The Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata get introduced in most yoga spaces as mythology; great ancient stories rich with symbolism, where Arjuna represents the inner seeker, the battlefield represents the mind, and Rāma’s exile is a map of the spiritual journey. The characters become archetypes, the events become metaphors, and the texts become a kind of elaborate psychological teaching delivered through narrative. This is not how the texts classify themselves. The category they belong to is called Itihāsa from iti (thus), ha (indeed, an emphatic particle that closes the door on ambiguity), and āsa (it was). The name itself is a claim: not allegory, not storytelling, not “it is said that” but testimony. This happened, in this world, to these people, with these consequences.
What Itihāsa means
If you have read my earlier essays on Śruti and Smṛti, you know the Vedic framework classified every text by what kind of knowledge it carries and what authority it draws from. Śruti was received, not composed apauruṡeya, not of human authorship. Smṛti was composed by human beings steeped in Śruti, for specific ages and conditions. Itihāsa is testimony, the category of text that says this happened, in this world, to these people, with these consequences. The Rāmāyaṇan and Mahābhārata both carry this designation. They fall under Smṛti in the broader classification, pauruṡeya, of human composition, but within Smṛti they form their own distinct category. The Mahābhārata names itself the fifth Veda in the Ādiparvan. What Śruti established in the most refined register of understanding, Itihāsa carries into the conditions of actual human life.
What changes when these texts are called mythology
When the Mahābhārata is read as mythology, the war at Kuruṣetra becomes a metaphor, Kṛṣṇa becomes a symbol of the higher self, and Arjuna becomes the spiritual seeker working through doubt. Everything becomes an archetype. The Bhagavad Gītā is chapters 25 through 42 of the Bhīṣmaparvan, the sixth of the Mahābhārata’s eighteen books. Most people who have studied the Gītā have never been told this. It is a conversation that happens at a specific irreversible moment inside a specific war. Arjuna has trained his entire life for exactly this. He looks across the field at Kuruṣetra and sees his teachers, his grandfather Bhīṣma, his uncles, people he loves arrayed against him, and cannot raise his bow. Kṛṣṇa’s teaching arises in response to this exact meltdown, with the armies standing, at a moment that cannot be undone.
The Gītā extracted from the Mahābhārata is a different text from the Gītā inside it. The philosophy is the same. The condition that produced it is gone. Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva all wrote their commentaries on the Gītā within the full Mahābhārata framework. None of them treated it as a standalone philosophical poem.