The Epics · Itihāsa
The Great Stories
The Itihasas — history told as story, dharma worked out in narrative. Read each as one flowing book.
The Bhagavata Purana
The Story of the Fortunate One, Retold in Full
The Bhagavata Purana is a story told to a man who has seven days to live. A king is cursed to die; a sage arrives; and what passes between them — creation and dissolution, the great devotees, the descents of the Lord, and above all the whole life of Krishna — is offered as the one thing worth hearing when there is no time left for anything else. Here it is retold in flowing English in full: all twelve cantos, broken into fifty-seven short chapters across seven movements, as a single continuous narrative — so that a first-time reader can move through the whole of it and feel why the tradition holds that to hear this story well is itself the thing the story is about.
Read → BookThe Mahabharata
The Great Story of the Bharatas, Retold
The Mahabharata is the story of a family that could not hold itself together, and of a war that ended a world. Here it is retold in flowing English as a single narrative — every one of the eighteen parvas, grouped into seven movements and broken into short chapters — so that a first-time reader can move through the whole epic without ever losing the thread.
Read → BookThe Ramayana
The Way of Rama, Retold in Full
The Ramayana is the older of the two great epics, and the simpler to state and the hardest to live: one man who will not break his word, whatever it costs him or those who love him. Here it is retold in flowing English in full — all seven kandas, broken into sixty-two short chapters across seven movements — so that a first-time reader can move through the whole epic without losing the thread, and feel why a story about obedience became a story about love, loss, and the price of being good.
Read → BookThe Shiva Purana
The Stories of Lord Shiva, Told Simply
The Shiva Purana is the great storybook of Lord Shiva — the ascetic on the mountain, the lord of dance, the family man with Parvati and his two boys, the slayer of vast demons, the one whose ash a devotee may wear without fear. This is the Purana retold as forty simple stories: how the world saw him for the first time, Sati and Parvati, Ganesha and Kartikeya, the great battles, the twelve sacred Jyotirlingas, and the devotees who reached him. Short chapters, plain English, the whole story told.
Read →