The Mahabharata Book III Part Two: The Book Of The Forest
About this book
The Mahabharata is the greatest epic of India. Anyone who has studied the Bhagavad Gita, which represents only 700 verses from the Mahabharata (out of 200,000 total) 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 only complete 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, 2003, and proofed at Distributed Proofing, Juliet Sutherland, Project Manager. Additional proofing and formatting of the text file was done at sacred-texts.com, by J. B. Hare.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 and read for free.While reading these free e-books I decided that I really wanted a bound and printed version. I felt this book deserved to be back in print, so I decided to prepare it for publishing using Create Space and offer it for sale at the lowest possible price.I have moved the footnotes in these volumes (hundreds 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 a few variant spellings, and replaced obscure words like "welkins" and "horripliated" with more common ones. Finally, the original work did not 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/OL233650....) I have used page images provided at archive.org and have cleaned them up using The GIMP software. The results speak for themselves. When all the volumes are published (probably twelve or so) 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