Observer Observes… “Mahabharata: Bheeshma Pitamaha”
You won't get an introduction for the sake of an introduction in this one. The Observer won't give you an introduction of how grand of an epic Mahabharata is and how much it has influenced him, what he has realized — not learned!: but realized from the Lord himself, the Lord, Krishna — the Master and the Slave of the Universe, Universe himself. No Sir/Madam!
You won't get an introduction describing you Krishna, the grandest of the grandests, the protector of the world; who has the blue color of the sky and forehead like the autumn moon; who is calmer than the ocean and violent than the volcano; who has nerve-wrecking power of illusion and an amber clear clarity of consciousness; who has the light of a thousand suns and the darkness of innumerable black holes. The most beautiful and the utterly hideous.
Krishna — the Knowledge and the end of it.
You won't get his description here.
Description of the one who is the essence of the Vedas; who carries the weight of existence and gives weight to existence and whose weight lightens the earth; who gives eternal pleasing & perpetual nourishment to the soul and who is the cause of suffering of life; who does not have birth and never ages; who is the beginning, the middle and the end; who has no attachment to the world and yet resides in its every atom; who is the greatest hero of the heroes and wins all the battles, and he who would take you across trough the sea of life.
No, you won’t get his description here.
For his description would take the life of the Universe. So apologies for the incompetence inability incapacity of the Observer to give you an introduction to Mahabharata- a tale that begins and ends with a description of Krishna just like our lives is a description of the Lord.
So bowing down humbly to his grandness, let the Observer jump right into his tale — the tale for the ages; the grandest of tales; the grandest of the grandest: doubly grand; so grand that it doesn't just warrant repetition of superlatives but necessitates it.
Nature is its own description.
The grandness of the grandest of all the grand tales lies in its Characters.
Coz… What is Mahabharata without its Characters?
What is Mahabharata without Bheeshma, the grandsire-Pitamaha of Pandavas and Kauravas? The lightning of whose vow sends down electricity down the spine and who has been condemned with boon of इच्छा-मृत्यु.
What is Mahabharata without Dronacharya, the greatest Guru on earth, शिष्य of Bhagwaan Parshuram, incarnation of Lord Vishnu himself? Whose devotion to teaching makes one covet his erudition & wisdom.
What is Mahabharata without Yudhishtra — धर्मराज, the eldest of Pandu's sons, whose Righteousness and Truthfulness is unattainable for even gods? For whom Yamaraj came down to Earth with Swan Chariot, deliver him to heaven.
What is Mahabharata without Bheema, brother of Hanumana both Vayu Putras? The strength in whose hands make one tremble in mind.
What is Mahabharata without Arjuna, son of Indra, the battle weary warrior being charioteered by Krishna himself?
And can you understand Mahabharata if you haven’t ever cried for the tragedy that is perhaps the greatest tragedies in time, Life of Surya Putra Karna! — Observer's favorite character… Mritunjay Daanveer Karna-the cursed.
By these articles, the Observer ponders over what Mahabharata means to him and shares it with you for you may share your interpretation.
Note: This article series is not the description of stories, enough material is online for you to explore that. These are what the Observer has got from his understanding of Gita and the Mahabarata stories which he has studied all his life.
The idea is to understand these characters in particular order- Bheeshma, Drona, Dhritrashta, Duryodhana, Karna, Yudhishtra, Bheema, Arjuna-and at the end the one character that would be left would be Krishna, and once one understands Krishna… well… he understands everything, for he is the essence of everything.
Understanding Bheeshma Pitamaha
Superficial Understanding of Bheeshma— Son of the river goddess Ganga and old king Shantanu.
He is the most powerful of the Kauravas, Ganga Putra, his mother Ganga took him to different realms, where he was brought up and trained by many eminent sages (Mahabharata Shanti Parva, section 38).
Brihaspati: The son of Angiras and the preceptor of the Devas taught Devavrata the duties of kings (Dandaneeti), or political science and other Shastras.
Shukracharya: The son of Bhrigu and the preceptor of the Asuras also taught Devavrata in political science and other branches of knowledge.
Vashishtha, the Brahmarshi and Chyavana, the son of Bhrigu taught the Vedas and the Vedangas to Devavrata.
Sanatkumara: The eldest son of Lord Brahma taught Devavrata the mental and spiritual sciences.
Markandeya: The immortal son of Mrikandu of Bhrigu’s race who acquired everlasting youth from Lord Shiva taught Devavrata in the duties of the Yatis.
Parashurama: The son of Jamadagni of Bhrigu’s race. Parashurama trained Bhishma in warfare.
Indra: The king of the Devas. He bestowed celestial weapons on Bhishma.
Although he has abdicated the throne, he has sworn to protect it. This lands him on the other side of the Pandavas although he loves them very much. Arjuna is faced with the task of killing him. He dies on the bed of arrows!
Psychological Significance of Bheeshma — “the EGO”
Bheeshma is the Ego.
The word Bheeshma means- dreadful: causing or involving great suffering, fear, or unhappiness; extremely bad or serious.
In Sanskrit, the word Bheeshma (भीष्म:) means ‘one who undertakes a terrible vow (Bheeshma प्रतिज्ञा) and fulfills it.’
Bheeshma प्रतिज्ञा: Vow of Celibacy of the Ego-the Nature of Ego
Bheeshma/Ego is known for his pledge of Celibacy. And this pledge is its identity.
The ego represents the conscious mind as it comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity. Ego is the complex that is a collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and memories that focus on a single concept.
As long as the Ego has vowed to be celibate, it can never understand the whole. Ego is the manifestation of the fragmentation of a being. It is the one that keeps on the Persona.
Persona comes from Latin and literally means ‘mask, character played by an actor’.
You all have masks that your ego carries with you- persona/mask of a son/daughter, persona/mask of a student, persona/mask of an employee, persona/mask of a lover, persona/mask of a boyfriend/girlfriend, persona/mask of a husband/wife and on and on it goes and perpetual it is. What is personality then? A beautiful mask at the most, a beautiful lie, perhaps a convenient one.
But ego is not the whole. Ego divides. Ego can never see the immeasurable. The stronger the ego, the more fragmented the human being.
All our lives- school, colleges, jobs, friends, at home with family- all the time the quest is to cultivate an ego that is revered by the others. An ego that is so intelligent that it can change the personas instantaneously.
The most successful ‘Egos’ are the ones that have multiple masks/personas all the time.
So that fragmented being gets all the validation from the outside. Others justify his ego and consider him a whole.
But does he never feel frustrated? Does he never yearn for the meaning of it all? Does he never look for an escape?
Sure he does, that is the fragmenting nature of the fully developed ego or an aged Bheeshma.
Ego isn’t all bad, in fact, it is necessary for a human being to relate to the world to find his place in society. But it is the stepping stone to the world, its nature needs to be realized to be whole, in fact, it is the biggest hindrance to the realization of self.
Realization that the Ego has vowed to remain unmarried with the outer world.
This Bheeshma प्रतिज्ञा of the Ego comes from the outside, in fact, our whole education system is based on the cultivation of this ego. Whether in India or the USA, every institution inculcates this sense of ego that is so innately unnatural that all their students are fragmented. Schools and colleges are thus nothing more than manufacturing units of fragmented beings, that are supposed to take on the world when they have no understanding of themselves.
An Ego so assiduously cultivated, nurtured, nourished since we were 5–6 years old is the biggest reason for this contradiction that one feels when he comes in the real world. Everyone feels that contradiction in himself/herself, that is the nature of Ego, it is an assault on the ‘being’ thats why in his Yoga Sutras written 2000 years ago, Patanjali calls it a force that acts.
Does one want an escape from this contradiction, an escape from the विरोधाभास? If you do keep on reading.
Strength of Bheeshma: the Power of Ego
Kurukshetra means the field of doing. The doer within us is our ego.
Bheeshma was the most powerful of all Kauravas.
No surprise that half of Mahabharata, 9 out of 18 days, Pandavas tried to overcome Bheeshma in Kurukshetra.
In order to understand Krishna- Bhagwat Prapti-the realization of divine in you, you must overcome your ego first.
But you must observe it first and from that observation comes the understanding of the ego, and that understanding helps you overcome it.
You must realize how powerful your ego is.
The “persona” (or mask) of the personality is the outward face we present to the world. It conceals our real self — it is the “conformity”. This is the public face or role a person presents to others as someone different from who we really are (as an actor).
The word Bhishma comes from the root ‘bhi’, meaning to frighten. The realization of the Ego is frightening. Ego hypnotizes by our bodily existence and the indulgences of the five senses. That which frightens the soul into forgetting its immortality and getting bound in sentient existence is Bhishma or the Ego.
He rules our psychic nature, forcing our soul, the real ruler, into a hypnotic trance. Here lies the seed of human suffering. The scriptures depict this as the प्रतिज्ञा or vow of celibacy that Bhishma took to satisfy the lust of his father. This very प्रतिज्ञा became the root cause of the Mahabharata war. The whole aim of spirituality is to dissolve the ego and awaken the sleeping soul to its true divine nature.
We all want to be famous people and as long as we want something we are not free. That is the nature of ego. The ego tries to find the answer outside. That’s why the problem has been aggravated in present times as Career is the greatest 20th-century invention.
India was never like this. But the consumerism of the West has brought with it this insatiable appetite for ‘want’; & a person who wants: is never whole. Everything you see around you is a form of advertising — employees advertising their coding skills to their managers, managers advertising their organizational skills to the company, companies advertising their products to a man, a man advertising his capacity to buy an expensive car to his woman, woman advertising capacity of his man to her family and friends… and on and on it goes…
The Ego is never whole but it yearns to be whole. Theories are out there-
The Capitalists answer to this is to find the meaning in Materialism & Consumerism. If that was the answer then Kurt Cobain would have never shot himself and we would have new Nirvana songs.
The Communists are even worse, they negate individualism and try to conform people into finding a “Super-Ego” i.e. ego of the state. That’s what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn masterpiece Gulag Archipelago tells us about the tendency of the totalitarian state to crush individual beings, and what we in Modi’s India should be wary of.
There is no equality in wrongness. Both are wrong.
The Ego lives and thrives in the past.
And the past is the burden for the present. To be free one has to let go off the burden. At times the burden is unbearable. It will crush you and your will. That's why a person whose mind is burnt by the ego with the memories of the past can never be whole.
This reminds the Observer of one of his favorite lines from The Joker from The Killing Joke. P.S.- Read the comics if you want to understand the Joker.
“So… I see you received the free ticket I sent you. I’m glad. I did so want you to be here. You see it doesn’t matter if you catch me and send me back to the asylum… Gordon’s been driven mad. I’ve proved my point. I’ve demonstrated there’s no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else… Only you won’t admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there’s some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that… Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is… My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you? I mean, you’re not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we’ve come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?”
Joker here is telling about the fissile nature of the ego-the mask of sanity that can slip off on a bad day. A Bad Joke.
“Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see- I’ll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.” — The Dark Knight
Thus the Ego fragmentation can drive a person mad. Therefore, one can realize:
Real education is the education of the human mind and it is the highest form of intelligence.
Once you have realized, not learned, this; you can kill your Bheeshma-your ego and are one step closer to understand Krishna.
Mrityu of Bheeshma: Ego Death- इच्छा-मृत्यु of Ego
The ninth day of the Mahabharata war is characterized by Bheeshma devastating the Pandava army. Even the mighty Arjuna has fought and lost many duels with him. Here, Krishna warns Yudhisthira that unless the Pandavas defeat Bheeshma, defeat in the battle is certain. Yudhisthira asks, “How does one kill someone who has the boon of voluntary death?”
So how do you kill your ego? Which has the boon of इच्छा-मृत्यु |
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Ego has to commit suicide.
I cannot destroy your ego & you cannot destruct mine.
That is what Tyler Durden meant by “Self-Improvement is Masturbation… now self-destruction…”
And in order to realize the immeasurable or what people call God, the toughest fight is with the suicide of the ego.
Point of View Vs the Thing itself: This contradiction has to be prevailed over. Point of views can change but that is not the thing, what one should do is realize the thing itself, in its entirity. Then one realizes that all points of views are nothing but an abstraction.
Ego has इच्छा-मृत्यु Vardaan. Nuture has given it that.
Ego has to realize that. And when Bheeshma sees that his existence is a hindrance to the victory of Lord, he puts aside its weapon.
Shikhandi, Avtar of Amba, a transsexual, a eunuch, arrives on the battlefield on the 9th day of Mahabharata, which is the middle of the 18-day war, perhaps she is a eunuch that’s why she arrives on 9th day. One ponders.
So Krishna asks Righteousness/Yudhistra to request the Ego/Bheeshma to take back its victory आशीर्वाद — ego’s promise of bliss.
And then…what happens then?…
The ego commits suicide.
Thus awakening of righteousness is the dissipation of ego.
Bheeshma was not killed by Arjun, Bheeshma was killed by the will of Lord himself.
Arjuna released a volley of arrows. The hundreds of arrows punctured every limb of Bhisma Pitamah’s body — his hands, his legs, his trunk, his thighs — till the grandsire fell like a giant Banyan tree falls in the middle of the forest.
As Arjuna pierced his body with arrows, Bheesma cried: “My son, the earth will not accept my body, for I am too heavy for her lap. The skies will not accept me since I have not produced children and have thus not honored my ancestors.”
He then pleaded with Arjuna: “Now that you are on your path of Dharma, do mercy to my withered body in such a way that I belong neither to the earth nor to the sky. Thus Arjuna placed him above the earth and below the sky by suspending him on a bed of arrows…
When the ego drops its guard and its semblance of socially accepted sanity, Arjuna pierces the body of ego with innumerable arrows of truth and the blood of understanding gushes out.
What oozed out was ‘Vishnu Sahastranama’ — ‘Sahastra’ means thousand-so thousand names of Krishna came out- which is the end of knowledge, the whole of wisdom & realization of the self.
Thus,
the realization of ego is its death and with that begins realization of God.
Ego remains until the end of the war & the war is ever going.
We will see other characters in the future. Bheeshma’s story will go on in parallel with them.