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INTRODUCTION
TO
ANUGÎTÂ.
Like the Bhagavadgita and the Sanatsugatiya, the Anugita 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 gard. It forms part of the Asvamedha Parvan of the Mahabharata, and is contained in thirty-six chapters of that Parvan. These chapters—being chapters XVI to LI-together with all the subsequent chapters of the Asvamcdha Parvan, 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 referred 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 Sankarakarya, and one or two in the Sankhya-såra of Vigñana 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 professes to be a sort of continuation, or rather recapitulation, of the Bhagavadgita. At the very outset of the work, we read, that after the great fratricidal war of the Mahabharata was over, and the Pandavas had become sole and complete masters of their ancestral kingdom, Krishna and Arguna--- the two interlocutors in the Bhagavadgita - 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, Krishna communicated to Arguna his wish to return to his own people at Dvaraka, now that the business which had called
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