Three Distinctive Personality Aspects from Scriptures

Ancient scriptures and coins are loaded heavily with three animal figures and narrations – bull, lion and elephant. In fact, these figures are representatives of three Dev (Theo) brothers of Vedic period who worked for developing the land extending from present Vietnam to Afghanistan before Mahabharat war and even later.

These animals, bull, lion and elephant, respectively, represent nobility, wisdom and might, again respectively, of Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar. Each of the human-beings of the ancient past used to fall in any of these categories or a combination thereof. These representations are not only valid for representing the particular personalities of ancient times, but inform us about variations in human personalities even of the present time.

With evolution of human life in the last 2,000 years after the Mahabharat war, human life and hence the human personality got a sea change. Now, a human-being is not of any one these three types, but a combination of these in differing proportions. Still, the fundamental human personalities remain these three and are worth studying.

Son of a cow, the bull had been the most useful animal for humanity as the source of power for agricultural work with a highly sublime nature with no demands of his own. When I look around, I find many persons who keep on working as their duties and responsibilities towards survival of themselves and their families and feeling satisfied whatever they get out of their work without any aspirations of getting more.

Brahma was such a noble person who used to be busy in his creative works about building homes, statues, etc. for which he is said to be the creator.

Lion is not the mightiest animal on the Earth, many animals such as elephant have more strength than the lion. Still, the lion is considered as the king of the forests. The lion often gets victory in fights against any other animal for his swift and wise moves against the enemy. This is the second type of personality, often found in human-beings called the intellectuals. They lead better lifestyles than the hard-working bulls through using their intellectual faculties, practically without doing any physical work by them-selves.

Vishnu was a fierce intellectual of lion type who used to work with his brain rather than his body. He used his wife Lakshmi, in the form of Durga, for finishing many of his enemies. After Mahabharat war, as Vishnu Gupta Chanakya, he took revenge of his defeat by killing Mahapadmanand and making his son Chandra Gupta Maurya as the Emperor of India and thus established rule of the Gupta dynasty, credited with making India the Golden Bird of the World.

Elephant is the mightiest of all the animals and this strength is very well displayed by his carrying heavy loads holding in his trunk, or even felling mighty trees through pushes and pulls. Look around and you will find wrestlers, boxers, etc with their mighty muscular bodies capable of moving the mountains, metaphorically. Such persons are exceptional in today’s world but in ancient times, when physical hunting and fighting without much of arms were common in the humanity, there used to be a large number of persons of this type.

Maheshwar, was the mightiest person of those who, as Porus, defeated Alexander on the latter's invasion of India in 323 bc. Later, he was known as Shiva and Mahadev, too.

These three types of personalities represent three extremes of nobility, intellectualism and physical might, as representative of three precious attributes of a living being. Presently, persons with such extreme attributes are rarely found with a great majority being of varieties composed of two or three of these attributes in different proportions. This could be graphically represented by a triangle with the above three attributes at apexes. A modern personality may fall anywhere within the triangle represented by a point as shown in the diagram above. Reciprocals of three distances of the point from the three apexes, representing nobility, wisdom and might, being proportions of these attributes in the personality.

Thus, a personality is represented by P = (1/n) + (1/w) + (1/m) where n, w and m are distances of the point representing a personality from the three apexes of the triangle. Through practice, a person may mold his/her personality with more richness in any of the elements than that in others.