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