The Complete Mahabharata In English!

If you read The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim you know that I had read quite a bit about Krishna before my first visit to a Hare Krishna temple. One of the things I had read was the Mahabharata.

Correction: a summary of the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata is one of the world's longest books. It weighs in at 200,000 verses, making it longer than the Bible (31,103 verses) or any other book you could imagine.

There are a number of summaries of the book, but only one English translation of the whole thing: that of Kisari Mohan Ganguli.

Kisari Mohan Ganguli

The summaries take the eighteen books of the whole and condense it down to one. Some of them are pretty good. I like the one by William Buck, for instance.

William Buck

Having said that, if you are serious about reading about Krishna (something that Hare Krishna devotees must be) you cannot be satisfied with a summary of the longest book about Him composed by a non-believer.

It is a fact, however, that the Hare Krishnas have to content themselves with a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a mere 700 verse extract. No serious person will deny that it is the most important part of the whole, but still you have to wonder what you're missing by not having the whole thing.

Imagine being the sort of person who takes Ayn Rand seriously. You hear about the novel Atlas Shrugged and how it is her greatest work, but the only part of it that is available in your own language is John Galt's radio speech. The only other information you have on the the book is a Wikibooks summary written by Noam Chomsky.

It's actually worse than that.

Now there is a way for a devotee to get the complete English translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, and soon there will be another one.

The first way is to get the e-book from Project Gutenberg. Since it is such a long work there are four e-books:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15474

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15475

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15476

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15477

You can get these for free, and Amazon has its own version of these texts which you can also get for free.

Now while I love e-books there are some books that really should be bound and printed. For instance, I just bought a King James Bible with illustrations by Gustave Dore. There is no way to make a e-book that is as good as that printed book is. No doubt you have your own favorite books that you absolutely must own as bound and printed volumes. The Mahabharata falls into that category.

Now when I say "bound and printed" I mean something beautiful that has been labored over with love. I do NOT mean printing off the Project Gutenberg web pages and slapping a quick and dirty cover on it.

Like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Mahabharata-Kri...

There are several paperback editions of the Ganguli translation of the book for sale at Amazon, and all of them are quick and dirty efforts.

I am making my own Create Space edition of the book. It will be more readable, more attractive, more complete, and lower priced than all the others.

How? stay tuned.