Mahabharata

The Mahabharata starts with a post-apocalyptic scenario: the war is over and only seven people are left alive. The longer I read, the more it looked like a story about human dominion. Indraprastha is built on the ashes of the Khandava forest. Leaving humanity in charge of the earth is a recipe for catastrophe. Greed is curable; one day we might even have a pill for it.

It's no surprise to me that a dice game is at the heart of the story. I think gambling redeems Yudhisthira, since an unchallenged king is a recipe for totalitarianism. Most of this trail follows Nala and Damayanti. It's her story more than it's his. The taming of chance goes hand in hand with the taming of love.

Bhima and Draupadi badger Yudhisthira to skip the thirteen years of exile and fight. He goes to the forest anyway. If you want to follow the dharma, I think you have to be ready for long periods of exile while you rework its principles. By the last Jayary I had soured on world government too.

Janamejaya is persuaded to take revenge for his father by killing every snake in the world. When it comes to war, philosophy stands mutely by the sidelines and the Jaya doesn't. My claim is that sacrifice, just like the law, gives violence its moral legitimacy.

The gods of the Jaya are capricious, a word I like because it sounds like what it means. The rishis are its keystone species. Agastya is Socrates with his fleshy parts intact, and even he goes asking kings for a loan. I also spent weeks on the tirthas.

An itihasa is fiction while not only being fiction, and fact without only being fact. I'd rather assume it's apauruseya, authorless, than go hunting for whoever wrote it. Some of these essays follow speech and writing and how each keeps a story alive.

How do you inherit a tradition that has been severely disrupted by the forces of the modern world? I'm no fan of the great wall of India, and the browner versions of Aquinas and Hegel aren't much better. The story form is more durable than argument. We can use the Jaya to digest modernity and modernity to digest the Jaya.

In 2015 I started reading the Mahabharata one small bite at a time and sent the diary out as a newsletter, the Jayary. These posts are about the reading. Having spent almost ten months on the epic, I was barely a third of the way into the third book. A ruminant has four stomachs, and I needed all of them.