Mahabharata

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskritepics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana. The title may be translated as "the great tale of the Bharata dynasty".

The Mahabharata is an epic legendary narrative of the Kurukṣetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pandava princes. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or Purusartha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahabharta are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the story of Ṛṣyasringa, often considered as works in their own right.

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The oldest preserved parts of the text are thought to be not much older than around 400 BCE, though the origins of the epic probably fall between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE. The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE). According to the Mahabharata itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simply Bharata.

The Mahabharata is the longest epic poem known and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 sloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages.

Website:

·         Mahabharata online

·         All volumes in 12 PDF-files

·         Reading Suggestions, J. L. Fitzgerald, Das Professor of Sanskrit, Department of Classics, Brown University