The great Vedantist philosopher Çankaracharya, who wrote his commentary in 804 A.D., often quotes the Mahabharata as a Smriti, and in discussing a verse from Book XII. expressly states that the Mahabharata was intended for the religious instruction of those classes who by their position are debarred from studying the Vedas and the Vedanta. From the middle of the eleventh century A.D. we have the oldest known abstract of the Mahabharata, the work of the Kashmirian poet Kshemendra, entitled Bharata-Manjari. This condensation is specially important, because it enables the scholar to determine the state of the text in detail at that time. Professor Bühler's careful comparison of the MSS. of this work with the great epic has led him to the conclusion that Kshemendra's original did not differ from the Mahabharata as we have it at present in any other way than two classes of MSS. differ from each other. This poetical epitome shows several omissions, but these are on the whole of such a nature as is to be expected in any similar abridgment. It is, however, likely that twelve chapters (342-353) of Book XII., treating of Narayana, which the abbreviator passes over, did not exist in the original known to him. There can, moreover, be no doubt that the forms of several proper names found in the Manjari are better and older than those given by the editions of the Mahabharata. Though the division of the original into eighteen books is found in the abridgment also, it is made up by turning the third section (gada-parvan) of Book IX. (çalya-parvan) into a separate book, while combining Books XII. and XIII. into a single one. This variation probably represents an old division, as it occurs in many MSS. of the Mahabharata. Another work of importance in determining the state of the Mahabharata is a Javanese translation of the epic, also dating from the eleventh century. The best-known commentator of the Mahabharata is Nilakantha, who lived at Kurpara, to the west of the Godavari, in Maharashtra, and, according to Burnell, belongs to the sixteenth century. Older than Nilakantha, who quotes him, is Arjuna Miçra, whose commentary, along with that of Nilakantha, appears in an edition of the Mahabharata begun at Calcutta in 1875. The earliest extant commentator of the great epic is Sarvajna Narayana, large fragments of whose notes have been preserved, and who cannot have written later than in the second half of the fourteenth century, but may be somewhat older.