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 professions of friendship and goodwill The Pandavas were conquered and driven into a far country, where they wandered homelessly and yet filled with undying love for the old home of their fathers and with a resolve to regain at the first opportunity their ancestral territory.

With the help of as many princes and generals as they could win to their side they marched towards the land which they had lost, taking back by force what had been wrested from them by force.  The two armies met face to face on the field of Kurukshetra (land of the Kurus), and the battle, which lasted eighteen days, was about to begin.  The father and king of the Kauravas, called Dhritarashtra, aged and blind, felt that he could not stand to witness the bloody affray.  He accordingly accepted the offer of Vyasa (Krishna), a relative of both the contending parties, to have the entire course of events described to him when all was over, one Sangara, being deputed to perform the task.  The battle began and proceeded for ten long days when Bhrisma, the chief general of the Kauravas, fell.

At this point Sangara advanced to the old King Dhritarashtra to acquaint him with the course things had taken, and among the rest to recite to him a conversation which had taken place between Krishna and Arguna, the Pandavan prince and general.  It is this dialogue which constitutes the Holy Song, known as the Bhagavad-Gita, or Krishna Song, the Krishna of this philosophic poem being, of course, the eighth avatara; or incarnation, of Vishnu.