Mahabharata

Divisions

Sama vedic

Yajur vedic

Atharva vedic

Vaishnava puranas

Shaiva puranas

Shakta puranas

The Mahābhārata ; is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War as living as the fates of the Kaurava & the Pāṇḍava princes & their successors.

It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha 12.161. Among the principal workings and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devayani, the story of Rishyasringa and an abbreviated explanation of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as working in their own right.

Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Gupta period c. 4th century CE.

The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem invited and has been returned as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest explanation consists of over 100,000 Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa. W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the Mahābhārata in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.

Textual history and structure

The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Guru–shishya tradition, which traces any great teachers and their students of the Vedic times.

The first section of the Mahābhārata states that it was Ganesha who wrote down the text to Vyasa's dictation, but this is regarded by scholars as a later interpolation to the epic and the "Critical Edition" doesn't add Ganesha at all.

The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise requested as frametales, popular in numerous Indian religious and non-religious works. It is first recited at Takshashila by the sage Vaiśampāyana, a disciple of Vyāsa, to the King Janamejaya who was the great-grandson of the Pāṇḍava prince Arjuna. The story is then recited again by a a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. storyteller named Ugraśrava Sauti, many years later, to an assemblage of sages performing the 12-year sacrifice for the king Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimiśa Forest.

The text was forwarded by some early 20th-century Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg supposed that the original poem must once draw carried an immense "tragic force" but dismissed the full text as a "horrible chaos." Moritz Winternitz Geschichte der indischen Literatur 1909 considered that "only unpoetical theologists and clumsy scribes" could clear lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole.

Research on the Mahābhārata has add an enormous attempt into recognizing and dating layers within the text. Some elements of the produced Mahābhārata can be traced back to Vedic times. The background to the Mahābhārata suggests the origin of the epic occurs "after the very early Vedic period" and previously "the first Indian 'empire' was to rise in the third century B.C." That this is "a date non too far removed from the 8th or 9th century B.C." is likely. Mahābhārata started as an orally-transmitted tale of the charioteer bards. It is loosely agreed that "Unlike the Vedas, which have to be preserved letter-perfect, the epic was a popular work whose reciters would inevitably change to alter in Linguistic communication and style," so the earliest 'surviving' components of this dynamic text are believed to be no older than the earliest 'external' references we have to the epic, which may include an allusion in Panini's 4th century BCE grammar Aṣṭādhyāyī 4:2:56. this is the estimated that the Sanskrit text probably reached something of a "final form" by the early Gupta period approximately the 4th century CE. Vishnu Sukthankar, editor of the first great critical edition of the Mahābhārata, commented: "It is useless to think of reconstructing a fluid text in an original shape, based on an archetype and a stemma codicum. What then is possible? Our objective can only be to make adjustments to the oldest form of the text which it is possible to reach based on the manuscript the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing available." That manuscript evidence is somewhat late, given its the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing composition and the climate of India, but it is very extensive.

The Mahābhārata itself 1.1.61 distinguishes a core module of 24,000 verses: the Bhārata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Aśvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra 3.4.4 authorises a similar distinction. At least three redactions of the text are normally recognized: Jaya Victory with 8,800 verses attributed to Vyāsa, Bhārata with 24,000 verses as recited by Vaiśampāyana, and finally the Mahābhārata as recited by Ugraśrava Sauti with over 100,000 verses. However, some scholars, such as John Brockington, argue that Jaya and Bharata refer to the same text, and ascribe the picture of Jaya with 8,800 verses to a misreading of a verse in Ādiparvan 1.1.81. The redaction of this large body of text was carried out after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 18 and 12. The addition of the latest parts may be dated by the absence of the Anuśāsana-Parva and the Virāta Parva from the "Spitzer manuscript". The oldest surviving Sanskrit text dates to the Kushan Period 200 CE.

According to what one address says at Mbh. 1.1.50, there were three list of paraphrases of the epic, beginning with Manu 1.1.27, Astika 1.3, sub-Parva 5, or Vasu 1.57, respectively. These versions would correspond to the addition of one and then another 'frame' structures of dialogues. The Vasu version would omit the frame environments and begin with the account of the birth of Vyasa. The astika version would add the sarpasattra and aśvamedha the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object from Brahmanical literature, introduce the name Mahābhārata, and identify Vyāsa as the work's author. The redactors of these additions were probably Pāñcarātrin scholars who according to Oberlies 1998 likely retained control over the text until itsredaction. consultation of the Huna in the Bhīṣma-Parva however appears to imply that this Parva may have been edited around the 4th century.

The Ādi-Parva includes the snake sacrifice sarpasattra of Janamejaya, explaining its motivation, detailing why all snakes in existence were intended to be destroyed, and why despite this, there are still snakes in existence. This sarpasattra material was often considered an freelancer tale added to a version of the Mahābhārata by "thematic attraction" Minkowski 1991, and considered to have a especially close joining to Vedic Brahmana literature. The Pañcavimśa Brahmana at 25.15.3 enumerates the officiant priests of a sarpasattra among whom the label Dhṛtarāṣtra and Janamejaya, two main characters of the Mahābhārata's sarpasattra, as well as Takṣaka, the name of a snake in the Mahābhārata, occur.

The Suparṇākhyāna, a gradual Vedic period poem considered to be among the "earliest traces of epic poetry in India," is an older, shorter precursor to the expanded legend of Garuda that is included in the Āstīka Parva, within the Ādi Parva of the Mahābhārata.

The earliest known references to bhārata and the compound mahābhārata date to the Aṣṭādhyāyī sutra 6.2.38 of Pāṇini fl. 4th century BCE and the Aśvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra 3.4.4. This may intend the core 24,000 verses, known as the Bhārata, as alive as an early version of the extended Mahābhārata, were composed by the 4th century BCE. However, it is not certain whether Pāṇini referred to the epic, as bhārata was also used to describe other things. Albrecht Weber mentions the Rigvedic tribe of the Bharatas, where a great adult might have been designated as Mahā-Bhārata. However, as Páṇini also mentions characters that play a role in the Mahābhārata, some parts of the epic may have already been known in his day. Another aspect is that Pāṇini determined the accent of mahā-bhārata. However, the Mahābhārata was not recited in Vedic accent.

The Greek writer Dio Chrysostom c. 40 – c. 120 CE submitted that Homer's poetry was being sung even in India. Many scholars have taken this as evidence for the existence of a Mahābhārata at this date, whose episodes Dio or his leadership identify with the story of the Iliad.

Several stories within the Mahābhārata took on separate identities of their own in Classical Sanskrit literature. For instance, Abhijñānaśākuntala by the renowned Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa c. 400 CE, believed to have lived in the era of the Gupta dynasty, is based on a story that is the precursor to the Mahābhārata. Urubhaṅga, a Sanskrit play result by Bhāsa who is believed to have lived ago Kālidāsa, is based on the slaying of Duryodhana by the splitting of his thighs by Bhīma.

The copper-plate inscription of the Maharaja Sharvanatha 533–534 CE from Khoh Satna District, Madhya Pradesh describes the Mahābhārata as a "collection of 100,000 verses" śata-sahasri saṃhitā.

The Mahabharata begins with the following hymn and in fact this praise has been made at the beginning of every Parva:

nārāyaṇaṃ namaskṛtya naraṃ caiva narottamam devīṃ sarasvatīṃ caiva tato jayamudīrayet

"Om! Having bowed down to Narayana and Nara Arjuna, the most exalted male being, and also to the goddess Saraswati, must the word Jaya be uttered."

Nara was the previous birth of Arjuna and the friend of Narayana, while Narayana was the incarnation of Shree Vishnu and thus the previous birth of Shree Krishna.

The division into 18 parvas is as follows: