hitopadesha

Many of you must have come across the picture of Lord Ganesha, the elephant God in the Hindu pantheon, in some way or another. He is one of the Gods that have the most number of followers and he appeals to both the young and the old. Some of you who do not have an insight into the Hindu way of life would be surprised by my statement that how could a God be called appealing to the young and the old. Is he not a God who is represented the same way to everyone? Well, this is true and yet not totally true when you look at things from the perspective of a practioner of Hindu dharma. Gods can be revered, respected, feared, made friends with or even can be scolded by the devotees. Well, more about the relationship between humans and God in a different post.

So, if you have seen the picture of Lord Ganesha you would have noticed that he has the head of an elephant and one of his tusks is broken. Here is the story of how it happened. Like always, there are many versions with subtle differences but rigouresness is not the objective of this blog.

The Mahabharatha war was over and things were slowly returning to normal. Lord Brahma felt that this epic incident should not go un-documented and he wanted someone to take on the role of writing down the entire sequence of incidents that led to the war including the connecting events and lives of the people who were involved. As this process requires someone with great knowledge and wisdom to take on such a task, Brahma felt that the right candidate would be Sage Ved Vyasa himself. So he set out to meet him and discuss how this can be accomplished.

Vyasa, on hearing this proposal, agreed with Brahma that this should indeed be documented for future generations and that he would be more than happy to take on this task. He then said that he would not have any problems composing the entire epic document in the form of poetry but that the actual scribe must be someone else since it would be a hinderence in his thought process if he had to compose as well as write. Brahma then immediately suggested that the right person for this job was Ganesha as he is wise and learned and will not have any problems keeping pace with Vyasa. So, it was settled that Vyasa would do the reciting and Ganesha would do the writing.

Well, Ganesha was not too thrilled about this proposition that he would have to sit and write for days on end when Vyasa would be reciting the slokas. So he decided to make life a bit difficult to Vyasa and said that if he were to be the scribe then the condition would be that Vyasa should not take a break in his recitation and that Ganesha’s pen should not stop from writing. Vyasa was not to be fooled so easily. He knew the task ahead of him was quite difficult and that he would require breaks in between to think and compose. So, he put forth a counter condition that whatever he recites, Ganesha must understand it before writing them down. Both agreed to each other’s conditions and set upon the task of documenting what we have today as various puranams.

During the course of writing, Ganesha used to write extremely fast to make it difficult for Vyasa to keep pace and Vyasa would in turn compose the most complicated of verses which would make Ganesha take a break to understand the meaning and then write it. This gave a chance for Vyasa to spend more time thinking about the next verse.

Many days passed with both the experts engaged completely in the documentation process. On one such day, Ganesha’s pen broke down and Vyasa was on the mood to recite a very long verse with breakneck speed. Ganesha did not know what to do as he did not have a spare pen to write with. Having made a statement before beginning the task that his pen should not stop while writing it would not be a bright idea to ask Vyasa to stop his recitation so he could arrange for another writing instrument. So immediately, Ganesha broke one of his tusks and used that as a pen and continued writing and finally completed the epic work. Thus to this day, you see that Ganesha has one of his tusks broken in half.

A nice story behind his appreance isn’t? So what do we learn from this. We see that before taking on a major task, we should cover our bases so that we have a fall back in case the task seems insurmountable half-way down the line. And in addition, it also tells us that having committed to something, one should go the extra mile to fulfill what one has agreed to.

I hope you enjoyed this story and until next time,

peace,
aditya.