Vyasa

The Knotted Verses

The first chapter of the Adi Parva opens on the day the poem is finished and there is no one on earth to write it down. Brahma himself comes to the poet, grants the work the rank of a poem, and tells him to call Ganesha to mind, and Ganesha has no sooner been thought of than he stands where Vyasa sits. “Guide of the Ganas, be the writer of the Bharata that I have formed in my imagination and am about to recite.” Ganesha hears him out and sets his terms. “I will become the writer of your work,” he says, “provided my pen does not stop writing for a single moment.” A poet who composes as he speaks needs the pauses, and Ganesha has just taken them away, so Vyasa answers with a condition of his own. “Wherever there is anything you do not understand, stop writing.” Between those two promises the poet finds room to breathe: now and then he ties a verse into so tight a knot that even the all-knowing scribe must stop for a moment to think, and in that moment Vyasa composes the verses ahead. Eight thousand eight hundred of those knots are in the poem, and no one has yet undone them. When King Janamejaya begins his snake sacrifice, the poet comes to the sacrificial hall in person, is seated on a golden seat, and is asked by his great-grandson what caused the quarrel between the Kurus and the Pandavas. He turns to the disciple at his side and gives him one instruction. “The discord that happened long ago between the Kurus and the Pandavas: narrate all of it to the king, just as you heard it from me.” Vaishampayana tells the king that the work runs to a hundred thousand shlokas, that Krishna Dvaipayana finished it in three years, and then speaks the sentence by which the poem has been known ever since. “Whatever this work does not contain is not to be found anywhere at all.”

Where the Story Stops

Inside the story, his coming is almost a rule. At Ekachakra, where the Pandavas live hidden in a Brahmin’s house, he visits them and tells of a sage’s daughter who asked Shankara five times for a husband and was told she would have five husbands in her next life, and that this girl, born now in Drupada’s line, is appointed to be the wife of them all; then he sends them toward Panchala. After the svayamvara, when Drupada protests that no one has ever heard of one woman with many husbands, the island-born sage arrives at his court in the course of his wanderings. “This practice is opposed to usage and to the Vedas,” Vyasa says, “and it has become obsolete.” He hears what each of them thinks, and then takes Drupada by the hand into a private room and tells him of the five Indras and of the goddess Shri appointed to be their wife, gives the king celestial sight to see the five brothers in their old forms, and comes back to tell Yudhishthira that the moon has entered Pushya and that he should take Krishna’s hand that very day, before his brothers. In the Dvaita forest, with Bhima pressing for war and the whole future sitting heavily on the king, he draws Yudhishthira aside to a corner where the others cannot hear. “I am giving you a knowledge called the Pratismriti.” Pass it to Arjuna, he says, and let Arjuna go to the gods for their weapons. And on the morning the two armies stand facing each other at Kurukshetra, he comes privately to the blind king. “The hour of your sons and of the other kings has come.” Dhritarashtra does not want to see his kinsmen killed, only to hear of it, so the poet gives the gift of sight to Sanjaya instead. “He will know everything: what is done in the open and what is hidden, what happens by day and by night, even what a man only thinks in his own mind.” The man who composed the war has just arranged for it to be watched.

Twice in the war he is met on the road. On the fifteenth day, when the Agneya weapon has burned an akshauhini and left the two Krishnas standing untouched, Drona‘s son drops his bow, walks off the field, and finds him there, dark as a rain cloud, the compiler of the Vedas. To the question why a weapon that can kill every creature could not kill two men, Vyasa answers with the austerities of Narayana and the boons of Rudra, “know that Arjuna is that Nara and no one else,” and then tells the son of Drona what he himself is, a portion of Rudra, born by the power of his own religious acts. The same day Arjuna asks him about the blazing figure that went before his chariot with a raised spear and feet that never touched the ground, and Vyasa answers, “You have seen Shankara, Arjuna: the first cause, from whom the Prajapatis came.” The character who speaks least in the poem is the one who tells every other character who he is.

In Front of Grief

After the war his work is grief, and he handles it without a single lie. Dhritarashtra, out of his senses with the loss of a hundred sons, wants to die, and Vyasa tells him a thing he once heard in Indra’s assembly. “From this you will understand that your son Duryodhana, born from Gandhari’s womb, was a portion of Kali, come into being to bring about a universal slaughter,” Vyasa says, and in the same breath that the sons perished by their own faults. Gandhari, remembering that Yudhishthira has destroyed every enemy he had, is about to curse him, and the sage, who can go anywhere at the speed of thought, is at her side before the words are out. “Do not use this occasion to pronounce a curse,” Vyasa says. “Use it to show your forgiveness.” Yudhishthira calls himself the killer of his teacher and announces that he will fast to death, and Vyasa stops him with two words, “This cannot be,” before opening the question the poem never closes: “Is the Supreme Being the doer, or is man the doer?” He pronounces the king free of sin and tells him in the next sentence that if he still holds himself a sinner he should perform the expiations and go on living; and when the king asks him for the whole law of kings, he turns his eyes on Narada and sends Yudhishthira to Bhishma. The treasury is empty when the horse sacrifice is proposed, and the poet’s answer is practical. “This empty treasury will be full,” he says. “There is gold lying in the Himalaya, on the mountain Himavat. The Brahmins left it behind at the sacrifice of King Marutta, who gave them more than they could carry away.” No one living will be taxed for the rite.

A Son, and the Shadow of a Son

In the Shanti Parva, Bhishma tells from his bed of arrows the one story in which Vyasa is a man who receives. Near a summit of Mount Meru where the karnikara trees are in flower, the island-born sage performs extraordinary austerities for the sake of a son, and as he sits in yoga his matted hair is seen to blaze like flames with the force that is in him; “That is why the matted locks of the island-born Krishna have looked the color of fire ever since.” Mahadeva grants the boon with a smile. Then one day, rubbing his fire sticks together, Vyasa sees the apsara Ghritachi, and from the two sticks his father used to make fire the ascetic Shuka is born. The father teaches him everything and then sends him to learn the law of release from a king. “Go to Janaka, the ruler of Mithila.” And with it the rules of the road: “Go simply,” Vyasa says, “and do not go looking for pleasure.” The four disciples ask a boon, that the Vedas may shine in the five of them alone, and their teacher sends them down to the earth with one warning. “Be careful always. The Vedas are easily misunderstood.” When they are gone the poet sits in silence with only his son for company, and tells Narada plainly, “I am parted from my disciples, and my spirits are very low.” Then the day comes when Shuka announces what he intends. “My son,” he says, “my dear son, stay here today, so that I may look at you a while and satisfy my eyes.” Shuka is unmoved by the request. He goes up to Kailasa and becomes one with Brahman, and Vyasa follows by the subtle path of yoga, reaches in less than a moment the place his son set out from, and breaks into lamentation, calling the name. The son, now everywhere, answers his father with the single syllable “Bho,” in the form of an echo, and from that day the mountains answer every sound. The apsaras playing in the Mandakini had felt no shame before the son; before the father they scatter in confusion, and Vyasa understands that his son is free of every attachment and that he is not, and is filled with joy and shame together. It is then that Shiva comes, carrying the Pinaka, and comforts the burning father with the last boon of his life. “And by my grace you will see in this world a shadow in the likeness of your son, moving at your side, that will never leave you for a single moment.”

One Night on the Bhagirathi

Fifteen years after the war Dhritarashtra asks leave to go to the forest and Yudhishthira refuses him, and Vyasa arrives at that moment with an order. “Do what Dhritarashtra asks, Yudhishthira, and do it without any scruple,” Vyasa says. When the Pandavas visit the old king in the forest, Vyasa reads the wish in the blind man’s heart and offers him a boon. Gandhari asks to see the dead, and Kunti, bowing before her father-in-law, opens the secret of Karna’s birth; he hears the whole of it and tells her, “As for the birth of Karna, no fault is ascribable to you.” Then he makes a promise to Gandhari. “Tonight you will see your sons and brothers and friends and kinsmen, together with your fathers, like men risen from sleep.” When night comes, the great ascetic walks down into the Bhagirathi, bathes, and standing in the river summons every warrior killed on either side. Out of the water comes a deafening uproar, the same sound that was once heard from the two armies facing each other, and the kings rise by the thousand with Bhishma and Drona at their head, each in the dress he had on the field, and all of them free of enmity. Through the power of his penance Vyasa gives Dhritarashtra celestial vision, and the man who was blind from birth sees his sons for the first time in his life. At dawn the heroes plunge back into the river. Then the sage, still standing in the stream, speaks to the widows. “Let those among you who wish to reach the regions your husbands have won cast off all sloth and plunge quickly into the sacred Bhagirathi.” They do, and go where their husbands have gone. Years later, with Dwarka under the sea and the Gandiva too heavy to string, Arjuna comes to the same hermitage with his eyes full of tears and says only, “I am Arjuna,” and waits. “Welcome,” says Vyasa. “Sit down.” He tells him that the one who walked before his chariot was Vasudeva himself, and then, “The time has come for you to depart from the world.” “Time is the seed of the universe, Arjuna, and it is Time again that withdraws everything at its pleasure.” The great journey of the Pandavas begins from that sentence. At the very end, when Janamejaya asks where each of them went, Vaishampayana answers with the leave of the great Vyasa. The poem does not record its maker’s own departure; it leaves him where it found him, seated on the golden seat in the hall of the snake sacrifice, under whose orders the whole of it was told.

The Vyasa of Other Texts

The first skandha of the Bhagavata sees him where the Mahabharata never looks, after the work is done. He sits alone at dawn on the bank of the Sarasvati with his face clouded by an unrest he cannot name, and Narada, arriving with his veena, names it. “You have scarcely sung the spotless glory of the Lord,” he says, and this time there is no smile with it. Narada sends him down into samadhi to remember, one by one, the lilas of the Lord, and out of that samadhi comes the Bhagavata, which Vyasa completes and teaches to his son Shukadeva. The Devi Bhagavata tells the birth in its own way: on the Kalindi, Parashara, crossing in the ferry rowed by the fisherman’s daughter Matsyagandha, calls up a mist by the strength of his merit, gives her a fragrance that carries a yojana, and promises, “Your son will be pure, born of a portion of Lord Vishnu, and famed through the three worlds.” And the Vishnu Purana counts Vyasa as an office, a seat filled afresh in every age: in every Dvapara age Vishnu descends as Vyasa and divides the one Veda for a world whose strength has grown small, twenty-eight times so far in this manvantara, and the twenty-eighth was Krishna Dvaipayana, of whom the text says, “Krishnadvaipayana is to be known as Narayana himself; who in the world besides Narayana could compose the Mahabharata?” The next sentence of that Purana names the Vyasa of the Dvapara to come: Drona’s son Ashvatthama.

His Path

The Origin of the Kuru Line · A girl born of a fish, Parashara on the ferry, and a child on an island who walked away to austerity.

Naimisha and the Snake Sacrifice · Brahma’s visit, Ganesha‘s one condition, and Vyasa’s condition in return.

Satyavati and the Levirate · A mother’s remembering, the condition of ugliness, and three brothers born of one sequence of nights.

Draupadi’s Svayamvara · Drupada led by the hand into a private room, and a king given celestial sight.

Gandhari’s Lament and Curse · A portion of Kali, and a daughter-in-law offered forgiveness in place of a curse.

Yajnavalkya, Sulabha and Shuka · Hair the color of fire, a son born from the fire sticks, and the echo in the mountains.

The Forest and the Fire · Kunti‘s secret, warriors rising from the water, and a sage standing in the stream.

The One Who Comes When Remembered

Vyasa is the maker of this poem and its most restrained character. He never comes unsummoned, and when he comes it is to tell someone who he is: Arjuna is Nara, Drona’s son a portion of Rudra, Duryodhana a portion of Kali, Draupadi the girl who asked five times for a husband. Eyes are his gift, to Drupada, to Sanjaya, to Dhritarashtra, and each time the eye is given for a sight its owner had not wanted to see. In one relationship alone he is the one who receives, his son Shuka, and in that one place his sight is no use to him; apsaras blushing on a riverbank tell the seated rishi that the son is free and the father is not, and Mahadeva gives him a shadow in his son’s place. Ganesha’s condition and its counter-condition hold the poem’s own manner: where you do not understand, stop. Perhaps that is why the text never writes its author’s death. The teller of the story is left inside it, on a golden seat in the hall of the snake sacrifice, with the telling still going on.