The Harivamsa is an important work of Sanskrit literature, containing 16,374 shlokas, mostly in the anustubh metre. The text is also known as the Harivamsa Purana. This text is believed to be a khila to the Mahabharata and is traditionally ascribed to Vyasa. The most celebrated commentary of the Mahabharata by Neelakantha Chaturdhara, the Bharata Bhava Deepa also covers the Harivamsha. According to a traditional version of the Mahabharata, the Harivamsha is divided into two parvas and 12,000 verses. These are included with the eighteen parvas of the Mahabharata. The Critical Edition has three parvas and 5,965 verses. The Adi Parva of describes the creation of the cosmos and the legendary history of the kings of the Solar and Lunar dynasties leading up to the birth of Krishna. VishnuParva recounts the history of Krishna up to the events prior to the Mahabharata. Bhavishya Parva, the third book, includes two alternate creation theories, hymns to Shiva and Vishnu and provides a description of the Kali Yuga. While the Harivamsha has been regarded as an important source of information on the origin of Vishnu's incarnation Krishna, there has been speculation as to whether this text was derived from an earlier text and what its relationship is to the Brahma Purana, another text that deals with the origins of Krishna. Panchalakṣaṇa tradition, that is, the five marks of the Purana corpus one of which is the genealogy, and stories about the life of Krishna as a herdsman. The text is complex, containing layers that go back to the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE. The origin of this appendix is not precisely known but it is apparent that it was a part of the Mahabharata by the 1st century CE because "the poet Ashvaghosha quotes a couple of verses, attributing them to the Mahabharata, which are now only found in the Harivamsa". Edward Washburn Hopkins considers the Harivamsa the latest parva of the Mahabharata. Hazra has dated the Purana to the 4th century CE on the basis of the description of the rasa lila in it. According to him, the Visnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana belong to the 5th century CE and 6th century CE respectively. According to Dikshit, the date of the Matsya Purana is 3rd century CE. When we compare the biography of Krishna, the account of Raji, and some other episodes as depicted in the, it appears to be anterior to the former. Therefore, the and the can be dated to at least the 3rd century CE. By its style and contents, the appears to be anterior to the and. The verses quoted by Asvaghosa belong to this parva. On this basis, we can safely assume the to be at least as old as the 1st century CE.
Editions
The is available in two editions. The vulgate text of the has total 271 s, divided into three parvas, , and . The Critical Edition or CE is around a third of this vulgate edition. Like the vulgate, the chapters in the CE are divided into three parvas, , and . Vaidya suggests that even the CE represents an expanded text and proposes that the oldest form of probably began with chapter 20 and must have ended with chapter 98 of his text.
Contents
The last chapter of the text gives a brief description of the subjects narrated in it as follows:
Harivaṃśa Parva
Viṣṇu Parva
† These pieces definitely appear to be interpolations into the text.
Bhaviṣya Parva
† This suggests that at some point of time this chapter used to close the text.
