Mahābhārata महाभारत

What it is

The Mahābhārata, "the great tale of the Bharatas", is one of the longest poems in the world, with about 100,000 verses including its supplement, the Harivaṃśa. It tells the rivalry between two branches of one royal family, the five Pāṇḍava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, which ends in an eighteen-day war on the field of Kurukṣetra. Around this story it gathers myths, teachings and countless other tales, and the Bhagavad Gītā is part of it.

How it is arranged

The epic is divided into eighteen books (parvas), from the Ādi Parva, "the beginning", to the ascent to heaven at the end. The war itself fills books 6 to 10, named after the commanders Bhīṣma, Droṇa, Karṇa and Śalya and the night raid that follows. It is told as a story within a story: Vaiśampāyana recites it at the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya, a descendant of the Pāṇḍavas, as he learned it from his teacher Vyāsa. A well-known legend says that Gaṇeśa wrote it down as Vyāsa dictated.

What it teaches

The Mahābhārata keeps asking what dharma, right action, really is, and admits that its truth is subtle and hard to see. It shows how envy, greed, pride and a game of dice lead to the humiliation of Draupadī, exile and finally a war that destroys almost everyone. Its characters are rarely simply good or evil: Karṇa’s loyalty, Bhīṣma’s vow, Yudhiṣṭhira’s honesty and his weakness all carry costs. Within it are some of India’s best-known teachings: the Gītā, Bhīṣma’s instructions from his bed of arrows, Vidura’s counsel and the riddles of the Yakṣa.

What it can mean in your life

The Mahābhārata is a mirror for hard choices. It shows good people making bad decisions, and bad decisions bearing fruit for generations, and so it teaches responsibility for the consequences of what we do. It explores loyalty and its limits, the courage of people like Abhimanyu and Draupadī, the grief that follows every war, and the need for forgiveness. People in India often say that whatever is found in the world is found in the Mahābhārata.

Where to begin

Start with a few famous episodes rather than the whole: the dice game in the Sabhā Parva; the Yakṣa’s questions to Yudhiṣṭhira in the Vana Parva; the Bhagavad Gītā in the Bhīṣma Parva; Abhimanyu in the Chakravyūha in the Droṇa Parva; and the lament of the women in the Strī Parva. The illustrated stories on Vedyatra begin with the Chakravyūha.

Origins and dating

Tradition names the sage Vyāsa, who also appears in the story, as its author. Historians see a poem that was composed and expanded over many centuries, roughly between 400 BCE and 400 CE, and it has been retold in every Indian language and on stage and screen around the world.

The text on Vedyatra

The Sanskrit here comes from Sanskrit Wikisource, one page per adhyāya, and every verse links to the exact page revision it was taken from. The Wikisource pages follow a southern printing of the epic: their chapter counts (260 adhyāyas in the Ādi Parva, 375 in the Śānti Parva) and the manuscript readings in their notes appear to match the Kumbhakonam edition of 1906 to 1910, a long southern text. Here that gives about 96,000 verses in 2,311 adhyāyas across the eighteen parvas. The Harivaṃśa, the epic's appendix on Kṛṣṇa's family, is not included yet.

The pages were typed by many volunteers, so Vedyatra cleaned them: verse numbers and references typed into the text, footnote digits, glosses in brackets and stray punctuation were removed, and every rule is in the open-source import tool. Where a page marks letters it could not read, the verse shows "…" in their place. The Droṇa Parva pages number their verses as if they were the Udyoga Parva, so Vedyatra numbers each verse by the page it is on. One verse (Śānti 257.1) is left out because Wikisource has lost its text, and one page (Śānti 290) is empty there.

The Pune critical edition (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933 to 1966) compared manuscripts from across India and reconstructed the oldest text they share. It is about a quarter shorter, roughly 75,000 verses: passages found only in some manuscripts, many of them southern, are moved to its notes and appendices, so its adhyāya and verse numbers differ from the ones here. The Bhagavad Gītā, for example, is Bhīṣma Parva 25 to 42 here and 23 to 40 in the critical edition; its verses here carry a note pointing to the Gītā published as its own text. Where a passage here is absent from the critical edition or reads differently there, that is explained in a note on the passage, kept apart from the text, as passages are reviewed.

Passages to start with

• Sabhā Parva: The game of dice and the humiliation of Draupadī.
• Vana Parva, the Yakṣa’s questions: Yudhiṣṭhira answers a spirit’s riddles to save his brothers.
• Bhīṣma Parva: the Bhagavad Gītā: The Gītā is part of the sixth book.
• Droṇa Parva: Abhimanyu enters the Chakravyūha.
• Strī Parva: The women of both sides mourn the dead.