Dharma, Epics, and the Upanishads' Silence: A Narrative Review of India's Sanskrit Canon --- Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, and Ramayana
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: India's Sanskrit canon is the world's oldest continuously living literature: the Vedas' hymns recited for three millennia, the Upanishads' meditations, and the two epics --- Mahabharata and Ramayana --- that still organize the subcontinent's moral imagination. This article presents a narrative review of the literature that transmits and reads that canon. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the Vedic foundations, in which Doniger's Rig Veda translation, Olivelle's Upanishads, Witzel's Veda chapters, and the Blackwell companion fixed the oral corpus --- the hymns' recited authority and the Upanishads' philosophical turn; the epics and the Gita, in which van Buitenen's Mahabharata, Goldman's Ramayana, Sattar's modern retelling, Miller's Bhagavad Gita, Brockington's Sanskrit epics, and Hiltebeitel's oral epics research fixed the narrative stratum --- dharma's dilemmas, exile's politics, and the war's dialogue; and the modern readings, in which Doniger's alternative history and Olivelle's ashrama system fixed the scholarship --- the canon's history read against its own claims. It is concluded that the literature describes a single living transmission: a canon whose authority is recitation, whose epics argue rather than decree, and whose modern editions are the latest stage of an oral tradition that never quite stopped speaking.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Topic: Indian and Buddhist Studies
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204764352