tures are the Vedas, and that his
creed and practice have their source in these scriptures.
Brahmanism may be represented as a system of law and custom in
the Laws of Manu; as a philosophy in the Upanishads; and as a
mythology in the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

MAHABHARATA

The word "Mahabharata" means "The Great Bharata," the name of a
well-known people in ancient India. The epic so called is a very long
one, containing at least 220,000 lengthy lines. It is really an
encyclopaedia of Hindu history, legend, mythology, and philosophy.
Four-fifths of the poem consist of episodes, some of them very
beautiful, as the tale of Nala and his wife Damayanti. These have no
primary connection with the original, though they are worked in so
deftly as to make the whole appear a splendid unity. For pathos,
sublimity, and matchless language, no poem in the world exceeds this
one.

It is arranged in eighteen books, all of which claim to have been
composed by Vyasa--another name for the god Krishna--who is said also in
the course of the epic to have composed the Vedas and the Puranas. This
is, of course, mythology, and not literary history.

The historical nucleus underlying this poem is the conflict which raged
in ancient India between two neighbouring tribes, the Kurus (or
Kauravas) and the Pandavas. But this is worked up into another long tale
into which and around which Brahman teachers and philosophers have woven
a very network of religious, theosophic, and philosophic speculation.
The tale is, in fact, made a vehicle for teaching Brahman ism as it
existed in India in the first five centuries of our era, though much of
the Mahabharata goes back to a thousand years or so B.C.

_OUTLINE OF THE EPIC_

The descendants of Bharata, the king of Hastinapura, about sixty miles
north of Delhi, were divided into two branches, the Kauravas and the
Pandavas, each of which occupied the territory which had come down to it
by inheritance. They lived together in peace and prosperity, worshipping
the gods, studying the Vedas, and spending much time in meditation about
higher things. But there came a change for the worse. The Kauravas, not
content with their own territory, looked with jealous eyes upon that of
their kinsmen, the Pandavas. Soon their covetousness realised itself in
action, for gathering their armed men together, they sprang suddenly
upon the land of their neighbours, whom they disarmed previously by