Ancient Classics: Mahabharata

The Bhagavad Gita is a 701-line portion of the fifth book of the immense Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Its attribution to Vyāsa is traditional and probably reflects the customary submergence of the individual identities of ancient Indian poets in a Vyāsan persona. There is no way to be sure, but it seems likely that the poem, at least in the form we have it, was composed around the second century CE...

The effect of bhakti—a kind of emotional fervor that infused the devotional literature of India for the better part of a millennium—began to make itself felt as early as the ninth or 10th centuries. Bhakti, however, achieved its most influential expression in the work of the probably illiterate Hindi poet Kabir (1440–1518). Kabir hoped to see Hinduism and Islam amalgamate into a single monotheistic faith. To that end he dictated a number of brief, inspirational maxims and verses to a disciple named Bhagoji. These maxims teach that God is available to everyone and that through faith everyone can reach salvation and direct union with the divine. Some of Kabir's inspirational verses found their way directly into the hymns of Nānak (1469–ca. 1539), the founder of the Sikh religion. Nānak translated some verses of Kabir and imitated others in the Punjabi language. Nānak was the first guru of Sikhism. One of his successors, Arjun, the fifth guru, collected Nānak's verses along with others into the sacred book of that religion, the Granth. As a result, the fervor of bhakti, with its mixture of both Islamic and Hindu elements, infused the literary traditions of the Sikhs...

The god Krishna is understood to be an incarnation of Vishnu. None of the other incarnations of Vishnu has attracted as passionate and widespread a devotion in India as Krishna. There is some evidence that Krishna was originally a historical figure. Krishna is technically the black god, since the Sanskrit word krishna means “black.” However, he is generally depicted with blue skin...

(mӘhä´´bär'ӘtӘ), classical Sanskrit epic of India, probably composed between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200. The Mahabharata, comprising more than 90,000 couplets, usually of 32 syllables, is the longest single poem in world literature. The 18-book work is traditionally ascribed to the ancient sage Vyasa, but it was undoubtedly composed by a number of bardic poets and later revised by priests, who interpolated many long passages on theology, morals, and statecraft. It is the foremost source concerning classical Indian civilization and Hindu ideals...

The literature is divided into two main periods—the Vedic (c.1500–c.200 B.C.), when the Vedic form of Sanskrit generally prevailed, and the Sanskrit (c.200 B.C.–c.A.D. 1100), when classical Sanskrit (a development of Vedic) predominated. Sanskrit had, however, become the standard language of the court by 400 B.C., and its early literature overlapped the Vedic. The word Sanskrit means “perfected,” and the language was adopted as an improvement of the Vedic...