The story behind the story

Brahma, the creator, created human beings and all things on the Earth. The four Vedas too. However, the Vedas, which were divine revelations, were available to only the ones who were allowed to recite it…How then can the avarice and ignorance of the common people be addressed? The wise ones went to Brahma to ask about it. They requested him to create something that would bring the essences of the four Vedas to the unlettered common people tilling the land and working with their hands. Brahma meditated on the question for a while and created the fifth Veda!

The magic of the fifth Veda
The fifth or the Panchama Veda made human beings the creators of stories. They were given the power to tell tales to each other in about 64 different modes including narrating, painting, sculpting, drama, dancing, singing, etc. Thus story telling came into vogue. At least this is what the Natyashastra tells us.

Therefore, they began to create stories… In addition, the telling and retellings created more and more fantastic imagery.

Do you how and when an eclipse occurs? In the beginning of the world, they churned the milky ocean to get at the pot of nectar at its bottom, which would give the Gods immortality. When they finally got at it, all hell broke loose with the demons running away with it. Vishnu became Mohini, the enchantress who mesmerised the demons into giving her the pot with the nectar. She began to serve only when everyone could sit in a row and began with the Gods. The nectar pot became empty by the time she came to the demons’ row. But the Gods Chandra and Surya screamed that two who were not Gods but disguised as such had just been served. Rahu and Ketu had just tasted nectar. Vishnu went into his Vishwaroopa and used his weapon, the disc to cut their heads off. Because they had tasted nectar, their heads are still living. The nectar had not yet made below their necks, so their bodies died. The heads of Rahu and Ketu keep going around trying to take revenge on Chandra and Surya for outing them. They do catch up with them once in a while. They have to swallow them since they do have limbs to fight, but because their necks are open, Chandra and Surya can easily come out at the other end.

Such fantastic imagination!
More fantastic is the epic Mahabharata. The powers of storytelling are stretched to extremes here. Janamejaya encourages Vaishampayana to get Vyasa to tell him the story of the Mahabharata so that Vaishampayana can tell it to Janamejaya himself and to the many Brahmins who had gathered at the snake sacrifice. The activity at the sacrifice alternates with the story. Each explains the other. Each becomes the other. Each leaves a residue and adds something. For thousands of years after the first telling, the story is being told in hundreds of hues and colours and interpretations in every corner of the country from Afghanistan to Indonesia. Vyasa had begun to tell the story so that something immeasurable, sanctifying, purifying, atoning and blessing might spread out from it, something at whose expense, the best of story tellers would live.
What is interesting is that the story of Ramayana, as in Mahabharata, also is told in the story itself. The children of Rama tell his own story to him.

Stories like no other
Why did Vyasa and Valmiki choose to tell the story of such complication? Even a tenth of the stories within the Mahabharata and the Ramayana would be enough to allude to the infinite complication of existence. Whatever happens in the Jambu dvipa, there is always a residue, an excess, something that overflows, something that goes beyond. They are crests on the wave of migration (Samsara). The stories are just one of the knots in the innumerable weaves of everything that stitches with everything. Going back in time to what came before it, or forward a little, after it ended, we encounter a net that brushes us on every side and immediately we are struck by the conviction that we will never see the edges of net, because there are no edges.

Everyone sat down, in the grass or around a fire and listened to these stories. Often the stories were familiar for the rituals they were performing came from these stories. The Mahabharata was called the fifth Veda. It was said that anyone who knew the four Vedas with their branches and likewise the Upanishads, but who did not know Mahabharata possessed no knowledge whatsoever.

The story of the last battles in Troy were told by Homer, a blind poet. The battle of Kurukshetra was handed down to us as told to a blind king Dhritharashtra. It makes no sense to tell a story to someone who had witnessed it. It is the mind that has to conjure the imagery of the story. Therein lies the magic of the story.

In the beginning, stories were no more than appendices to knowledge, but gradually the time given over to them grew in the gaps in that knowledge like grass between bricks, expanded and multiplied in stories that generated more stories, until they covered the whole construction of knowledge. After many many tellings, literature began.

Kalidasa added the episode of the curse of Durvasa on Shakuntala and the ring that would bring the memory of the king back. Actually, no such excuse is allowed to Dushyanta for forgetting Shakuntala in the original story in the Mahabharata. This magical addition has added lustre to the story and this is what people like to remember.

Telling a story is a way of having things happen at the highest possible speed; that of the mind.

All arts are a form of storytelling
All arts are a form of storytelling. An idea blossomed into a form of communication, whether through the body or words or colours or abstraction. Stories are the most durable texture of life for us and help us assimilate the perception of the powers in and around us. All narratives are to bring about rapture. Rapture is a word connected with possession. It is a path to knowledge.

Along with all the hardship of living comes that urge to believe in the divine and the creativity of the arts. That surplus of the creative impulse is simply life. There is no life without surplus. Whatever one does with that surplus, decides the shape of a culture, of a life, of a mind. There were certain cultures that decided they had to offer it in some way. It is not clear to whom, why, and how, but that was the idea. There are other cultures, like ours, where all this is almost like magic realism. It exemplifies a consciousness, which is characterised by an undifferentiated, unmediated blend of the routine, and the divine, the mundane and the mystic, a state of mind, which sees no essential dichotomy between myth and reality.

Advaita tells us that the world itself is a myth. Therefore, no matter what we are doing, we are in the midst of a fable. Fables are by definition what enchant us. The only question is whether we perceive it or not.

Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches. Unless one takes into account all possible variants, one cannot truly understand it. There is a sort of wondrous fever that can go on, and that is very near a feeling of happiness. The Sanskrit word tapas, “ardour”, is deeply connected with this. The very purpose of drama as mentioned in the Natyashastra in an answer by Bharata, given to Atreya and other sages who enquired about the origin and purpose of Natyaveda which was on par with the Srutis, was to give a pastime to cure the qualities of lust, covetousness, jealousy, wrath and misery of the people.

Do we need to sustain stories?
To survive sanely we must and let every generation make its own meaning of the stories.

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