ABOUT THE MAHABHARATAThe Mahabharata is the greatest epic of India, and arguably the greatest epic of any country. It is well known for including the Bhagavad Gita, an important scripture that has influenced great thinkers like Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, and Herman Hesse. However, the Gita represents only 700 verses out of 200,000 total in this epic. In addition to its philosophical chapters, the Mahabharata is a great work of imagination and adventure. When you read it you will be transported to a world where demigods and goddesses sport with men and women. A beautiful girl can take birth from the belly of a fish. A prince might get a wife from archery competitions or kidnapping. And God Himself (Krishna) might be your best friend. There is no other book like it.ABOUT THIS EDITIONAnyone who has studied the Bhagavad Gita must be interested in reading the whole book. When I was a Hare Krishna devotee I certainly wished I could do that.Several summaries of the Mahabharata exist, but it is impossible to condense eighteen books into one without omitting anything worthwhile. The onlycomplete English translation of the book is this one, by Kisari Mohan Ganguli.These volumes are based on a text file scanned at sacred-texts.com. If you have a Kindle you can read this translation without cost by downloading it from http://www.gutenberg.org/. Amazon.com also has their own versions of these books which you may download for free from the Kindle Store.While reading these free e-books I decided that I really wanted a bound and printed version. The books have thousands of footnotes, which doesn’t work well in e-book format. While this translation is still in print, every existing edition leaves something to be desired. When I was in the Hare Krishnas I owned a complete set of their books, and they were the most beautiful books you can imagine. I wanted to have an edition of the complete Mahabharata that was worthy to share the same book case as those books, so I decided to prepare a newedition using Create Space and offer it for sale at the lowest possible price.Each volume in this edition represents many hours of work. I have moved the footnotes in these volumes (again, thousands of them) from the end of the book back to the bottoms of the pages for easier reading. I have replaced archaic words like “behoveth” with “behooves”, etc., where it was possible to do so without rewriting the sentences where they appear. I have also fixed hundreds of variant spellings, and replaced obscure words like "welkins" and "horripliated" with more common ones. Finally, the original work didnot translate the titles of the individual books, so I have used the names found on Wikipedia. Thus Adi Parva in the original becomes The Book Of The Beginning.The illustrations are from a Hindi translation of the Mahabharata that has also fallen into the public domain. (http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23365037M/Mahabharata.) I have used page images provided at archive.org and have cleaned them up using The GIMP software. Theresults speak for themselves. When all the volumes are published there will be nearly 300 full page illustrations.In short, I have spared no effort to make this the most complete, most readable, and most attractive edition of the Mahabharata in English.While I no longer practice the Vaishnava religion I hope that these books will meet with the approval of my former godbrothers and godsisters. I do not believe that they will find anything offensive in them.BHAKTA JIM
