The words of the wise have explained it clearly:
Non-Being will not do!
But Being is not enough!
—The Īśa1 Upaniṣad
[[Working with Writers Workshop to get you the full text]]
Over the fall, winter, and spring of 2008-2009, I had the honor of being a guest with Purushottama Lal and his family. He was a scholar and a guru. He died a year after I left, having dedicated himself entirely to his life’s greatest project: transcreating the Mahābhārata of Vyāsa in its unabridged entirety. This was a massive undertaking of love and dedication, pure work without any expectation of an earthly reward. And it was in addition to running The Writers Workshop, a beautiful enterprise that produced hand-made, editions cloth-bound editions of not only his works, but also the works of independent poets and writers throughout India who used English as their linguistic medium—which was what drew me do him, as an aspirant to be a publisher of an alternative kind.
His Mahābhārata, like all of his transcreations, is far more readable, lyrical and profound than any other translation of Sanskrit I have found. This is because, in the great Indian tradition of building culture by synthesis, he developed an ear for English modernist poetry as a young man, educated by Jesuits at St. Xavier’s in Calcutta, before independence. He saw in Yeats and Eliot artists who were striving for the knowledge that is clearly stated above. But mostly, he valued the Sanskrit intellectual tradition for its capacity for subtlety and ambiguity. What he loved to talk about in his Sunday morning lectures at the Birla Mandir was that the Pāṇḍavas were not the good guys, and the Kauravas not evil. That both sides had their own virtue, and that both sides of the great war committed elaborately described war crimes that used unfair tactics. Kṛṣṇa, the avatara of Viṣṇu, was guilty of deception and cruelty, for instance when he tricked Karṇa into surrendering his armor, so that Arjuna could murder him (book eight, The Karṇa Parva). Perhaps, indeed, the bad guys won the war. This was the narrative event he was lecturing upon during my time with him, and became an important lesson for my understanding of history. For instance, on the new Kurukṣetra of the cold war, each side was guilty of vast atrocity, and mythologizing the crimes of the other was a weapon of each side, to different degrees. The crimes and brutalities of Stalin are one thing, but the Black Legend of Stalin quite another.
P. Lal’s achievement outshone any of the heroics in the great battles he narrated; when I knew him, he seemed to be living entirely on spiritual energy, keeping his body animate through sheer will so that he could finish the final volume and then finally rest.
In early February 1989, Purushottama Lal travelled to Albion, Michigan, with a severe fever. He took two Bufferin tablets and started bleeding. “I was operated on. A ‘Third World’ ulcer was removed. (a Third World ulcer is a wicked fungal phenomenon that afflicts the inhabitants of the less opulent areas of the earth. It is contained so long as it is confined to those areas, but has a tendency to flare up and assert itself in an antiseptic, apparently non-hostile environment such as that prevailing in the developed West and, who knows, the developed East as well, such as Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.” (Lessons 122). “The fever did not abate. He was rushed by helicopter to the Borges Medical Center in Kalamazoo and within a week was operated on again. Gangrene had set in. His colon was removed, and Amphotericin administered. First his kidneys failed; then the pancreas; then the liver. Three months of dialysis; a hundred bottles of blood; intravenous injections, endoscopy; tracheostomy; a sci-fi battery of life supporting machines; NDE (Near Death Experience). No medical insurance and a bill for $400,000.” (Lessons ix). Ever since, he had been rail-thin as his body struggled to extract nutrients from food. Devi saved him. (When I first met him in Calcutta, he said to me, “Jed, you have come to the only city in the world that worships a Goddess, the female divine. Do you think there might be a reason?”)
I believe that he conquered death to finish the Mahābhārata before he left his body, and so his final collapse in 2010 was the stuff of epic victory. But we also must be able to live with ambiguity. He was working on the 18th volume. Though the finished work contains the 18 parvas in 19 volumes, with the last two being completed by Dr Pradip Bhattacharya, by P. Lal’s request.
In the essay that accompanies the text scanned in above, the Īśa Upaniṣad is “significantly restricted to 18 ślokas—and we know that the Mahābhārata has 18 parvas, and 18 akṣauhīnīs fight on dharmakṣetra Kurukṣetra for 18 days; the Gītā is divided into 18 chapters; there are 18 purāṇas divided into 18 chapters and 18 smṛtis or lawbooks; and the nine avatāras of Viṣṇu, seen ambivalently (as incarnations in Hinduism are), add up to 18.” He got to (through?) 18, as he chose to count it, although the project remained incomplete.
The reason I post this now is that people have been asking me about the points I made about Hinduism on both podcasts. The Īśa Upaniṣad shows how Vedic wisdom is dialectic: there is That One, the Unmoving One that is different from matter. This reflects the core dualism in Hinduism: you are not your body.
and yet it is the world, synthesized into matter and inherent in the very fabric of being (or else we would not be here).
The words of the wise have explained it clearly. Do not be perplexed.
Īśa is a name of The Lord in Sanskrit. It sounds similar to īsā عيسى, the Qur’anic name of Jesus; the origin of the Islamic word is a mystery, and so we cannot discount the possibility that the latter is derived from the former. Some, including many Hindus and Ahmadi Muslims, believe that Jesus traveled to northern India or central Asia during his life and studied with spiritual masters in that region. However, scholars have recently discovered a Safaitic inscription bearing the divine name ‘sy, which would be the earliest documented instance. (“Safaitic is a modern conventional label given to the northern-most variety of the South Semitic script family. It is a sister of the Ancient South Arabian alphabet rather than a descendent of it.”)
Thank you for sharing Jed. I'd been looking for a vouched translation of the Mahabharata that wasn't written by Bibek Debroy. That version must be an ontological operation, no?