Reading Diary A

Wow, so much has happened in the Mahabharata that it's almost hard to be able to remember the details of each encounter!  As I am a little behind on the reading I've covered a little bit different amount of reading in order to catch up to where I should be.  As such I'd like to cover a couple of the stories that I found to be the most prominent to me.  Something that I've noticed in the Mahabarata is the occurrence of individual adventures of the Pandu brothers, such as when Bhishma married the she-demon and went to live with her for a while, or such as when Arjuna exiled himself for twelve years and came back with another wife.

27. Wife of the five Pandavas

I thought this was really interesting, not just because she was destined to be the wife of all five men, but because they seemed to be really okay with the five of them all sharing the same woman. My interest was really piqued at the way that the brothers even had rules and that there were no mention of jealousies between the brothers when one of the five was with her.  It's a little hard for me to understand how a woman could have five husbands!  Not only that but Draupadi's father actually was okay with the fact that she was marrying five men!

37. The Gambling Match

So this scene was the hardest for me to read, because not only did Yudhishthira agree to gamble knowing that he didn't know how, but he also agreed knowing full well that Shakuni did not gamble fairly.  Then while gambling, Yudhishthira knowingly gambled away all of his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and then the last straw of gambling away their wife Draupadi!  Could he really be so stupid as to not see the plot of Durodhana in this?  It was really hard for me to read knowing how stupid it seemed!

40. The Second Match

Alright, so not only did Yudhishthira lose everything the first time and then get his freedom back through his wife, but he stupidly agreed to a second gambling match!  This time he lost everything again and thus had to go into exile with his brothers and wife for twelve years in the forest!!  Who chose this guy to be king again?

After all this the Pandavas and their wife entered the forest to live with the sages in rags and with only an everful pot of food to keep them from becoming hungry.  While in exile Duryodhana tried to spy on them causing another of his failures where he was defeated by the gandharvas so that the Pandavas had to come rescue him.  This caused Duryodhana to become depressed and he vowed to let himself die for his failure and his embarrassment.  However a goddess carried him from death and gave him a new vigor for life, saying that he would have help in defeating the Pandavas.  So on the struggle between Duryodhana and the Pandavas continues!

Messenger to Pandavas