The Mahābhārata ( ;"Mahabharata". Oxford Dictionaries Online."Mahabharata" . Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. , , , 'Great Bharata') is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India revered in Hinduism, the other being the Ramayana. Both are considered smṛti and itihasa texts. The Mahābhārata narrates the events around the Kurukshetra War, while also discussing philosophical concepts, such as the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha. A principal element of the Mahābhārata is the Bhagavad Gita, which is a prominent sacred text in Hindu traditions.
The Mahābhārata recounts the events of the dynastic struggle for the throne of Hastinapura, that leads to the battle of Kurukshetra, a war of succession between princely cousins, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas. The multiple stories in the Mahābhārata include the story of Damayanti, Shakuntala, Pururava and Urvashi, Savitri and Satyavan, Kacha and Devayani, Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa. The epic theorizes about dharmayuddha, "just war", and the Bhagavad Gita discusses the Vedic concept of dharma (duty, rightful action) in a dialogue between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his charioteer guide Krishna.
Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahābhārata is attributed to Vyāsa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The bulk of the Mahābhārata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE.Brockington (1998, p. 26) The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period ().Van Buitenen; The Mahabharata – 1; The Book of the Beginning. Introduction (Authorship and Date)
The title is translated as "Great Bharat (India)", or "the story of the great descendants of Bharata", or as "The Great Indian Tale". The Mahābhārata is one of the longest epic poems known. Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shlokas (verses) or over 200,000 individual lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa, albeit more than 2.5 times shorter than the world's longest poem, The Epic of Manas.Spodek, Howard. Richard Mason. The World's History. Pearson Education: 2006, New Jersey. 224, 0-13-177318-6Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian. Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity, London: Penguin Books, 2005. Within the Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.
Textual history and structure
The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major figure in the epic. Vyasa described it as being an itihasa (). He also describes the Guru–shishya tradition, which traces all 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" does not include Ganesha.Mahābhārata, Vol. 1, Part 2. Critical edition, p. 884.
The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales, popular in many Indian religious and non-religious works. It is first recited at the city of Taxila by the sage Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, to the King Janamejaya who was the great-grandson of the Pandava prince Arjuna. Many years later, the story is recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugrashrava Sauti to an assemblage of sages conducting a twelve-year sacrifice for King Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimisha Forest.
The text was described by some early 20th-century Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg supposed that the original poem must once have 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 have lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole."The Mahabharata" at The Sampradaya Sun
Accretion and redaction Research on the Mahābhārata has put an enormous effort into recognizing and dating layers within the text. Some elements of the present Mahabharata can be traced back to Vedic times.A History of Indian Literature , Volume 1 by Maurice Winternitz The background to the Mahābhārata suggests the origin of the epic occurs "after the very early Vedic period" and before "the first Indian 'empire' was to rise in the third century B.C." That this is "a date not too far removed from the 8th or 9th century B.C."van Buitenen (1973) pp. xxiv–xxv is likely. The Mahabharata started as an orally-transmitted tale of the charioteer bards. It is generally agreed that "Unlike the Vedas, which have to be preserved letter-perfect, the epic was a popular work whose reciters would inevitably conform to changes in language 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 include a reference in Panini's 4th century BCE grammar Ashtadhyayi 4:2:56. 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 reconstruct the oldest form of the text which it is possible to reach based on the manuscript material available."Sukthankar (1933) "Prolegomena" p. lxxxvi. Emphasis is original. That manuscript evidence is somewhat late, given its material composition and the climate of India, but it is very extensive.
The Mahābhārata itself (1.1.61) distinguishes a core portion of 24,000 verses: the Bhārata proper, as opposed to additional secondary material, while the Ashvalayana Grihyasutra (3.4.4) makes a similar distinction. At least three redactions of the text are commonly recognized: Jaya (Victory) with 8,800 verses attributed to Vyasa, the Bharata with 24,000 verses as recited by Vaisampayana, and finally the Mahābhārata as recited by Ugrashrava Sauti with over 100,000 verses.Gupta & Ramachandran (1976), citing Mahabharata, Critical Edition, I, 56, 33SP Gupta and KS Ramachandran (1976), p.3-4, citing Vaidya (1967), p.11 However, some scholars, such as John Brockington, argue that Jaya and Bharata refer to the same text, and ascribe the theory of Jaya with 8,800 verses to a misreading of a verse in the Adi Parva (1.1.81). The redaction of this large body of text was carried out after formal principles, emphasizing the numbers 1818 books, 18 chapters of the Bhagavadgita and the Narayaniya each, corresponding to the 18 days of the battle and the 18 armies (Mbh. 5.152.23) and 12. The addition of the latest parts may be dated by the absence of the Anushasana Parva and the Virata Parva from the "Spitzer manuscript".The Spitzer Manuscript (Beitrage zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens), Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2004. It is one of the oldest Sanskrit manuscripts found on the Silk Road and part of the estate of Dr. Moritz Spitzer. The oldest surviving Sanskrit text dates to the Kushan Period (200 CE).
According to what one figure says at Mbh. 1.1.50, there were three versions 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' settings of dialogues. The Vasu version would omit the frame settings and begin with the account of the birth of Vyasa. The astika version would add the sarpasattra and ashvamedha material from Brahmanical literature, introduce the name Mahābhārata, and identify Vyasa as the work's author. The redactors of these additions were probably Pancharatrin scholars who according to Oberlies (1998) likely retained control over the text until its final redaction. Mention of the Huna in the Bhishma Parva however appears to imply that this Parva may have been edited around the 4th century.
The Adi 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 independent tale added to a version of the Mahābhārata by "thematic attraction" (Minkowski 1991), and considered to have a particularly close connection to Vedic (Brahmana) literature. The Panchavimsha Brahmana (at 25.15.3) enumerates the officiant priests of a sarpasattra among whom the names Dhritarashtra and Janamejaya, two main figures of the Mahābhārata'''s sarpasattra, as well as Takshaka, a snake in the Mahābhārata, occur.J.A.B. van Buitenen, Mahābhārata, Volume 1, p.445, citing W. Caland, The Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa, p.640-2
The Suparnakhyana, a late 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 Astika Parva, within the Adi Parva of the Mahābhārata.
Historical references
The earliest known references to bhārata and the compound mahābhārata date to the Ashtadhyayi (sutra 6.2.38)mahān vrīhyaparāhṇagṛṣṭīṣvāsajābālabhārabhāratahailihilarauravapravṛddheṣu, 'Pāṇini Research Tool', Sanskrit Dictionary of Panini (fl. 4th century BCE) and the Ashvalayana Grihyasutra (3.4.4). This may mean that the core 24,000 verses, known as the Bhārata, as well as an early version of the extended Mahābhārata, were composed by the 4th century BCE. However, it is uncertain whether Panini 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 person might have been designated as Mahā-Bhārata. However, as Panini also mentions figures that play a role in the Mahābhārata, some parts of the epic may have already been known in his day. Another aspect is that Panini determined the accent of mahā-bhārata. However, the Mahābhārata was not recited in Vedic accent.Bronkhorst, J. (2016): How the Brahmins Won. From Alexander to the Guptas, Brill, p. 78-80, 97
The Greek writer Dio Chrysostom () reported that Homer's poetry was being sung even in India.Dio Chrysostom, 53.6-7, trans. H. Lamar Crosby, Loeb Classical Library, 1946, vol. 4, p. 363. Many scholars have taken this as evidence for the existence of a Māhabhārata at this date, whose episodes Dio or his sources identify with the story of the Iliad.Christian Lassen, in his Indische Alterthumskunde, supposed that the reference is ultimate to Dhritarashtra's sorrows, the laments of Gandhari and Draupadi, and the valor of Arjuna and Suyodhana or Karna (cited approvingly in Max Duncker, The History of Antiquity (trans. Evelyn Abbott, London 1880), vol. 4, p. 81). This interpretation is endorsed in such standard references as Albrecht Weber's History of Indian Literature but has sometimes been repeated as fact instead of as interpretation.
Several stories within the Mahābhārata took on separate identities of their own in Classical Sanskrit literature. For instance, the Abhijnanashakuntala by the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (), believed to have lived in the era of the Gupta dynasty, is based on a story that is the precursor to the Mahābhārata. The Urubhanga, a Sanskrit play written by Bhasa who is believed to have lived before Kalidasa, is based on the slaying of Duryodhana by the splitting of his thighs by Bhima.
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 18 parvas or books The division into 18 parvas is as follows: