Reading Diary B: The Mahabharata

I really loved reading the story of The Afterlife at the end of the Mahabharata.  Something about the journey the soul might take after one dies is really fascinating to me so I am always intrigued to read anything having to do with that sort of thing.  I just imagined putting myself into Yudhishthira's perspective of having the choice to pick between eternal bliss or to stay in the depths of hell with the ones he loved.  That would be a very intense situation and it would be very hard for me to choose what to do, but Yudhishthira chose to stay in misery with his loved ones instantly without even hesitating for a second.  This would be very hard for a normal person to do and it takes lots of courage.  I thought it was very clever though that this was just a test to see if he was worthy of staying in heaven.  That would truly be a good test to see if someone is worthy of achieving eternal bliss because that is probably the hardest decision anyone would ever have to make.  I also find this section of the Mahabharata interesting because it is interesting to see how the idea of heaven and hell is viewed between all different cultures and time periods.  No matter how different two cultures might be from one another, it seems that they still generally have a very similar version of their descriptions of heaven and hell.

Yudhishthira