Mahabharata: PDE Reading Notes A

Santanu, a king of Hastinapura in the Mahabharata, saw a beautiful woman on the banks of the river Ganga on Wikimedia

I chose the Public Domain Edition of the Mahabharata. I was excited to read that this epic has similarities to Game of Thrones, which I am a huge fan of. Reading about the similarities between the Mahabharata and Game of Thrones is something that I plan to do for my Reading Notes B post. Like the Ramayana, I found all of the names and their lineages to be extremely hard to remember. For my notes, I found that it was easiest to make bullet points of important people, relationships, and events. For some of my last posts in the Mythology and Folklore class, I have just been writing a few paragraphs about my impressions on the texts and do not need to take notes this way. Below I have posted a small section of my Mahabharata notes. I am not including all of them as they were about two and a half pages in length.

Something that I liked in this epic was that many characters are given their own storylines and are important on their own. I liked the tale about Amba and might write a story on her either this week or next week. It was interesting to read about a beautiful woman being overcome by embarrassment and grief to the point that she no longer cares about her appearance and lives (and dies to be reborn as a man) only for revenge.

At the end of the notes that I have provided, there is a definition of the Vedas from Wikipedia.

• Dhritarashtra = blind brother who becomes king w/ Bhishma as regent
• His wife = Gandhari “She became the mother of a hundred sons, the eldest of whom was Duryodhana. These were the princes who were named the Kauravas, after the country of Kuru Jangala.”
• Duryodhana grew up evil-minded, proud, and jealous
• Kunti raises sons of Pandu alone, then taken in by blind king
• Duryodhana tries to kill second Pandu son, Bhima. Bhima goes to underworld to king of serpents called nagas and becomes supernaturally strong
• Vasuki = king of nagas
• “Drona, who will become the guru (teacher) to the young Pandavas and to the Kauravas, their cousins. You will also learn about Drona's boyhood friendship with King Drupada — a friendship which later turned to hatred. An important thing to note here is that Drona, one of the warrior heroes of the epic, is a brahmin by birth, not a kshatriya (warrior)”

• “The Vedas (/ˈveɪdəz/;[1] Sanskrit: वेद veda, "knowledge") are a large body of knowledge texts originating in the ancient Indian subcontinent. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.[2][3] Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman"[4] and "impersonal, authorless".”

You can access the Mahabharata here: link.

Mahabharata. Public Domain Edition.