Mahabharata

The Sanskrit epic of the Kurukshetra war — roughly 100,000 verses, one of the longest poems ever composed, and the frame that contains the Bhagavad Gita.

Context: Usually read in abridgement; complete translations run to many volumes. Page count reflects the Penguin Classics abridgement (John D. Smith); these texts vary widely by edition and translation.

Why it’s on the list: The frame around the Gita, and a study in how a civilisation encodes its ethics as narrative rather than as rules.

Where I saw it: Thread of Classics — a crowd-sourced Twitter thread pairing classic texts with the people recommending them. Put forward by Rishi Tripathy (tweet).

Connections

• Thread of Classics — the reading list it came from
• Bhagavad Gita