Mahābhārata-tātparya-nirṇaya

The Mahābhārata, Madhva says early in this work, has not come down intact: verses have been inserted in some places and dropped or moved in others, and of the old scriptures in general nearly all are lost. His answer is an independent poem rather than a commentary on the epic's lines: some five thousand verses in thirty-two chapters that set out the epic's true purport, which is what the title promises. He claims to have compared manuscripts from many regions and to write by the grace of Vishnu. The epic, he adds, does not always speak directly: a passage that seems to contradict its purport is meant indirectly, and when a god in human form appears ignorant or suffers, the show is put on to mislead demons. The epic of the war between the five Pāṇḍava brothers and their cousins was, for Madhva, scripture that outranks the Vedas; the poem tells that the gods once weighed it against them on a scale and the epic proved heavier. Its first chapter sets out how all scripture is to be read: everything points to Vishnu, who is free of every defect, and beneath him souls stand in an eternal order of rank. Some are fit for liberation, some will be reborn without end, and some are bound for darkness. The chapters that follow retell the Rāmāyaṇa, the life of Krishna and the war in that light, and near its close the poem charges the readings that make God and the soul one with hiding the Lord's supremacy. The hero is Bhīma, the strongest Pāṇḍava, because he is a descent of Vāyu, the wind god who serves Vishnu, as Hanumān was before him. The poem names Vāyu's third descent Pūrṇaprajña, one of Madhva's own names. It also tells of Maṇimat, a demon Bhīma kills, born again in the present age to spread a false doctrine; Madhva's followers identified him with Śaṅkara. Rāghavendra Tīrtha, a later Mādhva teacher, condensed the thirty-two chapters into thirty-two verses. In 2000 Roque Mesquita, an Indologist at Vienna, argued that Madhva himself composed the many passages he quotes from the Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata that no known manuscript contains, believing them revealed to him. B. N. K. Sharma, the school's modern historian, and Shrisha Rao answered him in 2003, and Mesquita replied in turn.