Verses for the Brave: Selections from The Yoga-Vasistha (A Remarkable Conversation between the Young Rama and the Celebrated Guru Vasistha)

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Verses for the Brave is a selection of 218 verses from the remarkable Sanskrit work, the Yoga Vasistha (Vasistha's Yoga). The work purports to be Valmiki's account of a series of public conversations between the sixteen-year-old Rama and the celebrated guru of his royal family, Vasistha. The dialogue in this addresses questions, for which Rama has upon his encounter with the world that he cannot find answers. These questions are concerned (in the final analysis) with the problem of action in a morally complex and hugely imperfect world.

What makes the book so remarkable-perhaps even unique in Indian philosophical literature- is its advocacy of the overriding importance of analysis and human effort. The issues are discussed in a style that is forceful, elegant, and poetic. This selection of verses reflects the author's attitude towards the world, and to life in general, and gives flavour to one facet of a many-sided work of epic length. It is a facet that has appealed to one working scientist, offering a philosophy for the brave. A gorgeous rendition of a significant companion to the Ramayana, it offers the heroes of now a philosophy of the past.

RODDAM NARASIMHA (1933-2020) was a renowned fluid dynamicist and aerospace engineer with a deep interest in Indian history and philosophy. He held professorships at the Indian Institute of Science and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research and directed the National Aerospace Laboratories and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India. He was a foreign associate of the American National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Royal Society of London, a distinguished alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science and the California Institute of Technology, and was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India.

The first edition of Verses for the Brave was published by the National Institute of Advanced Studies in the year 2000. All copies from the first and second prints have been exhausted. Meanwhile I have added 65 new verses with their English translations in this new edition published by Penguin Random House India. All the verses in the first edition are retained.

As most of the verses in this book were already in the first edition, I would like here to express my gratitude to the many friends who helped me with the first edition. These included Dr U.N. Sinha, Prof. A. Prabhu and Prof. S.M. Deshpande, who shared their love of Sanskrit works with me, and my colleagues at the time, Prof. B.V. Sreekantan, Prof. Ravi Kapur, Dr Raja Ramanna and Dr Sangeetha Menon, for their comments on the first draft of the first edition.