Mahabharata
The great epic of the Bharata war, and the frame that holds the Bhagavad Gita; a vast store of dharma, story, and teaching.
A quick reference entry. For the full account, follow the guides below.
Appears in
- What is the Mahabharata? Scriptures
…000 verses arriving at, and recovering from, that battle. This is the Mahabharata.
- What is the Bhagavad Gita? Scriptures
It is a passage inside the Mahabharata , the vast Sanskrit epic of the Bharata dynasty, often called the longest poem in the world.
- The Twelve Jyotirlingas Temples
That is Mahabharata -adjacent material developed in the Skanda Purana , in the Kedara Khanda , as local sthala tradition.
- The Unwritten Library Treatise
…lume III, "Thus It Was," takes up the two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata: what itihasa means, the first poem and its birth from grief, the largest poem in the world, the moral questions the epics force…
- The Search for the Original Treatise
This is the instrument. The question was whether it would work on the Mahabharata .
- Reading the Bhagavad Gita in the modern world Journal
Svadharma in the Mahabharata 's world is bound up with birth and caste, and the line has been used to tell people to stay in the social slot they were born into and call that virtue.
- Thus It Was Treatise
The sages asked him to tell it. He began, and what he began to tell was the Mahabharata .
- What Is Not Here Is Nowhere Treatise
Vyasa, the tradition says, had composed the Mahabharata entire within himself, and needed a scribe equal to its size and speed.
- The Trouble With Dharma Treatise
That silence is the Mahabharata at its most characteristic, and it is the subject of this chapter: the epics are loved as the tradition's great teachers of dharma , and their deepest scenes are the ones where d…
- The Song in the Middle Treatise
How did a song in the middle of the Mahabharata become the book a Hindu hands a stranger?
- Devas and Asuras Deities
In the twelfth book of the Mahabharata , after the war is over and the ground is covered with the dead, Vyasa is trying to talk Yudhishthira out of his despair, and reaches for a precedent.
- Is the Bhagavad Gita an interpolation in the Mahabharata? Journal
So the question gets asked, again and again, by newcomers and scholars alike: was the Bhagavad Gita always part of the Mahabharata, or was it slipped in later?
- Did the Mahabharata describe nuclear weapons? Journal
The Mahabharata, the claim goes, describes a nuclear weapon: a single projectile "charged with all the power of the universe," a column of fire "as bright as ten thousand suns," an "iron thunderbolt" that left …
- The word they were given Treatise
*Śabara* is a name outsiders gave. In the classical Sanskrit sources it marks a forest people at the edge of the settled order, then any savage at all, and the same…
- The Story That Would Not Stay Still Treatise
The Mahabharata, also plural The Mahabharata , vast as it already is, has lived the same branching life.
- The Vishnu Sahasranama Worship
It sits inside the Mahabharata , in the vast didactic book called the Anushasana Parva , the book of instruction, where the dying Bhishma spends his last days pouring out everything he knows about duty, kingshi…
- Where was Dvārakā? The search for Krishna's drowned city Journal
The Mahabharata ends its account of Krishna not in glory but in ruin.
- Who is Ganga? Deities
Her most human chapter is in the Mahabharata, and it is a hard one.
- Who is Krishna? Deities
The Mahabharata , the vast Sanskrit epic whose layers accumulated across centuries on either side of the common era, gives Krishna as a prince of the Yadavas, ally and cousin of the five Pandava brothers, a tac…