ANUGITA
02INTRODUCTION
To
ANUG{TA.
Like the Bhagavadgita and the SanatsugAtiya, the Anu-
ita is one of the numerous episodes of the Mahabharata.
And like the Sanatsugatiya, it appears here for the first
time in an English, or, indeed, it is believed, in any European
garb. It forms part of the Asvamedha Parvan of the Maha-
bhirata, and is contained in thirty-six chapters of that
Parvan, These chapters—being chapters XVI to LI—to-
gether with all the subsequent chapters of the Asvamedha
Parvaa, form by themselves what in some of our copies is
called the Anugita Parvan—a title which affords a parallel
to the title Bhagavadgita Parvan, which we have already
referrad to. The Anugita is not now a work of any very
great or extensive reputation. But we do find some few
quotations from it in the Bhashyas of Sankardéarya, and
one or two in the Sankhya-sdra of Vig#ana Bhikshu, to which
reference will be made hereafter. And it is included in the
present volume, partly because it affords an interesting
glimpse of sundry old passages of the Upanishad literature
in a somewhat modified, and presumably later, form; and
partly, perhaps I may say more especially, because it pro-
fesses to be a sort of continuation, or rather recapitulation,
of the Bhagayadgita. At the very outset of the work, we
read, that after the great fratricidal war of the Mah4bharata
was over, and the Pandavas had become sole and complete
masters of their ancestral kingdom, Krishna and Arguna—
the two interlocutors in the Bhagavadgité—happened to
take a stroll together in the great magical palace built for
the Pandavas by the demon Maya. In the course of the
Conversation which they held on the occasion, Krishwa
Conimunicated to Arguna his wish to’return to his own
People at Dvaraka, now that the business which had called