraid of his donkeys escaping at night while he would be asleep. But he did not have sufficient length of rope to tie them all; he only had a small length of rope which was hardly sufficient to tie one donkey. So he planned in such a way that he pretended tying the small rope around legs of each of the donkeys. In actual fact he did not tie the rope to any in the herd. Next morning when he pushed each donkey it hardly moved thinking that it was tied by its master. Only when he pretended to untie them did they begin to move." After seven months I realize why she would have said these stories? The moral of these stories is that every one of us is born and has died countless times ever since birth and death started happening on this universe. This world is a long unending disease for which the sure and best medicine is true inquiry and own personal experience. We are not bound by love or illusion in reality, but we only have the false feeling that we are bound by illusion or love. Similarly, we too are led to think that we are bound by so many of our past deeds and hence we are made to suffer. In reality it is realization that is needed, not the purification rituals to get over it. Realization that this world is only dreamlike and the truth is beyond it helps one initially pass through the hurdles of life. To say that this world is created hardly arouses right reasoning for there need to exist a witness to such creation and this witness had to precede Creation. Another reasoning to support the dream nature of the dream world is that any creation ought to have stuff for creation and this stuff should have been created earlier.