The Mahabharata
The epic's great questions, each followed through the moments that answer them.
The Mahabharata can be read straight through, book by book, and most people never finish it that way. It is a hundred thousand verses long and it keeps stopping to tell a different story. But the epic is not disorganised. It returns again and again to the same handful of questions, testing each one on a new character until the answer has been turned over from every side.
These eight themes are those questions. Each gathers an essay on how the epic treats the idea, the defining moments where it is decided, what the Bhagavad Gita says about it, and a few things worth sitting with afterwards. Read one theme end to end and you have followed a single argument across eighteen books, from a vow in the first chapter to a refusal at the gates of heaven in the last.
8 themes, in the order they unfold in the epic's thinking