Epics of India

I started by looking at an Indian holiday called Janmashtami  which is actually just a celebration of the birth of Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. There is a bunch of fasting, eating, dancing, and meditating that happens in celebration of this holiday. This made me look closer at Krishna himself, and I learned quite a bit about how he has been portrayed through Hindu literature, and how those portrayals inspired dances such as  Kathakali , which is like a play and a dance all in one. They also wear costumes like the one below. Kathakali Costume From that page, I also found a link to Bharata Muni . He was essentially the father of Indian theater and was an ancient dramaturg. 

I wanted to learn more about Shiva this week, so that was my starting point. I found out that among his countless fearsome and brutal depictions, he is also known as the god of yoga. Learning about Shiva led me to wonder about other Hindu deities , so I followed a link for principal deities. What I found here is that Hinduism has a very large number of deities. I also followed a link for Devi , since I had no idea what it was. Turns out, that is is just the Sanskrit word for goddess. In this new page I found reference to a goddess named Mahatmya, who is the inspiration of Shaktism . This is a really interesting ideology within Hinduism in which the supreme being is female. This has a lot to do with entities such as Kali, and is a really interesting read. Shaktism

So I finally decided I wanted to start with the Hanuman page. Shocker really, considering my two favorite stories that I've written so far are about him. While looking through the page this time around, I found mention of Bhakti Yoga . Honestly, I thought yoga was yoga so I naturally decided to look deeper. Turns out that Bhakti Yoga is a "spiritual path of loving devotion to a personal Divine." My interpretation of that is that you spend time every day in quiet meditation, relaxing your body and praying to the Divine that resonates most with you. I'm not sure if that is correct, but that's what I understood. This particular yoga was apparently discussed in the Bhagavad Gita . This is a collection of verses and scripts that discuss the interactions of Arjuna and Krishna. This book is apparently a part of the Mahabharata , which is much larger than the version we are reading for class. From the sounds of it, the original Mahabharata is 2000 verses. For re...

Saraswati So I had seen somewhere mention of a goddess, Saraswati , who is the goddess of all knowledge. In reading about her, I saw the word Dharma , which has been continuously popping up in this class, and I decided to finally read on a little about it. Dharma is essentially a bunch of different behaviors that make the universe possible. It seems to be a pretty abstract concept. But reading through its page, I came to Yudhishthira , who is the son of some god and goddess, but more importantly to me, he took part in the Kurukshetra War . This is also know as the Mahabharata, so I got a little taste of what is to come in our next book. It sounds like a power struggle between two factions for the throne.

We've read about Lanka quite a bit recently, so I decided to look a little bit more into Sri Lanka , which is supposedly one and the same as appears in the Ramayana, and the bridge of islands fits the tales. It turns out, that Sri Lanka has had many names in its history. This led me to find that the first is the name of the first kingdom to exist in Sri lanka: Tambapanni , which means "copper-red earth." It was apparently once inhabited entirely by she demons called Yakkhinis. And I found that  Prince Vijaya made Tambapanni his kingdom after landing on the beaches on the day of Buddha's death. Vijaya tied threds around the wrists of his followers for protection, which eventually led Kuveni , one of the she-demons, to become his consort, since she could not kill his men. That seems a little odd to me, but whatever. She had been the queen of the Yakkhas. He eventually makes her leave the island, after using her to kill all her sisters. Vijaya sounds like he was a c...

To start my mini Wikipedia adventure, I decided to look into Rakshasas . Like I've talked about in other posts, these are cannibalistic creatures in Hindu mythology, similar to demons. Hindu Mythology  is based from a very large collection of stories in a number of famous texts. The texts keep stories from previous ones with little evolutions and twists as each story gets retold and others get added. These have a wide range of content from cosmic origins to godly battles and different ways of life. Hindu Mythology Hindu Cosmology  is the belief that the universe exists in a repeating cycle of creation and destruction. It is born, exists for a period of time before collapsing and immediately being born anew. It also talks about different realms in the universe, which exist around our own. Patala  are the subterranean. These would be the equivalent to the underworld from Western cultures. Interestingly enough, this region is apparently considered to be mor...