The Upanishads, as S Radhakrishnan pithily puts it, move from the wonder of the outside world to a meditation on the self, though there is a search for the mystery of existence, of creation, in them as well. There is more certainty in the Upanishads; they are didactic since they are meant to instruct students.
The importance of teachers is emphasised by long passages which recite names of teachers and pupils. The Upanishads are philosophical, spiritual, complex and abstruse. They work through conversations, stories, examples and questions and answers, which make it easier to understand though not always difficult concepts.
There are some famous dialogues, like the one between a young man, Svetaketu, and his father, Uddalaka Aruni, in which the father instructs his son about the nature of the self.
Another well-known dialogue is between Maitreyi and her philosopher-husband Yajnavalkya about immortality. And yet another is between Nachiket, a bright youth, and Yama the god of death, about death. A very modern-seeming story is the story of Satyakama, who asked his mother what family he belonged to. Her reply, innocent and honest, was that she had been a maid when young and had moved about a lot.
Call yourself Satyakama Jabala. A problem solved by unflinchingly facing the truth. A delightful tongue-in-cheek response — and this from a learned man who had studied all the Vedas. But once again the same honesty. Questing, questioning, hazarding guesses, open-minded, truthful — what connects us to these people? How can we, superstition-ridden, and unable or refusing to think for ourselves, be the descendants of such people?
Perhaps we are wrong to look for our earlier, better selves in a religious, spiritual text. We need to go to stories, which are the best guide to a people and to how they lived. Which is why our two epics are still alive; the characters are people we know as well as we do our families and friends, the people and the events in the Mahabharata still a point of reference to much that happens in our lives.
Both the epics are full of Dharma — an ideal not always attainable. In the Mahabharata , in spite of the word Dharma being the keynote of the story, Adharma flourishes. Everyone indulges in wrong acts, even Krishna, when he finds Arjuna vacillating, not giving his best to the fight.
It was a kind of turning point in my thinking and writing life. I could never look at the Mahabharata with the same vision ever again. With this new vision, an episode in the epic that happened before the war, one of the best-known and most dramatic stories in the Mahabharata, gave me some very surprising truths. Almost everyone knows this story, but perhaps it can do with another retelling. So listen:. The Pandavas were invited to play a game of dice by Shakuni, the evil spirit of the Kauravas.
Yudhishtira played and rapidly lost his property, his kingdom, his brothers, and finally himself. When it seemed he had nothing more to wager, Shakuni prompted him. And a desperate Yudhishtira, hoping, like all gamblers, that his luck would change, wagered his wife.
And lost. Duryodhana was gleeful, triumphant. This was the moment he had been waiting for, for years. He immediately sent a messenger to Draupadi, to tell her that her husband had lost her and she was now their slave. Ask her to come here, he ordered. Draupadi was stunned by this message. How could she, a queen, become a slave? Now Duryodhana was furious. He sent his brother Duhshasana this time. Draupadi, terrified, fled, trying to get to Gandhari. One can imagine how hard it must have been to say this aloud in public.
The men were stunned when they saw Draupadi, a proud woman, a queen, in this state! Draupadi ignored the gleeful, leering Kauravas, ignored her husbands who seemed to have been struck dumb and addressed the elders of the family — Dhritarashtra, Bhishma, Vidura, Drona, Kripa.
They were silent. Whatever the answer, Draupadi was in a situation fraught with danger. If her husband had lost himself first, he became a slave who could own no property. What did that make Draupadi then? Whereas, if Yudhishtira had a right to wager her, she would, like the rest of them, become a slave of the Kauravas.
The question was not a mistake, it had to be asked at some time. Does he have the right to do with me whatever he wishes? Vikarna, the one white sheep among the Kauravas, got up to defend Draupadi. She was right, he said. Yudhishtira had no right to wager her because she was the wife of five men, not of Yudhishtira alone. Small comfort for Draupadi, this!
One may choose other texts and other role-models; Mahatma Gandhi for example is far more explicit. But it is hardly digestible that the Mahabharata is something beyond Krsna. As an illustration, let us look at this version of moksa :. Despite its plainly universal meaning, and its secular nature, the idea of moksa became obscured by the religiosity of theistic practices Thus moksa has been perceived as a religious idea, and that, too, of the Hindus Let us put them aside.
Did Buddha say he is not a Hindu? Is our author seriously suggesting that Abhinavagupta was merely quarrelling when he set out his Svatantrya theory of moksa against other theories? Will he say, for example, that Jacques Derrida was quarrelsome? Why this special treatment to our thinkers?
This special treatment originates from a very simple premise: Indian thinkers dealt with the same questions that the postpagan West took up. Since the answers are already spelt out by the great minds of the postpagan West, any statements that Indian thinkers make about life, nature, human race, and social functioning, must be in concordance with the current notion of what is politically correct.
But this premise is wrong. Further, there is nothing in the Mahabharata to suggest that it is even remotely opposed to any statements of the dharmasastras; to the extent that any quote can be extracted from the Mahabharata to contradict some quote from a dharmasastra, a quote to that effect can almost certainly be extracted from that particular dharmasastra itself. No modern scholar tries to ask why the contradictory statements, let us say on caste or on women, were not regarded as contradictory statements by our writers not familiar with western scholarship.
Our author does the same. This makes him naturally quite uncomfortable when questions of the caste system and the status of women come up. We have only explanations of the following kind:. When varna and jati were presented in the later dharmasastras and absolute social theory, they were at complete variance with the pluralistic facts of Indian life.
They were at complete variance too with the ethical foundations of social relationships, without which nothing that is sane and moral can ever survive anywhere. The Mahabharata is concerned with the foundations, with the dharma, of all social arrangements everywhere. But it was the dharmasastra and their literal exponents, the sastri and not the Mahabharata, that came to dominate the social structure in India.
They laid the foundations of a social system that could produce only social conflict and human degradation. The Mahabharata is saying in a voice impassioned, often even anguished, that should any social arrangement degrade and debase human worth, it would be adharma and will produce only violence.
Actually both the dharmasastras and the Mahabharata are in tune, and to the extent that the dharmasastras dominated Indian life, the Mahabharata also did. Let it remain the privilege of the postpagan West to discuss exactly at what stage of progress the religion of the Greek and the religion of the Romans were when Christianity dawned on them.
The facts of a social situation vary from one place and one time to another place and another time. The ancient Egyptian royal line is supposed to have encouraged incestuous marriages; this is not acceptable to many societies including the modern Egyptian society.
Does that make the ancient Egyptians worthy of contempt? Do we have the right to be judgemental about people who refuse to be drawn into moral courts that we have set up in our wisdom? Caturvedi Badrinath in his Introduction says that he is not a Sanskrit pandit and apologises for any possible errors in the translations for which he takes full responsibility.
He is in good company here, for we have many experts on Ancient India who have no knowledge of Sanskrit. They, however, are far less candid than he is in admitting this. The translations, while they can be improved, are not always the problem, except at times. The purpose of governance is not to kill the wicked, but to create conditions in which people can be good. The sentence that appears as translation is a nice instruction but that is not what the verse says.
The verse says:. When terrorised, the doers of good do not whimsically kill the doers of evil. The kings rule their subjects only by good acts and hence should not punish by death whimsically. This simply says that capital punishment is to be awarded only in the rarest of rare cases: a maxim of contemporary law also.
This is hardly an argument against capital punishment. That capital punishment, whimsically awarded, is an evil act by the king for which he must pay is a recurring theme in Indian literature. You do not need the Mahabharata to argue that capital punishment should be awarded only after all options are exhausted and there is no hope that the culprit will not repeat the crime if released. To give another example, on page the quoted verse.
In the money and property of a woman inherited from her father, the daughter has a right as the son has, because as the son so the daughter. Daughter is like son — this is the established principle. But the verse talks about the money given to a woman, not inherited by her. This verse merely says that a woman has full control over stri-dhana , which includes but does not consist entirely of the money given to her by her father.
The right of control by a woman over her stri-dhana is repeatedly emphasized by all the dharmasastras, and was part of the law even before the various modifications by the Indian state after independence. One more example and I stop the enumeration. On page , the Yogavasistha verse. What is worn out, broken, loosened, powerless, disturbed, crushed, or destroyed, consider that a new beginning.
What is worn out, broken, loosened, powerless, disturbed, crushed, or destroyed, I regard as only new; and that is how I live disease free.
The first version believes in change, the second regards change as hallucination. The teachings of the Upanishads were never intended to be published for anyone to buy. And they were not meant to be read in the library or at home in the living room. These teachings were meant to be studied only in the context of a life of serious spiritual discipline, only by those properly prepared, and only with a qualified teacher.
The Prashna Upanishad tells the story of six eager students who approach a guru for study. But before he would take a single question, the teacher required them to live with him for a year, leading a life of discipline, to see if they were fit to be taught. From ancient times to the present, the guru has played an important role in transmitting the Hindu traditions of wisdom and practice.
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