By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The story of Dhruva comes from the Puranic traditions, especially the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana. It is, at once, a metaphysical story, as well as a story of devotion, recounted most simplistically. Once upon a time, there was a boy called Dhruva, who wanted…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist A thousand years after the Buddha’s nirvana, Buddhists finally acquired a Goddess of (almost) equal stature to the Buddha. Before this, the only Goddess who was very prominent in Buddhist literature was Shri or the Goddess of Fortune, clearly included within the Buddhist iconography by the…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In popular re-tellings, the Mahabharata ends tragically with vast bloodshed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, where the Kauravas are defeated by the Pandavas. Following this episode, there is the Ashwamedha Parva. It describes how Yudhishthira becomes king and lets loose his royal horse across the land,…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The Buddhists and the Hindus share the idea of the land becoming sacred, when it is connected with the body of a holy being. Let us first hear the Buddhist story. We are told that when Buddha died, his body was cremated, and after the cremation,…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In the Vedas, long before people knew about Gods such as Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, there was a story of how the God of Heaven committed incest with the Goddess of Dawn, his daughter. Now this is called the problem of primal incest, which is found…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In Hinduism, God cannot be divine without the Goddess. There is no Vishnu without Lakshmi. No Shiva without Shakti. No Brahma without Saraswati. But it is a mystery for many why Hindus, for whom divinity is both male and female, treat women so badly. Aren’t women…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In South India, Kartikeya is worshipped as Murugan, who stands on top of mountains. On either side of him stand his two wives, Valli and Sena. Valli is a tribal girl, while Sena is a celestial princess, the daughter of Indra. There are songs of Murugan’s…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist A dramatic shift happened in Buddhism roughly 500 years after the historical Buddha. This dramatic shift is the rise of what is called Mahayana Buddhism or the Great Vehicle of Buddhism. This thought perhaps emerged in Kashmir and Afghanistan and spread to China, where it was…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Back in the year 2011, I went to an exhibition of Sudarshan Sahoo, master stone carver from Odisha, at Jehangir Art Gallery, and saw an image of Krishna, standing with flute in hand. What caught my eye was the nose-ring worn by Krishna on the right…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In the Puranas, we have heard the story of the Narasimha avatar. Hiranyakashipu had obtained a boon from Brahma that he should not be killed by either man or animal, at day or at night, above or below, inside or outside, by neither weapon nor tool….