Excerpt from The Five Brothers: The Story of the Mahabharata; Adapted From the English Translation of Kisari Mohan Ganguli For these and other reasons it seems unlikely that further Stories of this magnitude will be produced, and for these reasons the ones we have are particularly precious. There are none greater or more precious than the two epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Mahabharata In 1ts entirety is the longest of all scriptures and of all poems; for it is three times as long as the Bible and eight times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. For two or three thousand years the story that forms its nucleus has been the vehicle for the moral philosophy and for the highest spiritual teaching of Hinduism; it has acquired not only enormous elabora tion in the telling, but also enormous digressions amounting to whole volumes that are purely philosophical and only tenuously connected with the story. It has become the very encyclopedia of Hinduism: The Storehouse, as one scholar says, of Indian genealogy, mythology and antiquity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.