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 Puranic yuga theory into the Mahabharata, in particular when it comes to placing the action at the beginning of the current terrible Kali Yuga. Luis Gonzalez-Reimann discusses the meaning of key terms in the epic by examining the text and early Buddhist sources. This book also traces the sectarian appropriation of the yuga system in later literature and documents how modern religious movements have used the system to proclaim the arrival of a new, prosperous Krta Yuga, a phenomenon that coincides with New Age expectations.

Review(s)

“This original and well-researched study sheds considerable new light on the history and development of the theory of cyclical time, one of the most critical concepts in our understanding of the religious and cosmological thought of Hindu India. Luis Gon

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