by Satsvarūpa dāsa Adhikārī (ISKCON Boston)

A transcendentalist is generally not interested in mundane topics such as history and politics, but when the Supreme Personality of Godhead Sri Krsna appeared in human society 5,000 years ago, the history and politics in which He took part became spiritualized. The transcendental devotees of the Lord take great pleasure in hearing such narratives. The Mahabharata, an important Vedic literature, is such a spiritualized history, and it is accepted by the disciplic succession of spiritual masters as the actual history of Bharata-varsa, the ancient land which is now called India. The Mahabharata deals chiefly with the struggles of the Pandava brothers, great warriors and pious rulers to whom Krsna was related as a cousin. Krsna's devotees are inseparably one in interest with the Lord, and therefore their activities are also taken to be as good as those of the Lord Himself. There is a famous palace intrigue related in the Mahabharata in which Krsna sent one of His pure devotees, Vidura, a brilliant political moralist, to stop an impending war between the Kurus and the Pandavas. For the purification of all readers, we here present a short transcendental history of Krsna and His associates, as related in Mahabharata and the Srimad-Bhagavatam.

King Dhrtarastra, blind from birth, was ruling the kingdom of the world. He is described as being blind both in material and spiritual vision. Lord Krsna, the Personality of Godhead, appeared in the king's court and pleaded for the return of some land which was the rightful property of His powerful but exiled relatives, the Pandava brothers. Every word Krsna speaks, as recorded in scriptures like Srimad-Bhagavatam and Bhagavad-gita is relished like nectar by those who are not so entangled in matter that they cannot appreciate the transcendental vibration. But when Krsna addressed the assembly of King Dhrtarastra and pleaded for a peaceful settlement, the message was not taken very seriously by the king and his one hundred sons, led by Duryodhana. These rulers were thinking themselves independent of the Personality of Godhead and His laws, and they were intent on their own course of destroying the Pandavas. Due to losing their kingdom in a gambling match, the Pandavas, the rightful hereditary heirs to the throne, were exiled for a term of thirteen years. When the period of exile was over, they returned to the kingdom which was rightfully theirs, but were refused even so much as the rule of a single village. In fact, Duryodhana, the leader of the sons of Dhrtarastra, said that if the Pandavas wanted even as much land as can fit under the point of a pin, they would have to fight for it.