I am familiar with the Vedas from my
yoga teacher training course, so I thought it was really neat that the same author, Vyasa, wrote both the Mahabharata and the Vedas. The beginning of the Mahabharata struck me as odd; more
specifically, in Vyasa and Ganesha, the fact that King Uparichara’s semen fell into
the water to impregnate a fish with twins and also that the girl had a fishy
smell but she made a deal and became sweet-smelling from up to seven miles away
make for a very original story.
As in the Ramayana, a reference to
the lotus flower appears in King Shantanu and Ganga, which reads, “Her
celestial garments had the splendor of lotus blooms…” This comes from a
beautiful paragraph describing a goddess who King Shantanu believes to be Ganga
in human form. I was confused why she was casting all of her children into the
Ganges river but upon re-reading this section, it was very clear that she was
making a sacrifice for Devavrata.
Sacred Lotus. Source: Wikimedia Commons
My first glance at King Shantanu and Satyavati made me think of the Sanskrit word ‘satya’, which means
truthfulness according to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Furthermore, another
translation of satya, which I found on this Veda online glossary, is unchangeable; I
love the concept of truthfulness and unchangeable as being synonyms. I wonder if
the word satya has anything to do with the name Satyavati.
