Can the truth of the mahabharata, be possessed without a deep understanding of the narrative structure through which it emerges? Is a sense of self awareness, a flash of insight into truth, a reckoning with the dilemmas of existence, perhaps enlightenment possible without the stories from which these emerge?

Chaturvedi Badrinath has made an eminently commendable effort to produce a compendium of mahavakyas-cum-tika that makes Mahabharata usable for modern readers. It is conveniently divided into eighteen chapters, each of which covers a vital aspect of the human condition: from food, water and life, to death and rajdharma; from ahimsa to artha, from dharma to moksa. Each of the chapters distills the essential quotations on these topics and provides an agreeable and accessible gloss on the various claims made in the text. The selections and helpful commentary will be useful starting point for those uninitiated in the text.nbsp;nbsp;This digest is by someone who clearly knows the text. But in the end you cannot help feeling that this book runs the risk of simply being “quotable” Mahabharata. This is not meant to belittle Badrinath’s extraordinary labor, scholarship or clarity. As the introduction will demonstrate, Badrinath’s understanding of the Mahabharata can be quite supple.

But as edifying as the extracts and commentary are, there is a sense in which this digest some times misses the forest for the trees. Take for instance, the chapter on ahimsa, which collects most of the relevant quotations. Badrinath rightly points out that ahimsa is rooted in a psychological propensity, abhaya a point Gandhi never tired of making, and a metaphysical claim that the Self and other are not distinct, so violence to others is really violence to oneself. But presented as a monumental truth of this kind, detached from an intimate relationship to the existential predicament of real characters, the effect of the doctrine of ahimsa is to leave you cold rather than enlightened. The real pathos and edification of the Mahabharata does not come through the didactic declaration about ahimsa, but by working through the existential predicament strict adherence to this doctrine generates. Indeed, even in technical terms Badrinath glosses over a key distinction between ahimsa non-violence and anrsamsya non cruelty. Both these terms have different implications, and the text and its characters struggle through to settle on what is the real ideal.

Badrinath has a useful discussion of key aspects of our condition: kala and daiva. But the underlying unity of the text and argument is dissipated in pearls of wisdom. For the real fun of the Mahabharata are not the authoritative sayings, but the fact that it is a running argument with “God.”nbsp;For the Mahabharata is an ultimate anti-theodicy. Even seemingly unsympathetic characters like Sisupala and Duryodhana grow in sympathy as they mock at Krishna’s efforts to render the world into a an ethically rational and ordered totality. Badrinath often gets the artha meaning right, but the rasa is missing.

There is an obvious sense in which the Mahabharata is open to multiple interpretations and subverts any sense of certainty. But this has often, in contemporary discussions of the text, become an excuse to not attend to the precision of its vocabulary or the logic of the narrative. Modern readers find it incredible that Anand Vardhana could claim the Mahabharata has only one dominant rasa: shanti rasa. Any account of the Mahabharata’s inquiry into the human condition would be worth its weight in gold, if it could appreciate the profundity of that reading and unlock the reasons behind it.