Message: #1 2022-02-08 
The Mahābhārata (/məhɑːˈbɑːrətə/;[1][2] Sanskrit:
महाभारतम्, Mahābhāratam, pronounced
[mɐɦaːˈbʱaːrɐt̪ɐm]) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of
ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa.[3] It narrates the
struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the
fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and 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 works 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 version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in
their own right.
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.[4][5] The
original events related by the epic probably fall between the 9th and
8th centuries BCE.[5] The text probably reached its final form by the
early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).[6][7]
The Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem known and has been
described as "the longest poem ever written".[8][9] Its longest
version consists of over 100,000 śloka or over 200,000 individual
verse 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.[10][11] 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.[12] Within the
Indian tradition it is sometimes called the fifth Veda.[13 |
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