The Mahabharata

A bookshelf at home might hold a few dozen books, or more than a hundred in a family that loves to read. A single work many times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together would never fit there.

That work would need a shelf of its own.

The Mahabharata has about 100,000 couplets and about 1,800,000 words. Even reading two hours a day, a person would need many months to finish it. The words are not the difficulty. The difficulty is how much the work holds: so many stories, so many characters, so many lives.

People in India have a saying about this epic. It sits in the opening book of the Mahabharata, which is called the Adiparva. It says that what is found here may also be found elsewhere. What is not found here is found nowhere in the world.

It is not meant as a boast.

The Mahabharata holds teachings about dharma, about duty and the right way to live. It holds stories of brotherhood and betrayal. It holds law, astronomy, ancient medicine, and myths about the origin of the universe. And at the heart of this enormous epic lies the Bhagavad Gita. It is a philosophical dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, just before the greatest battle in Hindu epic tradition.

Tradition credits the epic to the sage Vyasa. According to Hindu legend, he recited it aloud while the god Ganesha wrote it down. Vyasa is not only the author of the story. He is also a character inside it, the grandfather of both families at war with each other.

And that is one thing that makes the Mahabharata so unusual.

Then there is the number eighteen. It turns up everywhere in this epic, like a secret signature.

The epic has 18 books, each called a Parva. The great war of Kurukshetra lasts exactly 18 days. The Bhagavad Gita sits in the sixth book, and it has exactly 18 chapters. The two opposing armies together make up 18 akshauhini, which means 18 great army divisions. No one knows why eighteen was chosen. But taken as a whole, it makes the entire world of the epic feel built on a single rhythm.

At the center of it all is one family story.

Two branches of a single family, sharing the royal blood of the Bharata line, go to war over a throne. On one side stand the five Pandava brothers: Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva. On the other side stand the 100 Kaurava brothers. They are led by Duryodhana, the eldest son of the blind King Dhritarashtra.

It is not a simple tale of good against evil. The Kauravas are human too, with their own pride and their own longings. The Pandavas are not wholly innocent either. Their war is a civil war, painful in a way that only people of the same blood can understand.

The turning point is a game of dice, in which Yudhishthira loses his kingdom, then his brothers, and then even Draupadi, the wife the five brothers share. It is the most shameful moment in the epic. It sows more than a decade of hatred, and in the end, 18 days of war.

But the Mahabharata does not stop with the war. It goes on after it.

When the war is over and the victors have grown old, the Pandava brothers set out on a last journey into the Himalayas, toward heaven. One by one they fall along the way. Only Yudhishthira reaches the end, and beside him walks a dog that has followed him the whole way.

At the gate of heaven, the god Indra appears and says the dog may not enter. Yudhishthira refuses to go in. He says he cannot abandon a companion who has stayed loyal to him to the very end, even if the reward is heaven. In the epic, this is a test set for him by the god Yama, the embodiment of dharma. The dog is Yama himself.

That story comes from the Mahaprasthanika Parva, and it is not about heroism. It is about compassion. It asks whether a person will give up what is right in exchange for what he wants.

And that is only one story among hundreds.

There is the story of Karna. He is the secret son of Kunti and the sun god Surya. He grows up not knowing who he is, under an identity that is not his own. Before the war he learns the truth. Yet out of loyalty he stays at Duryodhana's side and fights against his own younger brothers. Many readers count Karna among the most tragically heroic figures in the Mahabharata. He stands on the losing side, yet he is never small.

And there is Draupadi, who never once bows her head, however many times she is forced to bow.

And then there is the Bhagavad Gita, tucked inside the sixth of the 18 books, like a gem inside a mountain. It runs to 18 chapters and 700 verses. It is a conversation between a man who is worn out and the friend beside him, who is in no hurry to give orders.

In Vietnam, the Bhagavad Gita has been translated into Vietnamese under the title Chí Tôn Ca. A reader opening that slim book for the first time need not know it is a piece of an ocean. But that is exactly what it is. It is one chapter of an epic that would take many months to read in full.

In India, the Mahabharata is not seen only as a work of literature. In Hindu tradition it is called Itihasa, which means "this is how it really happened." It is a shared memory of how humankind once lived, loved and struggled with one another.

And the saying is still there, from the very start of the epic: what is not in the Mahabharata is found nowhere in the world.

Even the story of a dog that would not leave its master is in there, on the last pages of an ocean of words.