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Synopsis Recent years have witnessed continued and growing interest in the massive, ancient, fascinating, mysterious and culturally rich poems we know as the Sanskrit epics. This interest has manifested itself in the continuing translations of the critical editions of both texts, a steady stream of monographs and edited volumes, and numerous scholarly meeting involving members of the international community of Sanskrit epic scholars. A number of these scholars assembled in Helsinki to constitute the Epic Section of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference convened in that beautiful city in the summer of 2003 under the auspices of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies and the University of Helsinki. The present volume place before the Indological community the sixteen learned papers presented at the conference by the distinguished group of scholars who were in attendance. The topics and methodologies of the authors are as varied and diverse as the contents of the monumental poems themselves but each contribution sheds new light on some aspect of the genetic and/ or receptive history of these popular and massively influential works, their relationship to each other and to other Indic texts, or the representation and analysis of specific characters and episodes in the poems.