The Mahabharata and the Yugas: India's Great Epic Poem and the Hindu System of World Ages

This book questions the conventional wisdom that a fully matured theory of the yugas – Hinduism’s ages of the world – is integral to the Mahabharata, and it illustrates how traditional commentators and modern scholars have read the later Purāṇic yuga theory into the Mahabharata, in particular when it comes to placing the action at the beginning of the current terrible Kali Yuga. Luis González-Reiman discusses the meaning of key terms in the epic by examining the text and early Buddhist source…