Destiny and Human Initiative in the Mahabharata.

• Author: Hiltebeitel, Alf
• Position: Book Review

Destiny and Human Initiative in the Mahabharata. By JULIAN F. WOODS. McGill Studies in the History of Religions. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2001. Pp. ix + 237.

In the preface to this stimulating book on the themes of destiny (mainly daiva) and human initiative (mainly purusakara) in the Mahabharata, Julian Woods sets a tone with the following statement: "The purpose and function of the text is clearly designed to be more than exemplary or even didactic; the intent is therapeutic in seeking to prompt the mind to a greater awareness of spiritual truths, and ultimately, to lead it to the joy that springs from the presence of God" (p. viii). Woods' footnote to this statement quotes a line from the Anugita--a unit of the Mahabharata that is usually considered a late interpolation, in which Krsna reencapsulates the Bhagavad Gita for Arjuna, who had forgotten it: "I am the guru, O mighty armed one, and know that the mind is my pupil" (p. 163 n. 7). Woods cites this as Mbh 14.51.45 (it should be 14.50.45) without mentioning the Anugita. After asserting that this challenge "to change ourselves" is sustained "through the allegories and images of the poet" and "taken for granted by subsequent commentators," Woods ends the same paragraph with another footnote that culls from Swami Prabhavananda's The Spiritual Heritage of India (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1979), 94 a quote from the ninth-century literary critic Anandavardhana to the effect that the epic teaches such values as renunciation, dharma, peace, and salvation and that "Vyasa himself remarks that he has sung the glory of the Lord and that his epic is the Narayana Katha, 'The Story of the Lord', and thus clearly indicating what the message of his epic is: for the story of the Pandavas is only an occasion, the purpose being to reveal the greatness of the Lord" (p. 163 n. 8). Woods quotes Prabhavananda who quotes Anandavardhana who, though no one mentions it, is quoting the Narayaniya (12.331.4ff.)--a highly devotional section of the Mahabharata's twelfth book that is likewise usually considered very late.

Woods thus makes a bold beginning, not only in terms of his emphasis on therapeutics and bhakti ("the joy that springs from the presence of God") but in setting a course by the Anugita and the Narayaniya, even if the course's initial signposts are encrypted in footnotes. Indeed, soon enough, Woods' hints at a Narayaniya reading: "There follows the extraordinary situation of the...