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The ''Mahabharata'' or ''Mahābhārata'' (US ;〔("Mahabharata" ). ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'',〕 UK ;〔("Mahabharata" ). ''Oxford Dictionaries Online''.〕 (サンスクリット:महाभारतम्), ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the ''Ramayana''. The ''Mahabharata'' is an epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pandava princes. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or ''purusharthas'' (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the ''Mahabharata'' are the ''Bhagavad Gita'', the story of Damayanti, an abbreviated version of the Ramayana, and the Rishyasringa, often considered as works in their own right. Traditionally, the authorship of the ''Mahabharata'' is attributed to Vyasa. There have been many attempts to unravel its historical growth and compositional layers. The oldest preserved parts of the text are thought to be not much older than around 400 BCE, though the origins of the epic probably fall between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE.〔Brockington (1998, p. 26)〕 The text probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).〔Van Buitenen; The Mahabharata – 1; The Book of the Beginning. Introduction (Authorship and Date)〕 The title may be translated as "the great tale of the Bhārata dynasty". According to the ''Mahabharata'' itself, the tale is extended from a shorter version of 24,000 verses called simply ''Bhārata''.〔''bhārata'' means the progeny of ''Bharata'', the legendary king who is claimed to have founded the ''Bhāratavarsha'' kingdom.〕 The ''Mahabharata'' is the longest known epic poem and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 ''shloka'' or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the ''Mahabharata'' is roughly ten times the length of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana.〔Spodek, Howard. Richard Mason. The World's History. Pearson Education: 2006, New Jersey. 224, 0-13-177318-6〕〔Amartya Sen, ''The Argumentative Indian. Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity'', London: Penguin Books, 2005.〕 W. J. Johnson has compared the importance of the ''Mahabharata'' in the context of world civilization to that of the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the Qur'an. ==Textual history and structure== The epic is traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who is also a major character in the epic. Vyasa described it as being ''itihāsa'' (history). He also describes the Guru-shishya parampara, which traces all great teachers and their students of the Vedic times. The first section of the ''Mahabharata'' states that it was Ganesha who wrote down the text to Vyasa's dictation. Ganesha is said to have agreed to write it only if Vyasa never paused in his recitation. Vyasa agrees on condition that Ganesha takes the time to understand what was said before writing it down. The epic employs the story within a story structure, otherwise known as frametales, popular in many Indian religious and non-religious works. It is recited by the sage Vaisampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, to the King Janamejaya who is the great-grandson of the Pandava prince Arjuna. The story is then recited again by a professional storyteller named Ugrasrava Sauti, many years later, to an assemblage of sages performing the 12-year sacrifice for the king Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimisha Forest. The text has been described by some early 20th-century western Indologists as unstructured and chaotic. Hermann Oldenberg supposed that the original poem must once have carried an immense "tragic force" but dismissed the full text as a "horrible chaos."〔Hermann Oldenberg, ''Das Mahabharata: seine Entstehung, sein Inhalt, seine Form'', Göttingen, 1922, 〕 Moritz Winternitz (''Geschichte der indischen Literatur'' 1909) considered that "only unpoetical theologists and clumsy scribes" could have lumped the parts of disparate origin into an unordered whole.〔("The Mahabharata" ) at ''The Sampradaya Sun''〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mahabharata」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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