An Annotated Translation of the Cosmologies of the Moksha Anthology of the Hindu Epic Mahabharata

FAIN: FA-53361-07

James Leo Fitzgerald
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

I shall study and provide an annotated translation of four cycles of cosmological teaching and five other chapters of cosmological teaching from the Moksha Anthology of the Mahabharata. The Moksha Anthology of this aggressive and imaginative epic has assembled a number of important Brahmin responses (from ca 300 BCE to 200 CE) to the metaphysical skepticism and epistemological innovations of the Brahmins' "upstart" rivals (from about 400 BCE), mainly the Jains and Buddhists. These important works are effectively unavailable to intellectual historians who are not Sanskritists. My work will make them available with a carefully designed scholarly apparatus presenting the results of a comparative study of these texts.