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.
The Mahābhārata states its own position on this in the Ādiparvan (1.56.33):
yad ihāsti tad anyatra, yan nehāsti na tat kvacit
What is here is found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere. This is a statement about what kind of text the Mahābhārata is not a story about a war but a record of dharma in every condition human beings encounter.
What the inner reading rests on
The inner reading of these texts is real and important so I am not denying if these texts are read, studied or understood as archetype. Every serious teacher across every lineage acknowledges the inner dimension and considers it important. Kṛṣṇa as the higher self, the battlefield as the mind, these readings are not wrong. But they rest on the historical claim, not the other way around.
Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to Arjuna is what it is because of the specificity of the situation. Arjuna’s grief is not a literary device. His paralysis is not a narrative technique. The Mahābhārata is not using his fall as a setup for a philosophical discourse. It is recording what happened when a specific person faced an impossible situation and what understanding made it possible for him to act. The inner dimension of that is inseparable from its historical ground.
How the Mahābhārata was composed
Most people who have studied the Mahābhārata do not know it went through three distinct stages before reaching its current form. The Ādiparvan documents this directly. Vyāsa composed Jaya first at 8,800 ślokas. His disciple Vaiśampāyana expanded this to Bhārata at 24,000 ślokas. Ugraśravā the Sūta, having heard Vaiśampāyana recite the Bhārata at King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, recited the expanded Mahābhārata at 100,000 ślokas to the sages at Naimiṣāraṇya. The text that survives is this third version. The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions northern and southern recensions which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. This is the version most people encounter.
The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions, northern and southern recensions, which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune produced a critical edition from 1919 to 1966, led by V.S. Sukthankar, then S.K. Belvalkar and P.L. Vaidya, comparing 1,259 manuscripts across both traditions and identifying passages found in some traditions but absent in others. The two traditions contain different episodes and in some cases different versions of the same events. Anyone reading the Mahābhārata seriously is worth knowing which tradition their edition draws from.
How the Rāmāyaṇa was composed
The Rāmāyaṇa was composed by Vālmīki, a contemporary of Rāma. The composition account is in the Bālakāṇḍa itself. Nārada narrated the story of Rāma to Vālmīki at his āśrama. Brahmā granted Vālmīki divya dṛṣṭi (direct vision) of all events of Rāma’s life, past and yet to come and instructed him to compose the Rāmāyaṇa in the śloka meter. Vālmīki composed 24,000 ślokas across seven kāṇḍas: Bāla, Ayodhyā, Araṇya, Kiṣkindhā, Sundara, Yuddha, Uttara. He first taught it to Lava and Kuśa, Rāma’s sons, who later recited it at Rāma’s court. The tradition calls Vālmīki Ādikavi, the first poet, and the Rāmāyaṇa Ādikāvya, the first poem.
The Rāmāyaṇa has one of the largest commentarial traditions in Sanskrit literature more than thirty major commentaries. The three best known Tilaka, Bhūṣaṇa (by Govindarāja), and Śiromaṇi are together called the ṭīkātraya. Maheśvara Tīrtha’s Tattvadīpikā is another major commentary. Ācāryas across philosophical traditions engaged with the complete text, including all seven kāṇḍas. Madhvācārya in the 13th century references Rāmāyaṇa events including Uttarakāṇḍa episodes in his Mahābhārata Tātparya Nirṇaya. Govindarāja wrote commentary on the full Uttarakāṇḍa. The text exists in multiple manuscript recensions southern, northern, Gaudiya, and northwestern across which the commentators worked. The Oriental Institute at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda produced a critical edition between 1960 and 1975 comparing manuscripts across these recensions. The critical edition retains all seven kāṇḍas.
Beyond Vālmīki’s Sanskrit text, there are major regional compositions that retell the Rāma story in other languages. Kamban’s Iramavataram in Tamil (12th century), Madhava Kandali’s Saptakāṇḍa Rāmāyaṇa in Assamese (14th century), Gona Budda Reddy’s Ranganatha Rāmāyaṇa in Telugu (14th century), and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (1576). These are separate literary works, not translations or manuscript variants of Vālmīki’s text. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is the dominant version across much of North India and is what most Hindi-speaking people encounter as the Rāmāyaṇa.
What the record shows
The Mahābhārata contains precise astronomical descriptions planetary positions, eclipses, stellar configurations at the time of the Kuruṣetra war. Indian researchers across multiple disciplines are actively working with this data. The astronomical school includes Dr. Narhari Achar, Dr. Manish Pandit, P.V. Vartak, and Nilesh Oak, using planetarium software and traditional astronomical methods. Shrikant Talageri works from linguistic and textual evidence, Rigvedic genealogies and Avesta-Mitanni correspondences. Jijith Nadumuri Ravi, a former ISRO scientist, has produced a three-volume Geo-Chronology Series (Rivers of Rigveda, Geography of Rāmāyaṇa, Geography of Mahābhārata) combining satellite imagery, archaeological data, and analysis of over 110,000 Sanskrit verses. The dates these researchers arrive at differ, and they disagree publicly. What they share is treating the data in these texts as specific and worth working with, not as vague symbolic language. This is an active field of Indian scholarship with ongoing debate
The Sarasvatī river, described extensively across both texts and long treated as mythological by modern scholarship, was confirmed by satellite imaging as a vast dried riverbed running exactly where the texts describe it. Underwater investigations off Dwarka in Gujarat found submerged structures dated to roughly 3500 BCE, consistent with the Mahābhārata’s account of Dvārakā being swallowed by the sea after Kṛṣṇa’s death.
The gap between “we cannot verify this with current tools” and “this is myth” is significant. Itihāsa never called itself myth.
What these texts are for
The events of the Rāmāyaṇan occurred in Tretā yuga. The events of the Mahābhārata at the junction of Dvāpara and Kali yuga. The two texts together show dharmic life under different conditions. The Rāmāyaṇa shows dharma largely intact the ideal son, husband, king, friend, devotee; institutions that function; roles that hold. Rāma is called Maryādā Puruṣottama, the ideal of proper conduct. The Mahābhārata shows dharma under severe pressure and breaking down, and what it takes to hold a dharmic orientation when the conditions are hostile to it.
The crises in the Mahābhārata, the fall of dharma, the corruption of institutions, the confusion of roles, the degradation of human capacity are not ancient problems being remembered. This is what the Ādiparvan means when it says what is not in the Mahābhārata is nowhere. It is not a record of something finished. It is a map of the conditions even this age produces and what it takes to live in them with understanding intact.
This is what is lost when these texts are called mythology. Mythology is about archetypes and universal themes applicable always, specific to nothing. Itihāsa is testimony about what happened to specific people in specific conditions, and what it took for them to hold dharma through it..
Weekly, from the tradition. Words & World continues.
Om Tat Sat
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