Johnson W.J. (ed.). The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahabharata. The Massacre at Night

New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. — 185 p. — ISBN: 978-0-19-95496-4.For the non-specialist western reader the Mahabharata can resemble a vast but distant mountain range obscured by clouds. Just as many people are able to identify only Everest among the Himalayan peaks, so, in the Mahabharata range, perhaps only the Bhagavadgfta stands
out, usually with little recognition that it is rooted in something much larger, more demanding, and yet no less rewarding to explore. For
even the most tentative approach uncovers in the text many, if not all, of those key assumptions, tensions, and questions—mythological,
theological, and soteriological—that converged, precisely during the period of the Mahabharata^'s crystallization, to form the great and
variegated religious culture subsequently labelled 'Hinduism'.