If Itihasa is correctly and intensionally translated as history, what sort of theory of History, in Collingwood's sense, do the 2 great Itihasas, i.e. the Ramayana & Mahabharata, commit non-Puranic Hindus to?
For reasons of tractability, let us narrow the scope of the question to the Mhb alone. If, as I believe, its system of symmetries conserves karma and dharma, a further gain is made in that two sorts of 'actions done by reasonable agents in pursuit of ends determined by their reason' become salient- viz. intentional states as dramatized or articulated on the one hand and the game theoretic pay-off matrix or strategic menu facing the agent at that moment.
This is quite different from Gadamer's notion that the meaning of a text has nothing to do with the intention of the author. In the case of the MhB, you have a history that is not empirical but which nevertheless fits Collingwood's formula as being real history in the sense of being history of mind and both intentionally and intensionally so.
The Gita, as the epoche of the Mhb, but also Res Gestae of the gravamen of casteism, in my view, does not however have multiple meanings and no single truth rather it is an event- something empirical and belonging to first order discourse as under the sign of causality not reason.
The nature of this event- a chapter from Darwin's Natural History of God- uniting the name of Collingwood to that of Godel under the rubric of the Ontological Proof- or suicide note as weapon of self-slaughter- is, of course, no fit subject for a blog published virginibus puerisque. .
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