In emWorld of Wondersem, Alf Hiltebeitel addresses the Mahabharata and its supplement, the Harivamsa, as a single literary composition. Looking at the work through the critical lens of the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, juice, essence, or taste, he argues that the dominant rasa of these two texts is adbhutarasa, the mood of wonder. While the Mahabharata signposts whole units of the text as wondrous in its table of contents, the Harivamsa foregrounds a stepped-up term for wonder ascarya that drives home the point that Vishnu and Krishna are one. pTwo scholars of the 9th and 10th centuries, Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, identified the Mahabharata's dominant rasa as santarasa, the mood of peace. This has traditionally been received as the only serious contestant for a rasic interpretation of the epic. Hiltebeitel disputes both the positive claim that the santarasa interpretation is correct and the negative claim that adbhutarasa is a frivolous rasa that cannot sustain a major work.