Why are there talking animals in Ramayana but not in Mahabharata?

From: Harendra

How come in Ramayana monkeys, birds (Garuda) etc were able to talk to human beings and vice versa and even Garuda’s brother was able to talk to monkeys like Jambavant and Angad ? But this type of incidents are not found in Mahabharata? Does it not prove that Ramayana is a kind of mythology and children s story?

Transcript

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question from harendra prabhu how come in ramayan monkeys birds garuda etc were able to talk to human beings and vice versa and even garuda’s brother was able to talk to monkeys like jambavan and angad but this type of incidents are not found in the mahabharata does it prove that ramayan is a kind of mythology and children’s story does it not prove this answer not at all the difference is primarily because the scale and scope of the two epics is different factually speaking firstly it is not garuda’s brother it is jatayu’s brother who talks with angada and hanuman that is sampatti but of course garuda also manifests in the ramayan where he talks he drives away the sarpas who have been using this snake weapon by idrajeet and then he talks with lord ram at that time but firstly it’s not factually true that there are no talking animals in the mahabharata in the mahabharata adi parva there is an elaborate story about how garuda himself became so famous how he became a vahan of vishnu and how he was born how he was enslaved because of some trickery and how became liberated how he stole the nectar and there it is described that he talks with talks with the devatas he talks with the birds he talks with when the rakshasas so garuda is quite not just a sensual being is extremely powerful being when he is going to take the nectar at that this is a different story from what is given in bhagavatam when he’s going to take the nectar at that time indra throws his thunderbolt and garuda is so powerful he says that because i don’t want to minimize the power of a thunderbolt so i will let your thunderbolt cut a fragment of my feather as a tribute to you and garuda keeps flying away and indra’s thunderbolt just whizzes off harmlessly past him so garuda certainly is not just talking but he is extremely intelligent and powerful far more powerful than even the gods what to speak of humans similarly there is hanuman ji who also makes a appearance although not so active in the mahabharata and hima and hanuman have a long conversation in when they are in the forest and they meet on the himalayan mountains similarly there are other situations where for example there are different animals that talk so we could go on on a list like this but i give two primary examples of a bird an animal that talks now the essential principle which i made at the start of the point is that the main confrontation between the ramayan in the ramayan is is between different species that is manava versus a rakshasa so ravana is a rakshasa whereas ram is a manava whereas in the mahabharata the confrontation is between two manava species actually they are not just manava species they are two branches of the same family same dynasty the kauravas and the pandavas so within this battle there is a so because the whole scale is primarily on the earth that doesn’t necessarily make any lesser lesser in significance from the point of view of the ultimate message that is given the bhagavad-gita is spoken over here but in terms of the participants it there are actually even in the mahabharata rakshasas on both sides now there is ghatotkach who fights the side of the pandavas and there is alambush who fights inside of the kauravas so there are members so the rakshasas from a literal point of view they their bodily structures are quite different from human beings and they are in that sense a different species although they may fall within the four lakh human species but they are not what we normally consider as humans Ravana is a rakshasa Duryodhana is not a rakshasa he may have a rakshasi mentality but he does not necessarily have he does not have a rakshasi body so rakshas can be a body and it can also be a mentality so the mentality of a demon can be there even among human beings whereas the body of a demon is a particular kind of form it’s quite ferocious is reserved to a particular species so in general in the mahabharata the interspecies communication or interplanetary communication the interspecies communication is lesser and lesser it is only because of some personal personal affections or agendas that the rakshasas participate in this manav yuddha it is that Ghatotkach is the son of Bhima and that’s why he participates and Alambush is a relative of Baka and other demons who have been who were miscreants and so were killed by Bhima and he wants to take revenge so he comes there so but they are not primarily involved in the battle over there so because the scale is different it’s a manav yuddha versus a manav rakshas yuddha that’s why there are not so many other species which are depicted in the Mahabharata so as far as that became mythological because of Ramayana being mythological because of hand talking animals actually it is to some extent the modern materialistic worldview which claims to be scientific but which is actually materialistic not scientific also the modern materialistic world view claims arrogance of extrapolation you know extrapolation means that if I have three points on a graph and I can just make a small line what I do is I just draw that line further and further and further and I make a graph that covers the whole page all the observations that I got were just three points so similarly materialism actually extrapolates from our tiny experience with our senses and then extrapolates and creates massive generalizations which have never been observed as general truths so all that we know within our experience on planet earth for a few thousand years as has been recorded in the historical record that modern historiography accepts we have not experience of talking animals or so we may think but whatever it is that record is very brief even from the material scientific point of view the earth has been around for a very long time and we don’t have a record of all that was there on the earth so the possibility that there are other species other realms of existence where there are other kind of people is not something which can be ruled out because of the testimony of science if it is ruled out if it is considered unscientific it is because of certain presumptions certain assumptions that whatever we have experienced is the general even universal reality so certainly we may not have experienced animals which are talking but that hardly proves that to be absolute truth now a few hundred years ago people had not seen microbes people had no idea of microbes so does that mean microbes didn’t exist now extrapolating from our general from our experience to absolute truths is called inductive reasoning and David Hume has pointed out very strongly that inductive reasoning is never reliable so his arguments have never been refuted for that you can see the article difference between science and scientism to understand this difference but how are talking animals possible from the vedic perspective actually speaking we should not think of the vanaras as ordinary monkeys although sometimes they are equated that way the vanaras are celestial apes in the hierarchy actually the vanaras are in many ways more powerful than humans so they were not just monkeys who are loafing around in the streets they may have bodies that by shape are similar but by power the vanaras were quite powerful so that’s how they actually are a different species which is not exactly the same as the kind of monkeys that we see here so souls who have a particular kind of karma are born in that species so so all that we can say honestly is that life as we know it and as long as we have known it is not found anywhere else but as we know it and as long as we have seen it are both very limited in terms of space and time and that’s why we shouldn’t arrogantly extrapolate from our experience to arrive at what we think are universal truths they are not so when we have this open-minded attitude then you understand that there are the various scriptures describe 8.4 million species and different species accepted exist in different realms and that’s why we can’t perceive them now but that doesn’t really prove it’s mythological it just proves that it was at a different time in a different yuga and the interactions between various species were different at that time the whole scope of the war was different. Thank you.