Kyle Harrison
to-read
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata
- Author
- Vyasa (trad.)
- Published
- c. 4th century BC – 4th century AD
- Pages
- 834
- Recommended
- Once
Why it’s on the list: The Sanskrit epic of the Kurukshetra war — roughly 100,000 verses, one of the longest poems ever composed, and the frame around the Bhagavad Gita. A study in how a civilisation encodes its ethics as narrative rather than as rules.
Where I heard about it
- Rishi Tripathy — put it forward in a tweet in the Thread of Classics, a crowd-sourced Twitter thread pairing classic texts with the people recommending them, May 2020.
About this edition
Usually read in abridgement; complete translations run to many volumes. The page count reflects the Penguin Classics abridgement (John D. Smith).
Connections
- Thread of Classics — the reading list it came from
- Bhagavad Gita
Referenced in
- Bhagavad Gita note
- Thread of Classics note