Teaching the Mahabarata: Part 1

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Fredo: So, first off, for readers that aren’t fully up to date on their Hindu mythology epics, tell us a little about the Mahabarata.

Tony:  The Mahabarata is one of the major Sanskrit epics. It’s title roughly means, “The great story of the Bharata dynasty.” The oldest parts likely come from around the 4th century BCE and likely matured into its current form around the 8th or 9th century CE. It stands at around 100,000 verses and 2 million words, and most estimates place it at being 10-times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Therefore, it’s a little hard to say what exactly it contains. It is broken into 18 major books, and uses a story-in-a-story structure to cover a great many topics and plot lines. It largely centers the adventures and trials of several generations of the ruling family. It contains a great deal of philosophical material, either encoded in the stories or discussed directly.

Fredo:  And the Bhagavad Gita is one portion of the Mahabarata.

Krishna

Tony:  Yes. In the middle of the 18 books is the Gita, comprised of 18 chapters, where two of the more central characters of the epic, Arjuna and Krishna, engage in a long discussion. The events of the Bhagavad Gita occur at a critical juncture wherein Arjuna is asked to take a difficult path and cannot bring himself to follow it. Arjuna is well trained, well educated, and doesn’t understand how he can commit certain acts that clash with his understanding of the world. Krishna uses this moment to articulate a new philosophy and consistently articulates that it is a break with traditional Vedic-based philosophical and spiritual systems and practices. Instead, this new philosophy, which he calls yoga, is offered as a more refined and nuanced path. Within yoga, as Krishna defines it, Arjuna’s conflict is resolved and he is empowered to battle on.

Fredo:  Awesome. So, what inspired you to decide to teach not just the Gita, but the entire epic?

Tony:  I found my voice as a teacher a few years ago as a mythic storyteller. As a student in Los Angeles, I often requested stories from one of my teachers, Scott Lewicki, who knew so many and told them well. I found I would get quite a bit more out of classes built around these types of stories, but it was some time before I realized that this would be a place I’d find solid footing as a teacher. Myth is a somewhat undervalued form of communication and instruction in our culture and most stories we receive are categorized as either fact, or entertaining fiction. As Douglas Brooks likes to say, “Myth is a lie told in service of a greater truth.” A myth doesn’t seek to present facts about what happened, but lie to you, openly, about events that likely did not and/or cannot happen. The work then is to extract from it the greater truth the story is trying to communicate. Good myths contain elements of fundamental human truth and serve to enrich our consciousness by touching our hearts. A good myth, well told and understood, cannot be untold, but instead, has to be retold. When I find and understand a good story, I can’t help but tell it to someone else. Fortunately, for the last five years I’ve had a great group of regular students who are interested in receiving what inspires me.

As to why the Mahabarata? It came about for several reasons. I’ve been teaching stories for years and the hardest part of it is simply finding new stories. Preparation for class usually involved some time on the internet looking for stories, or links to books that contain stories. A few months before I decided to teach Mahabarata I found that my searches kept bringing me to Ramesh Menon’s, The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering. Through these searches and reading the available excerpts from Google Books I learned that many of the stories I had been finding or telling, or had been told, were coming from Mahabharata. I decided that it was a great resource and purchased the volumes.

Shortly afterwords I was taking classes from Darcy Lyon during a period when she was teaching the Bhagavad Gita chapter-by-chapter. These were wonderfully inspiring classes made more so by the consistent week-to-week connection she created by building on previous chapters. I thought, “I’d like to do this someday,” but knew I couldn’t, at least not at that moment, because I didn’t understand the Gita to the depth, and certainly not the perspective, she did. If I wanted to teach it I’d have to study it and present it in my own voice. I knew the Gita was part of the larger Mahabarata epic, so I was curious how I would understand it if I read it in context of the greater work. The Gita picks up at the precipice of a great battle, but nothing in the Gita proper tells you about why this battle has come about, what the stakes are, why the good guys are the good guys, and why the bad guys are the bad guys, who Arjuna is and why it’s up to him to lead the battle, etc. etc. I was curious how my students and I would receive the Gita having understood fully the events that brought the characters to this point. Specifically, if you know what everyone has been through, would you be more engaged in trying to understand the philosophy and how it resolves Arjuna’s paradox, and coincidentally would that make yoga and its application to our own lives more palpable and meaningful?

Once I received my copies of the translation I purchased I dismissed, for a time, the idea of teaching the epic this way. The Gita appears about 1,000 pages into the translation I have, and it seemed like it would taken years to get there (and it did). Additionally, while I have attended a lot of workshops with Douglas Brooks, John Friend, and others; have been taught the Gita specifically; have been told a handful of stories from Mahabharata, and studied Tantrik philosophy for years; I don’t have “proper” academic or lineage-based training in the complete epic to render a wholly authentic and comprehensive interpretation of what it contains.

But this mindset did not last long. Tantra is meant to empower and there are several key ideas and teachings that started to rattle around in my head, nudging me on to start this. Specifically, Tantra, as it has been taught to the Anusara community, is described as a ‘householder’ tradition wherein the teachings are meant to be accessible to non-specialist/non-priest individuals who authentically desire to invest in its learning. Secondly, we say that devoted seekers have everything they need to achieve their desires. Thirdly, if I did this I wouldn’t be teaching a graduate seminar on Hindu literature, but an asana class to working professionals wherein I would have about 10 minutes per week to convey a story, its interpretation, and 1-3 key points. Fourth, life and its events do not show up for you when you are wholly prepared, trained, tested, and deemed ready to receive them. Life just happens, and you just dig in the best you can. Finally, the yogi’s response to life happening is, no matter what, to relentlessly find a way to create a state of life-affirming alignment with whatever is happening and find our way through it, light and dark moments alike.

Thus, I realized that presenting the epic in totality would be an opportunity to not just offer the teachings through discussing myth, but allow me to challenge my own practice by consistently embodying these principles myself. Specifically, could I, each week, jump into the next unknown story, find a life-affirming meaning in it, no matter what, and extract the key Tantrik principle at play in the story or its resolution? Additionally, could each story, some of which are over 2,000 years old, be made relevant to modern life? Also, since covering the epic could take several years, could I connect each class to the previous one to create a sense of continuity?

So, the ground rules I laid out for myself, and told my class, was that each week we would be covering the next story/chapter, whatever it was. While I do read ahead, I have a rule about not reading very far ahead. Real life has surprises and sudden course changes, as does the Mahabharata. If there were to be surprises along the way I didn’t want to have weeks and weeks to ponder them, but deal with them almost in real-time. Additionally, since part of the goal was to cultivate a greater sense of community around the shared experience of participating in this project, I also articulated several broader themes that would encapsulate the entire endeavor. Specifically we would look at how the stories treat concepts like community (the whole of the epic resists the partitioning/fracturing of our humanity), the meaning of dharma (specifically its definition as ‘that which supports’ or ‘the process by which we create meaning’), and yoga (defined more broadly as the relationship between subject and object).

Fredo: Let’s talk a little bit about format. You cover, what, about one chapter a week? Have you ever skipped chapters or stretched one chapter out over multiple weeks?

Tony:  Yes, I’m working out of a translation and serialized presentation of the Mahabharata. It’s been broken down conveniently such that one chapter is about the size of what can be effectively communicated in one class. I’ve definitely had to stretch out single chapters over weeks, or sometimes over a month, and occasionally two short chapters have been combined into a coherent whole. It’s important that, when choosing the beginning and ending events for a story I will tell in class to make sure it’s not too long and conveys too much, or the whole message could be lost. It’s been a great teacher to me in taking just the right amount of time. In contrast, if the treatment isn’t thorough enough to fully picture the situation and the character’s response to it, the teaching could come off as trite.

I’ve experienced the need to stretch out, or condense chapters, with the Bhagavad Gita. The opening two chapters have A LOT going on. Krishna pours out a tremendous amount of teaching and each of those chapters took at least two weeks to present the most significant threads. While I could’ve spent a month or more on each chapter, I decided to keep moving to maintain a steady forward pace. In a regular class you have to maintain a certain pacing of the poses, instructions, etc., or the class will feel rushed or too slow. I think, when connecting classes to each other over weeks/months/years around common threads, it’s also important to keep a steady pace. While there is no ‘deadline’ to complete this project, I believe it is critical to maintain a sense of steady consistent progression so that each week’s classes, and the main themes of the epic I’m trying to convey, stay coherently connected to each other.

I have skipped chapters, but very rarely. There are only two categories of story I will skip. The first are what I call housekeeping stories. These generally involve long descriptions of political machinations that, ultimately, lead to something you can say in one or two sentences. The other type of story I will skip are ones where explicit sex and/or unusual sex acts are a key facet of the story. While they can usually be glossed over or softened, in a few stories the sex or act is wholly critical to the story itself. Tantrics do not have many issues around discussing sex, especially fictional sex, per se, but my regular class is a public drop-in class. While most of my students, and the neighborhood in which I teach, are certainly liberal, I can’t assume that about everyone. It is also not unusual for children under 18 years old to attend this class given its proximity to Stanford and some local highs chools. Avalon is a yoga studio, but also a place of business. If the story would be inappropriate to tell at the water cooler of my workplace to my boss, I don’t take it to class. In each case I will say that I had to skip something, or that there’s more to the story than I can tell right now. In most of those cases people have asked me for the details after class, usually at dinner, in a more appropriate social setting.

There was, one incident, of skipping a story that I found to be too cruel and unjust. I left it behind for several weeks until one day when I was having lunch with a group of other Anusara teachers. Someone else brought up the same story and everyone at the table was shocked and repulsed by it, just as I had been. When I saw how upset it made everyone, I realized it must be important and decided that, by my next class 5 days later, I would need to find the life-affirming message or experience offered by it. It took hours but eventually I found it and presented it with two themes: the one the story was trying to tell, and the other about going into the dark places and staying there until you’ve brought the light to it. Since then I haven’t skipped any more enraging stories.

Editors Note:  Look for additional posts on the teaching of the Mahabarata, soon!

Related posts:

1. Teaching the Mahabarata: Part 2
2. Teaching the Mahabarata: Part 3