Mahabharata Video II: Vyasa

Here's another video tutorial on the Mahabharata. This one's on Vyasa.

Here's a transcript of the video:

Insights on Vyāsa

Who is Vyāsa?

Vyāsa is the patriarch of the Kuru family after Shantanu. Shantanu is a descendant from Bharata the great king from whom India takes its name. Shantanu obliges his son Bhishma to take a vow of celibacy so that he can marry Satyavati whose father wants to ensure his legacy.

When the sons of Shantanu have no children and the regent of Hastinapura, Bhishma, has no heirs, it falls to Vyasa to continue the line.

Vyasa’s children are Pandu, Dhritarasthra, and Vidura, whose sons are the Kurus and Pandavas. The war over the succession for the throne of Hastinapura is the core of the Mahabharat story.

There is much speculation around the personality of the original poet of the Mahābharata. to grow around the name “Vyāsa”. While tradition venerates him without question as an immortal, inspired sage, and the unique author of many different scriptures, modern criticism holds that “Vyāsa” may be a title given gifted poets and scribes. Just as there may have been more than one Homer or Shakespeare, there might have been more than one Vyāsa. The Mahābhārata seems to have gone through a number of editions before reaching its final form. Over the course of the book’s evolution there may have been more scribe or poet who adopted the name Vyāsa.

And yet Vyāsa captures the soul of India so well and reveals inner wisdom so perfectly that it is hard to differ with the traditional accounts. Vyāsa himself has a particular style. Mythology may be taken for granted, the history of ancient kings may seem fantastic, but the intimate details of daily life in ancient India are so carefully documented that the entire work is permeated with a kind of Magical realism. 

The history itself is in dispute with the date of the Kurukshetra battle varying by hundreds of years. To examine the true history of the Mahābhārata is an elusive goal. The biography of Vyasa himself is even more elusive. To understand the character of the author of Mahābhārata in the light of scholarship is an impossible task. It would be, as Vyāsa puts it, like “trying to catch the rainbow with your fingers.”

Much more than being a mere character in the story, as the patriarch of the Kurus and Pandavas, Vyasa is the author of Mahabharata, the greatest story-teller ever.