Reprint of the original, first published in 1883-1896.

The Mahabharata is the greatest epic of India. Anyone who has studied the Bhagavad Gita, which represents only 700 verses from the Mahabharata (out of 200,000 total) must be interested in reading the whole book. When I was a Hare Krishna devotee I certainly wished I could do that. Several summaries of the Mahabharata exist, but it is impossible to condense eighteen books into one without omitting anything worthwhile. The only complete English translation of the book is this one, by Kisari Mohan Ganguli. These volumes are based on a text file scanned at sacred-texts.com, 2003, and proofed at Distributed Proofing, Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager. Additional proofing and formatting of the text file was done at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare. If you have a Kindle you can read this translation without cost by downloading it from http://www.gutenberg.org/. Amazon.com also has their own versions of these books which you may download and read for free. While reading these free e-books I decided that I really wanted a bound and printed version. I felt this book deserved to be back in print, so I decided to prepare it for publishing using Create Space and offer it for sale at the lowest possible price. I have moved the footnotes in these volumes (hundreds of them) from the end of the book back to the bottoms of the pages for easier reading. I have replaced archaic words like "behoveth" with "behooves", etc., where it was possible to do so without rewriting the sentences where they appear. I have also fixed a few variant spellings, and replaced obscure words like "welkins" and "horripliated" with more common ones. Finally, the original work did not translate the titles of the individual books, so I have used the names found on Wikipedia. Thus Adi Parva in the original becomes The Book Of The Beginning. The illustrations are from a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata that has also fallen into the public domain. (http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23365037M/Mahabharata.) I have used page images provided at archive.org and have cleaned them up using The GIMP software. The results speak for themselves. When all the volumes are published (probably twelve or so) there will be nearly 300 full page illustrations. In short, I have spared no effort to make this the most complete, most readable, and most attractive edition of the Mahabharata in English. While I no longer practice the Vaishnava religion I hope that these books will meet with the approval of my former godbrothers and godsisters. I do not believe that they will find anything offensive in them. BHAKTA JIM

Description: The Mahabharata in its present form is equal to about eight times as much as the Illiad and Odyssey put together. The nucleus of the Mahabharata is the great war of eighteen days fought between the Kauravas, the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra and Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu. The epic entails all the circumstances leading upto the war. In this great Kurukshetra battle were involved almost all the kings of India joining either of the two parties. The result of this war was the total annihilation of Kauravas and their party, and Yudhisthira, the head of the Pandavas, became the sovereign monarch of Hastinapura, symbolizing the victory of good over evil. But with the progress of years new matters and episodes relating to the various aspects of human life, social, economic, political, moral and religious as also fragments of other heroic legends came to be added to the aforesaid nucleus and this phenomenon continued for centuries until it acquired the present shape. This very fact that the Mahabharata represents a whole literature rather than one single and unified work, and contains so many and so multifarious things, makes it more suited than any other book to afford us an insight into the deepest depths of the soul of Indian people. In the world of classical literature the Mahabharata is unique in many respects. As an epic, it is the greatest-seven times as great as the Illiad and the Odyssey combined, and the grandest-animating the heart of India over two thousand years in future. It is the mightiest single endeavour of literary creation of any culture in human history. The effort is to conceive the mind that conceived it is itself a liberal education and a walk through its table of contents is more than a Sabbath day's journey.

It Is A Transformation Of An Ancient Legend Into A Modern Novel. In This Process, It Has Gained Rational Credibility And A Human Perspective. The Main Incident, The Bharata War, Symbolic Of The Birthpangs Of A New World-Order, Depicts A Heroic But Vain Effort To Arrest The Disintegration And Continue The Prevailing Order. It Is Viewed From The Stand Points Of The Partisan Participants And Judged With Reference To The Objective Understanding Of Krishna. Narration, Dialogue, Monologue And Comment All Are Employed For Its Presentation. Shot Through With Irony, Pity And Understanding Objectivity, The Novel Ends With The True Tragic Vision Of Faith In Life And Hope For Mankind.

Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse? In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world. Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.

One of India’s greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country’s moral and cultural consciousness. For generations it has served as a bedtime story for Indian children, while at the same time engaging the interest of philosophers and theologians. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, the Ramayana tells the tragic and magical story of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, an incarnation of Lord Visnu, born to rid the earth of the terrible demon Ravana. An idealized heroic tale ending with the inevitable triumph of good over evil, the Ramayana is also an intensely personal story of family relationships, love and loss, duty and honor, of harem intrigue, petty jealousies, and destructive ambitions. All this played out in a universe populated by larger-than-life humans, gods and celestial beings, wondrous animals and terrifying demons. With her magnificent translation and superb introduction, Arshia Sattar has successfully bridged both time and space to bring this ancient classic to modern English readers.

Harivamsha or the family of Hari (Sri Krishna) is a sequel to the great Epic Mahabharata. The work opens with a request made by Sounaka to Souti for an account of the two great clans namely, Vrishnis and Andhakas. He says:--"O son of Lomaharshana, while describing the birth and history of the Kurus you forgot to narrate the history of Vrishnis and Andhakas. It becomes you to relate their history." The events in Krishna's life described in this book are mostly similar to those described in the Srimad Bhagavatam, but there are some interesting differences. The author does a literal translation of the book, adding and removing nothing, and it is clear that he believes that the story describes historical events. If you want to read the Harivamsha in English this is the best translation available. This book may be had for free in e-book form here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61937

I knew there was nothing poetic about death. I knew not that the most horrific battles are fought off the battlefield. Arjun: The idealist in a non-ideal world; the warrior whose deadliest opponent was his conscience. History forgot his voice, but misquoted his silence. My self-esteem originates from me and ends in me. Why does your honor depend on me? Find your own. Draupadi: The untamed tigress, the fragrant flame, the unbridled spirit. Power does not justify sin. Power is not virtue. Virtue is that which lasts in spite of power. Krishn: The enigma whose unique ideology churned the battlefield into a quest for Truth. The Missile …The Trajectory … The Vision. The trio that makes for the core of The Mahabharata (Indian Epic). This is their saga. Insightful, visceral and candid. Find ‘other’ famous Arjuns; compare Arjun vis-a-vis Achilles and Alexander; Explore Myths of Mahabharata. All this and much more in ‘Arjun: Without A Doubt’. First published in 2015 by Leadstart Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Genre: Epic/ Indian Mythology/ History/ Fiction Website: http://sweetyshinde.wordpress.com