The legends connected with it relate that Yudishthra ultimately entered Indra's heaven, and there found all the Kaurava relatives and his brothers. It is also related in the Mahabharata that after the battle of Kuru-kshetra, when the widows of the slain were talking over their losses, Vyasa bid them repair to the banks of the Ganges. Vyasa also was present, and called out the names of the slain. All appeared in great glory and splendour, and more beautiful than when they were alive ; widows went to their husbands, daughters to their fathers, mothers to their sons, sisters to their brothers, and all the fifteen years of sorrow which had passed since that war were forgotten in the ecstasy of seeing each other again. The night passed away in the fulness of joy, and when the morning dawned, all the dead mounted their horses and chariots and disappeared. But Vyasa said that the widows who wanted to rejoin their dead husbands might do so, and all the widows went and bathed in the Ganges, and came out of the water again, kissed, one by one, the feet of Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, and then went and drowned them selves in the river ; and, through the prayers of Vyasa, they all went to the place they wished, and obtained their several desires.
The complete text of time Mahabharata has been twice printed in India. It has been partially translated into French by M. Fauche. It is the longest poem in the world, consisting of 220,000 lines, divided into 18 parva or books, viz. the Adiparva, Introductory Book, the Sabha, Vann, Virata, Udyoga, Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Salya, Sanptika, Stri, Sauti, Anusasaua, Aswa-medhika, Asrama, Marsala, Maha - prasthanika, and the Swarga-roliana. Within the poem is an acknow ledgment that it was put into its present form by Saud, who received it through another person . from Vyasa, who was contemporary of the events which it relates. 24,000 verses out of 100,000 are alleged in the same place to be the work of the original author. But in some parts it men ' twins the Yavanas, showing that such portions at least were subsequent to the 4th century n.e.
Professor Williams believes that the earliest or pre-Bralnammical composition of the Rama yang and Maliabharfita was not later than the 5th century B.C., but that the first orderly com pletion in their Bralimanized form may have taken place in the case of the Ramayana about the beginning of the 3d century 'Lc., and in the case of the Mahabharata still later.
Lassen was of opinion that three different ar rangements of the Mahabharata are distinctly traceable.
Weber shows that the Mahabharata was known to Dion Chrysostom in the 2d half of the 1st century s.n. ; and as Megasthenes does not men tion this epic, and lie was in India about n.c. 315, Weber supposes its date to be between the two.
It is in the Sanskrit language. The l'nranic legends tend to show that the language of the Mahabliarata is not in its older form, but, as it has come down to us, has been the subject of various recensions, the latest of which can scarcely be fixed later than the 3d century n.c. (between B.C. 500 and 250). Of the two great Epopitia, the Maliabharata and Ramayana, it is doubtful whether either of them was composed as a whole, and the Mahabharata was undoubtedly a compilation of popular lays on national events. The main story in each belongs to a post-Vedic age, when the Aryans had pressed far into the Peninsula. That of the Mahabharata describes the internecine war of two closely-allied tribes, the Kuru and Pandu, for the supremacy of the land of the Doab, with Hastinapura, the modern Dehhi, as its capital. The
war fought by the Kaurava and Pandava kinsmen to gain possession of the lands near Hastinapura lasted ]8 consecutive days, and terminated in the complete destruction of the Kaurava. The war is described as conducted by a series of challenges and personal combats, which would seem to have been related in ballads, and then subsequently gathered together and embellished by a Vaishnava Hindu. The Pandava family were supported by the advice of their Yadava kinsman Krishna, who was brought up as a worshipper of Vishnu, and seems to have actively opposed the worship of Siva and of Indra ; and the Vaishnava compilers of the Mahabharata have interwoven the story of the battle with innumerable legends regarding Krishna, whom they deify as an incarnation of Vishnu. In addition to falsifications, exaggera tions, and embellishments, geographical, religious, moral, mythical, legendary, scientific, and physio logical dissertations are interpolated, interwoven, and forcibly intermixed. It has never been entirely translated, but extracts from it were discovered by Mr. Wheeler in the library of the Bengal Asiatic Society, and these formed the foundation of his History of India, which is an interwoven commentary on the war. Portions of the inter woven materials seem to relate to the life of Christ, portions are taken from the Koran, and it is said Buddhist elements also are found in it. Hastinapnra is probably the place on the Ganges, north-east of Heidi, which still bears the ancient name. The family itself was of the Lunar race, but the different parties were supported by numerous allies, and from some very remote quarters. Krishna, who was an ally of the Pandu section, though born on the Jumna, had founded a principality in Gujerat. Among the allies on each side are chiefs from the Indus, and from Kalinga in the Dekhan ; some, the translators are satisfied, belonged even to nations beyond the Indus, and orientalists consider the Yavana to apply in all early works to the Greeks. The Pandava were victorious, but paid so dear for their success, that the survivors, broken-hearted with the loss of their friends and the destruction of their armies, abandoned the world, and perished among the snows of the Himalaya ; and Krishna, their great ally, is known to have been killed in the midst of civil wars in his own country. Some Hindu legends relate that his sons were obliged to retire beyond the Indus ; and as those Itajputs who came from that quarter in modern times to Sind and Cutch are of his tribe of Yadu, the narrative seems more deserving of credit than at first sight might appear. The more authentic account, however (that of the Mahabliarata itself), describes them as finally returning to the neigh bourhood of the Junina. The story of the Maha bharata is much more probable than that of the Rarnayana. The date of the war was probably in the 14th century n.c.
This poem is interesting to astronomy, because it records the first eclipse of the sum mentioned in any of the Sastra. Modern European com mentators suppose that the date of the eclipse which it records is the 25th October in the year 945 before Christ., and therefore anterior to that transmitted to us from the Chaldaans, which was observed on the 19th March 720 before Christ. Professor Lassen and Mr. Wheeler both consider that the Pandava history in the Mahabharata conveys a history of India in successive periods.—Dowson ; Elphinstone, pp. 154, 173, 390; IVheeler, Hist. of India ; Muller, p.•47 ; Darwinism in Morals, p. 296; Westminster Review, April 1868.