This simple Bengali folktale, illustrating the power of faith, was passed down from teacher to disciple: from Sri Ramakrishna to Swami Vivekananda and from him to Sister Nivedita, who recounted it in ‘Cradle Tales of Hinduism’. Little Gopal is afraid to walk alone through the forest to school. His mother tells him, “Call out to your cowherd brother. He will come and protect you”. When Gopal calls out, to his delight, a cowherd with dancing eyes appears and escorts him to school…..
The gentle wit and wisdom of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa pervades this collection of tales. Drawing upon common weaknesses – arrogance, greed and narrow-mindedness among others – he makes us laugh even as we recognise some of our petty weaknesses.
Tapati, the daughter of Surya, catches the site of the mortal Samvarana and falls in love with him. She appears before him in the forest and he is so enchanted by her, he swoons and falls on the ground. Tapati and Samvarana had a son named Kuru, the ancestors of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The field of Kurukshetra upon which the battle takes place is also named after Kuru.
In the kingdom of Hemangada, a treacherous minister named Kattiyangaran, decides to usurp the throne, and kill the entire royal family. Queen Vijaya escapes the slaughter. In a dark cremation ground, unhappy and alone, she gives birth to a child and puts his father's royal ring upon his finger. The child grows up to be Prince Jivaka. Jivaka has many adventures but the core of the book becomes apparent in the end when a weary Jivaka decides to renounce his kingdom and become a Jain monk.
The hypocrisy of the famous, the unquenchable greed of the rich, the smugness of the ignorant are often encountered in our everyday world. Yet, when Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa weaves them into a story, they make us laugh and alert us to our own weaknesses, setting us firmly on the road to being better human beings.
A hundred sons, the sages say, are a hundred blessings. Gandhari's hundred Kaurava sons, however, were more of a curse. Did they become evil by some divine plan or was it because she was proudly blind to their faults? Helpless as they heaped dishonour on the family, she was furious with Lord Krishna for abetting in her son's eventual slaughter. Unfortunately, her grief was overpowering, and threatened to wreak further havoc...
Shantala was the queen of Vishnu Vardhana, the ruler of the Hoysala kingdom. Brought up as a Jain, Shantala believed in ahimsa or non-violence. Her husband, on the other hand, had a single minded ambition, to free Hoysala from the rule of the Chalukya Empire, whatever be the cost. He waged wars and unleashed death and destruction on hapless people.
To his admirers, he is a great teacher and a saint. To his devotees, he is a divine incarnation. Summing up the life of Sri Ramakrishna, Will Durant, in his The Story of Civilization, writes: "All religions are good, he taught his followers; 'All rivers flow to the ocean. Flow and let others flow too!' He tolerated sympathetically the polytheism of the people and accepted humbly the monism of the philosophers; but in his own living faith God was a spirit incarnated in all men and the only true worship of God was the loving service of mankind.
Shankaravara could run faster than all his friends and swim across the Brahmaputra when it was in spate. But when his grandmother scolded him for not paying attention to his books, he took her words seriously. Named Shankar Dev by his guru, the young man fulfilled all his duties as a student and a householder before embarking on a voyage of self-discovery. A voyage which led to his starting the Vaishnava movement in Assam.
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