From the introduction to Great Bharata: The Invasion Begins, Volume 1
Within the Mahā-bhārata itself, we find a clear recognition of the difficulty of transmitting a teaching over an extended time period. Importantly, this admission occurs in the sacred core of the epic, the Bhagavad-gītā. In the fourth chapter, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna, “I taught this unperishing Yoga spiritual science to Vivasvān, who told it to his son Manu. Manu spoke it to his son Ikṣvāku. Royal-sages thus learned it as received in disciplic succession. After great time in this world, the spiritual teaching was lost. Today, I speak to you this same ancient Yoga, this most confidential understanding, for you are My devotee and friend.”1
Kṛṣṇa affirms that a teaching may be lost or damaged over time. One may recover the original knowledge by hearing from a person who knows it. This principle itself is quite simple and common in our lives. The method, however, takes on greater weight and complexity when the subject matter is the ultimate truth of the universe.
Implicit in Kṛṣṇa’s words is the notion that there is an eternal truth that appears and disappears in time, much like the sun that rises and sets to our vision, but always exists.
We may assume here that Kṛṣṇa is not promising to his listener Vivasvān that he will restore to his student a precise literal text, in the way that a modern textual scholar would try to reconstruct a lost text. Rather, Kṛṣṇa is eternally cognizant of eternal truth, and he will now teach what he has always known.
Despite the strong metaphysical method, so distinct from modern scholarship, we do find here a clear, ancient awareness that teachings can be corrupted or lost over time. For now, it is this that interests us.
Echoing and expanding Kṛṣṇa’s statement in the Bhagavad-gītā, the celebrated devotional scholar Madhvācārya (1238–1317), saw pervasive text corruptions in the Mahā-bhārata, long before Western scholars studied it. In his book, Mahā-bhārata-tātparya-nirṇaya (Ascertaining the Meaning of Mahā-bhārata), he wrote, “In some parts of the work, the scribes or reciters add texts; in some parts, they even remove texts; in some parts, they carelessly transpose texts; and in some parts, they do otherwise. Even texts that are not lost are disordered. Corruptions occur throughout.” 2.3-42
Modern secular scholars agree that we are dealing with a corrupt text, though they draw some very different conclusions from that fact. Before going deeper in that topic, I will outline some likely reasons for the present state of the text.
South Asian tradition gives a very ancient date for the composition of the Mahā-bhārata as an unwritten oral tradition. If this is true, for untold centuries, bards and sages transmitted the work orally. It is near impossible to memorize such a huge work. Without a written text, reciters inevitably strayed from the original. Apart from their own human limitations, they often told the stories under heavy political, financial, and sectarian religious pressure. As centuries passed, newer text corruptions built on and overlayed the older ones. Text was inserted. Text was lost. Text was rearranged.
Scholars calculate that roughly 2400 years ago,3 Sanskrit writing in the Brāhmī script proliferated in India, evolving into the well-known Deva-nagarī script still used today. As writing became widespread in South Asia, it saw the rise of many regional alphabets to record the various regional languages, and to write classic Sanskrit texts in a regionally legible script. (Even today, most Westerners read Sanskrit verses transliterated into Roman script.) Doubtless, the writing of the Mahā-bhārata in many regional scripts dramatically slowed the rate of text corruption, but the damage had been done.
As a rule, when stories spread orally, and are later written down by diverse people in diverse places, the resultant written texts can differ significantly. Such was the case with the Mahā-bhārata.
In the twentieth century, inspired by successful efforts to discern the original versions of ancient Greco-Roman literature, and the New Testament, prominent Sanskritists from India, Europe, and America, deployed the same scholarly techniques to identify the original text of the Mahā-bhārata. Yet here, assiduous scholarly effort fell short.
The Sanskrit Department of Brown University describes this endeavor as follows. “The Critical Edition of…The Mahābhārata…in 19 vols. (Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 1933-1966), was a massive editorial project which recorded the readings of hundreds of manuscripts and other forms of testimony from all over the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia. Begun in 1919…, this edition was fundamentally shaped and guided by Vishnu Sukthankar, who laid out his editorial map in his brilliant Prolegomena Introduction to the first volume of the edition.
“The project was controversial from the beginning: Several scholars have argued that the Mahābhārata textual tradition is too complex, too rooted in living, oral traditions, to be amenable to edition on the basis of principles developed in the more simple literary traditions of Western texts…This critical edition is the basis of most contemporary Western scholarship on the Mahābhārata, but at the same time few such scholars, if any, take the critical edition simply at face value.”4
To better understand what the problems were, let us hear from the critical edition’s lead scholar himself, Viṣṇu Sukthankar. All quotes are taken from “his brilliant Prolegomena,” the copious Introduction to this multi-volume work.
After years of prodigious scholarship, Sukthankar threw up his hands, declaring that academic research could not retrieve the epic’s original text. “To prevent misconception in the mind of the casual reader, it is best to state at first what the constituted text is not. I am firmly convinced that the text presented in this edition is not anything like the autograph copy of the work of its mythical author, Maharṣi Vyāsa. It is not, in any sense, a reconstruction of the Ur original-Mahābhārata…, that ideal but impossible desideratum…It is but a modest attempt to present a version of the epic as old as the extant material will allow us to reach with some semblance of confidence.” Prolegamena ciii Similarly, “It is useless to think of reconstructing a…text in a literally original shape,…Our objective can only be to reconstruct the oldest form of the text which it is possible to reach on the basis of the manuscript material available.” Prolegamena vxxxvi
Sukthankar even seems to imply that there never was an original text! He urges upon his readers, “…this essential fact in Mahābhārata textual criticism, that the Mahābhārata is not and never was a fixed rigid text, but is fluctuating epic tradition…” Prolegamena cii
Ultimately, Sukthankar tried to see the sunny side of the failure to find an original text within a sea of spurious additions. “When I say that the Mahābhārata manuscripts contain quantities of spurious additions, I intend no disparagement or condemnation of the text or of the manuscripts. The process of text corruption is normal, inevitable, and in a wider sense wholly right. my emphasis If the epic is to continue to be a vital force in the life of any progressive people, it must be a slow-changing book! Thus, a progressive people need a progressively evolving book.” Prolegamena ci
Van Buintenen, the first scholar to attempt, and partially complete, a translation of the Mahā-bhārata‘s critical edition, made a similar point. “Unlike the Vedas, which have to be preserved letter-perfect, the epic was a popular work whose reciters would inevitably conform to changes in language and style.” 20 Buitenen (1973) pp. xxiv–xxv
Devotional scholars like Madhvācārya acknowledged the spurious additions in the text seven centuries before modern scholars did so. If anything, Madhvācārya is more severe in his assessment of the text. But he, and other devotional scholars, insist that there is indeed an original story, and that story is ultimately history, events that really took place long, long ago on this planet.
As we saw, the ancient Bhagavad-gītā speaks openly of problems in text transmission. The Bhagavad-gīta is part of the Mahā-bhārata. Thus, the epic itself warns that teachings tend to be adulterated over time. Further, neither Kṛṣṇa nor Madhvācarya oppose the speaking of an ancient teaching in contemporary language. Both do precisely that. But the essential message and story must be preserved. That is what did not happen in the case of the Mahā-bhārata.
Sukthankar saw positive elements in the text’s ‘evolution’ over time. Additions, changes, and removals of text merely contemporized a literary centerpiece of South Asian civilization.
In contrast, Madhvācārya only sees the loss and corruption of an invaluable, original, sacred history. This is not valuable, adaptive evolution in action, as Suktankar suggests, but rather a tragic loss. In that, Madhvācārya echoes Kṛṣṇa’s claim in the Bhagavad-gītā that his original pure spiritual teaching perished over great time, implying that this fact is related to the loss of virtue and justice in the world.5
Kṛṣna, in the Gītā, is restoring his original message by teaching it to Arjuna. Madhvācāṛya similarly claims that by divine mercy, he will restore the original meaning of the Mahā-bhārata.6 Thus he wrote, “Although the text is thus disordered, and its meaning is hard for even gods to approach, when things are thus confused in the fallen Kali age, inspired by Lord Hari to discern the real conclusions, I shall speak the conclusions, understanding them by His mercy, and knowing also other śāstras scriptures and the Vedas by His mercy.”7
Madhvācārya claims to restore the original meaning not by text-critical scholarship, but rather by divine revelation. Still, despite these stark differences in restorative methodologies, secular and devotional scholars do agree on the present state of the text.
But how old is the Mahā-bhārata? Even if we cannot recover an original text, can we say when that text might have been composed? How should we interpret Sukthankar’s claim of an “…essential fact in Mahābhārata textual criticism, that the Mahābhārata is not and never was a fixed rigid text, but is fluctuating epic tradition…” Prolegamena cii
Do we have clear evidence to support Sukthankar’s rather radical claim? I don’t think we do. Here are some reasons why.
- We cannot rationally assume that the Mahā-bhārata is not based on historical events, however imperfectly the surviving text tradition preserved those events. Thus, if a divine Avatāra, Vyāsa, descended to this world and described those real historical events, then the text had a definite beginning as itihāsa, history.
- If all that is true, than eye witnesses to the history, or those alive at the time who heard from witnesses, passed on what they knew to the next generations. Thus, if the Mahā-bhārata was born of history, and preserved by an Avatāra, then for at least a limited time, the text would probably not expand wildly beyond its original boundaries.
- Later generations, far more distant from the original events, might be more inclined to embellish, add, subtract, or mythologize. Mythologization might have occurred early on but the pace could well have accelerated as the original events faded into a remote, legendary past.
- The fact that the many varying recensions are still today easily recognizable as the same book indicates that corrupting tendencies were moderated by the deep veneration in which most people held the story and its putative author.
If devotional scholars cannot prove the historical thesis with all the tools and methods of modern scholarship, neither can secular scholars disprove it. Thus the opposing views do not indicate an opposition of scholarship versus faith, or reason versus unreason, but rather two equally precise and internally coherent worldviews built on opposing epistemic and ontological foundations. These in turn depend upon the self-evidential life experiences of each group.
Many people, perhaps hundreds of millions in India alone, remain committed to the Mahā-bhārata as a source, however problematic, of sacred history. Despite all the epic’s textual issues, these many people remain convinced that the great epic still retains a significant amount of historical and spiritual truth. Fortunately for the devoted, they have another, textually more reliable source of sacred history that confirms many, though not all, of the main events recounted in the epic. This source is the legendary Bhāgavata-pūrāṇa, also known simply as the Bhāgavatam.
Compared to the Mahā-bhārata, the Bhāgavatam‘s ancient text is relatively uncorrupted and intact. Indeed the text variants listed in the Bhāgavatam‘s critical text are few and inconsequential in comparison to those of the Mahā-bhārata. The Bhāgavatam contains far more advanced theology and explicitly claims to correct what it considers to be theological and narrative misconceptions in the Mahā-bhārata.
I have personally translated and published, with commentaries, 119 chapters of the Bhāgavatam. I have regularly consulted and profited from its Sanskrit text in the writing of this book. I have also studied the versions of major events as they are depicted in the other major Pūrāṇas, many of whose textual integrity does not match that of the Bhāgavatam.
Secular scholars will point out that the Bhāgavatam appeared on the scene various centuries later than the Mahā-bhārata, and thus cannot claim to provide eye-witness accounts, nor testimonies from those somehow related to the epic events.
The Bhagavatam itself replies to these critiques, stating that the Lord personally inspired, and manifests within, the Bhāgavatam, and that devoted readers can experience this fact so powerfully that it becomes for them a properly basic epistemic foundation, i.e. a self-evident fact.
Whatever one believes or disbelieves, something very much like this has been happening for many, many centuries among very large numbers of people. What does this prove? That depends of course on the philosophical value one places on human testimony in general, which after all is the epistemic foundation of all forms of knowing.
Conclusion: here too, as elsewhere, we confront two different ways of knowing, secular and devotional. To call the secular way objective, and the devotional way subjective, would betray a serious degree of philosophical naiveté. But let us return to the Mahā-bhārata.
Dating the text
Despite Sukthankar’s claim “that the Mahābhārata is not and never was a fixed rigid text, but is fluctuating epic tradition…”, many scholars, secular and devotional, attempt to date the text. I will briefly review a few of those attempts.
I will begin again with Sukthankar, who issues a dating caveat to his critical edition. “The constituted text cannot be accurately dated, nor labelled as pertaining to any particular place or personality…It goes without saying that like every other edition it is a mosaic of old and new matter.”8 Proleg ciii
Thus, to date the text, scholars look for external references, i.e. datable texts, inscriptions etc. that mention the Mahā-bhārata. As respected Mahā-bhārata scholar John Brockington states “…the earliest ‘surviving’ components of this dynamic text are believed to be no older than the earliest ‘external’ references we have to the epic, which may include an allusion in Panini’s 4th century BCE grammar Aṣṭādhyāyī 4:2:56.9
Tying the epic’s date to external references is understandable, but not always reliable. The dates of external references are themselves often uncertain. Further, if so much of a culturally central work like the Mahā-bhārata was lost, it is far more likely that far less important works that referred to the Mahā-bhārata also perished. Perhaps most importantly, the problem of dating a text whose oldest version cannot be found and is probably lost, is obvious.
The conclusion would seem to be that simply by examining and comparing texts, we do not know with certainty how old the Mahā-bhārata is. This makes it difficult to glean from the surviving text a precise date for the events described therein, if we suspect them to be roughly historical, and not mere myth. We do have evidence that points to a date of extreme antiquity for the epic. We will consider that now.
The Aihole inscription, found in an old Jain temple in Aihole, Karnataka, is dated to 634 CE, during the reign of Pulakeśin II. This inscription states that 3,735 years have passed from the time of the great Kuru-kṣetra war, the climax of the Mahā-bhārata, till the time of the inscription, composed by the poet Ravi-kīrti.
I am writing these words in 2022 CE. Therefore, since the time of the Aihole inscription, 1,388 years have passed. Thus the inscription claims that a central event of the Mahā-bhārata took place 5,123 years ago, in the year in 3101 BCE. We might not pay great attention to this ancient inscription, if it did not precisely confirm a date for the Mahā-bhārata coming from another, unusually credible source.
The Mahā-bhārata, the Bhāgavatam, and other ancient Sanskrit literatures, often give the positions of stars and planets at the time of important events. The great Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata (476–550 CE), a co-founder of trigonometry, among his many celebrated achievements, studied the epic’s descriptions of the positions of planets and stars at the time of major events, such as the Kuru-kṣetra War. As one of history’s great mathematicians, and a learned astronomer, he then calculated when in the past the night sky would have shown to a human observer the specific celestial configurations described in the epic.
This dating method is sometimes called archaeo-astronomy, or historical astronomy. Aryabhata concluded from astronomical descriptions in the Mahā-bhārata that the Kurukṣetra War took place roughly 5,100 years ago. Many Indian and some Western scholars, in various disciplines, support this date, and present additional arguments to bolster it. Many Western Indologists argue for a later date.
Arya-bhata concluded that the Kuru-kṣetra War took place in 3102 BCE, or 5,124 years ago, a date nearly identical to that of the Aihole inscription. One may argue that Ravi-kīrti, the author of the Aihole inscription, simply borrowed Arya-bhata’s date. However Arya-bhata lived far away from Aihole, in the area of modern Patna, and neither Ravi-kīrti, nor his king, nor anyone else associated with the inscription, mentions Arya-bhata, who died eighty-four years before its creation. In any case, over the centuries, Hindus have widely accepted Arya-bhata’s date for the Kuru-kṣetra War, and more generally for the period in which Kṛṣṇa appeared in this world, as described in the Mahā-bhārata.
Endnotes
1 4.1 śrī-bhagavān uvāca
imaṃ vivasvate yogaṃ proktavān aham avyayam
vivasvān manave prāha manur ikṣvākave ‘bravīt
4.2 evaṃ paramparā-prāptam imaṃ rājarṣayo viduḥ
sa kāleneha mahatā yogo naṣṭaḥ parantapa
4.3 sa evāyaṃ mayā te ‘dya yogaḥ proktaḥ purātanaḥ
bhakto ‘si me sakhā ceti rahasyaṃ hy etad uttamam Bhagavad-gītā 4.1-3 ↩
2 2.3 kvacid granthān prakṣipanti kvacid antaritān api
kuryuḥ kvacic ca vyatyāsaṃ pramādāt kvacid anyathā
2.4 anutsannā api granthā vyākulā iti sarvaśaḥ… Mahā-bhārata-tātparya-nirṇaya ↩
3 I will not consider here the much older “Indus script”, a collection of small seals with raised symbols, produced by the very ancient Indus Valley Civilization, mostly in modern Pakistan and Northwest India. Despite various claims to have deciphered these seals, there is no scholarly consensus supporting any of these claims. We don’t really know if the seals depict a language. We have no bilingual inscription to decipher the seals. ↩
4 https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Sanskrit_in_Classics_at_Brown/Mahabharata/MBh2Biblio.html ↩
6 Kṛṣṇa’s Bhagavad-gītā is far more widely accepted than Madhvācārya’s treatise on the Mahā-bhārata. Within the devotional community, not all restorations of sacred text are seen as equal. ↩
7 2.5 grantho ‘py evaṃ vilulitaḥ kim nv artho deva-durgamaḥ
kalāv evaṃ vyākulite nirṇayāya pracoditaḥ
2.6 hariṇā nirṇayān vacmi vijānañs tat-prasādataḥ
śāstrāntarāṇi sañjānan vedāṃś cāsya prasādataḥ Mahā-bhārata-tātparya-nirṇaya ↩
8 This mixing of text from different historical periods is also found in a similar genre of old Sanskrit literature called Purāṇas, Ancient History, dealing with cosmogony, cosmology, royal lines, heroic and didactic histories and other topics. ↩