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A Father Deciding His Child's Path
“Then how can the experiences of a time gone by be of benefit to a new generation?”
About this teaching
A father always wishes for his child's happiness and remains anxious for his future. For this reason he is forever trying to decide his children's path himself. The path the father has walked himself, whose stones and pebbles he has seen with his own eyes, whose shade and whose burning sun he has known himself — every father wishes that his son too should walk that same path.
Chapter 2 — Parents
Chapter 2 of 35 — 5 parts, 10 min in total.
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Parents, and the long shadow their wishes cast over their children.
Almost every catastrophe in the Mahabharata can be traced to a parent. Dhritarashtra cannot refuse his son. Gandhari blindfolds herself rather than see. Kunti abandons a child and keeps the secret for a lifetime. Shantanu's desire costs Bhishma everything.
The epic is unusually clear-eyed here: it does not present parents as villains, but as people whose love, unexamined, becomes the instrument of harm. What a parent wants for a child and what the child owes the world are not the same thing, and the gap between them drives much of the plot.
