| |
| | Untitled Document |
 | | The poem is made up of almost 100,000 couplets--its length thus being about seven times that of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined--divided into 18 parvans, or sections, to which has been added a supplement entitled Harivamsha ("Genealogy of the God Hari," i.e., Krishna-Vishnu). |
 | | The several centuries during which the epic took shape were a period of transition from the religion of Vedic sacrifice to the sectarian, internalized worship of later Hinduism, and different sections of the poem express varying and sometimes contradictory beliefs. |
 | | Some sections, such as the Narayaniya (a part of Book XIII), the Bhagavadgita (Book VI), the Anugita (Book XIV), and the later supplement, the Harivamsha, are important sources of early Vaisnavite thought. |
| www.mc.maricopa.edu /dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/archy/angkor/mahabharata.html (744 words) |
|