The+Mahabharata

//The Mahabharata// Tha Mahabharata has existed in various forms for well over two thousand years: The //Mahabharata// was one of the two most important factors that created the "Hindu" culture of India (the other was the other all-India epic, the //Ramayana,// pronounced approximately as Raa-MEYE-a-na ), and the //Mahabharata// and //Ramayana// still exert tremendous cultural influence throughout India and Southeast Asia.
 * First, starting in the middle of the first millennium BCE, it existed in the form of popular stories of Gods, kings, and seers retained, retold, and improved by priests living in shrines, ascetics living in retreats or wandering about, and by traveling bards, minstrels, dance-troupes, etc.
 * Later, after about 350 CE, it came to be a unified, sacred text of 100,000 stanzas written in Sanskrit, distributed throughout India by kings and wealthy patrons, and declaimed from temples.
 * Even after it became a famous Sanskrit writing it continued to exist in various performance media in many different local genres of dance and theater throughout India and then Southeast Asia.
 * Finally, it came to exist, in numerous literary and popular transformations in many of the non-Sanskrit vernacular languages of India and Southeast Asia, which (with the exception of Tamil, a language that had developed a classical literature in the first millennium BCE) began developing recorded literatures shortly after 1000 CE.

But the historical importance of the //Mahabharata// is not the main reason to read the //Mahabharata.// Quite simply, the //Mahabharata// is a powerful and amazing text that inspires awe and wonder. It presents sweeping visions of the cosmos and humanity and intriguing and frightening glimpses of divinity in an ancient narrative that is accessible, interesting, and compelling for anyone willing to learn the basic themes of India's culture. The //Mahabharata// definitely is one of those creations of human language and spirit that has traveled far beyond the place of its original creation and will eventually take its rightful place on the highest shelf of world literature beside Homer's epics, the Greek tragedies, the Bible, Shakespeare, and similarly transcendent works. // The Story of King Sibi // King Sibi ruled over the kingdom of Sibi and was known for his generosity. One day, Indra and Agni came to test the limits of the king's generosity. The two gods disguised themselves as a hawk and a pigeon. The hawk started chasing the pigeon and the pigeon fell on King Sibi's lap trembling with fear. The hawk demanded the king to surrender the pigeon as its prey. The king refused saying that the pigeon had sought his protection.

After much argument the hawk agreed to leave the pigeon alone if the king would offer a piece of flesh from his own body which was equivalent to the weight of the pigeon. The king was more than happy to make such a sacrifice. Strangely, after endless slicing off his flesh and placing it on the scale, the king found that he could not equal the weight of the pigeon. The king threw his entire body on the scale and even then the scales tipped in favour of the pigeon. At this point the hawk and the pigeon revealed their true identity and praised the king for his unbounded charitable spirit.

"Sibi" []