Mahabharata

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The Mahabharata is the longer of the two great Sanskrit epics of India: a poem of roughly a hundred thousand verses, several times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey together, telling of a catastrophic war between two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, for the throne of a north Indian kingdom. Its ostensible subject is a dynastic quarrel; its actual subject is dharma — the duty, law, and right order that the war strains to the breaking point and the poem examines from every angle.

The text grew over centuries rather than being composed at a stroke. Scholarship generally places its formation between roughly the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE, around a core narrative gradually swollen by genealogy, myth, law, and philosophy until it became, in its own phrase, a work in which “what is here may be found elsewhere, and what is not here is nowhere.” Tradition assigns authorship to the sage Vyasa, who is also written into the story as the grandfather of its warring families — an attribution the tradition holds and historians read as legend rather than record.

The narrative does not let either side stand clean. The Pandavas, nominally the righteous party, win by deceptions the poem refuses to hide; the war ends in near-total slaughter, and the victory tastes of ash. That refusal to resolve dharma into a simple rule is much of what the epic is for: it stages duty in collision with duty and leaves the friction showing.

Embedded in its sixth book is the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue on the eve of battle between the warrior Arjuna, who balks at killing his kin, and his charioteer Krishna, who is revealed as God. The Gita can be read on its own and usually is — the library holds it in two early English versions — but it sits inside the larger poem as one answer, offered at the hinge of the catastrophe, to the question the whole work turns on: how to act rightly when every course does harm.

For the Hindu traditions the Mahabharata is not scripture in the strict sense of the Vedas, yet it has carried Hindu ethical and religious thought to more people than the Vedas ever reached, through recitation, drama, and retelling across South and Southeast Asia. Western readers met it late and mostly through the Gita, which nineteenth-century translators and the early Theosophists prized as a compact statement of Indian metaphysics. The epic around it is larger, darker, and harder to summarize — a single immense argument about what is owed, and to whom, when the world will not allow a clean hand.

→ In the library: The Bhagavad-Gita (Arnold, 1885) · The Bhagavadgita (Telang, SBE VIII, 1882)

→ Related: Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali · Dhammapada · I Ching