The Wisdom hub: stories from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Yoga Vasishtha for parents

DharmaCode starts from the Bhagavad Gita, but the Gita sits inside a much larger library. This hub collects short, careful retellings of stories from three of our great texts: the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Yoga Vasishtha. Each page tells one story, quotes the passage from a public-domain English translation with a reference you can check, and then asks what the story can teach a teenager and the parent standing beside them.

How are these stories chosen?

We pick stories that speak to the questions DharmaCode is built around: what is my child naturally good at, how do talent and effort fit together, and how do we choose well under pressure. Abhimanyu is about knowing half a skill. Ekalavya is about learning with no one's permission. Hanuman is about forgetting your own strength until someone reminds you. Gadhi and Lila are about how real a life can feel, and how we decide what matters inside it.

Where do the quotes come from?

Every quotation on these pages is taken word for word from a translation now in the public domain:

• Mahabharata: Kisari Mohan Ganguli's English translation (published 1883 to 1896).
• Ramayana: Ralph T. H. Griffith's verse translation (1870 to 1874).
• Yoga Vasishtha: Vihari-Lala Mitra's English translation (1891 to 1899).
• Bhagavad Gita: Kashinath Trimbak Telang (1882) and Edwin Arnold (1885).

Older translations use older English, so we keep quotations short and retell the rest in plain words. Where a well-known detail of a story comes from a later retelling rather than the text itself, we say so.

Is this a scholarly commentary?

No. These are retellings by a parent, written for parents. They are faithful to the translations we quote, but they are not a substitute for reading the texts themselves or learning from a teacher. If you want to go deeper, each page points to the section of the translation it draws on.

How does this connect to the DharmaCode report?

The report describes a child's natural strengths using seven patterns inspired by the Gita's idea of svabhāva, one's own nature. The seven patterns are our modern framework, not a list from the texts. The stories here are not part of the scoring. They are simply good company for the conversations a report starts at home.