The sultan and his wish…
Saturday, June 1st, 2013
When you are eager to gain an end, you must be prepared for all the travail, all the obstacles or else, you should not entertain the wish. The five Pandava brothers are the five Pranas (vital airs) in the human body and all of them constitute one entity, and Draupadi, born of fire, is the energy that activates the body. When this is ignored and the epic is taken as a story of kings and queens and dynastic wars, the meaning is missed, said Bhagawan narrating a related story ascertaining the above point.
There was a Sultan once, who heard of the Mahabharata, which the Hindus revere as the fifth Veda; he commissioned a Hindu Poet of his kingdom to write a Mahabharata, with him as the hero who wins the empire back. He threatened the poet with dire punishment if he did not complete it within a stipulated time.
The poet had to agree; but he pretended he was at it, and told the Sultan that he himself is being portrayed as the eldest of the Pandava brothers and the other four Pandava brothers were his ‘viziers’. He said that in the Mahabharata he was writing, the enemies of the Sultan were the Kauravas. This made the Sultan very happy and he became restless, to read the epic as soon as it was finished. The poet, however, delayed long.
One day when asked the reason, the Poet told the Sultan, “Your Majesty! I am awaiting clarification of one simple matter from you; it is giving me a lot of trouble, this problem. The queen is, in my epic, the counterpart of the queen of the eldest of the Pandavas; this is as it should be, since you are eldest of the five heroic brothers. But, in the original Mahabharata, she is the wife of all the brothers. In my poem, your viziers are those brothers; they are allotted those roles in this new version. Now, shall I depict the queen as the wife of the viziers also, or…”
The Sultan did not wait to hear the rest; he threw the entire project overboard…and sent the poet away.
II Samastha Lokah Sukhino Bhavantu II
Posted in Storytime With Baba |
