Sage Vyasa

Born on an island in the Yamuna

Before she married King Shantanu, Satyavati was a fisherman's daughter who ferried travellers across the Yamuna. The sage Parashara, grandson of Vasishtha, raised a fog over the river, and on a small island she bore him a son who grew to manhood at once. Because he was dark and born on an island (dvipa), he was called Krishna Dvaipayana. He left for the forest promising to come whenever his mother thought of him. Later he divided the Veda into four branches, which earned him the name Vyasa, the arranger.

Father of the Kuru princes

When Shantanu's son Vichitravirya died childless and Bhishma refused to break his vow, Satyavati called her first son. By the custom of niyoga Vyasa fathered sons on the two widowed queens. Ambika shut her eyes at the sight of the wild ascetic, and her son Dhritarashtra was born blind. Ambalika turned pale, and her son Pandu was born pale. A serving woman who received him without fear bore Vidura. Vyasa was therefore the grandfather of both the Kauravas and the Pandavas.

He kept returning at the family's turning points. He saved the mass of flesh Gandhari delivered by dividing it into a hundred and one jars of ghee, from which came Duryodhana, his brothers and their sister Dussala. He came to Drupada at night and explained why Draupadi could marry all five Pandavas.

Witness and counsellor in the war

The night before the fighting he offered Dhritarashtra sight so that he could watch the battle. The blind king refused to watch his sons die, so Vyasa gave the divine eye to Sanjaya, whose reports to the king frame the war books. After the war Vyasa and Narada stood between the Brahmashira weapons loosed by Ashwatthama and Arjuna. Years later, when Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti lived in the forest, he called the dead warriors up out of the Ganga for one night so that their families could see them again.

The author of the epic

Separately from these deeds, the Mahabharata names Vyasa as its composer. It says he shaped the poem over three years and taught it to his disciples, among them his son Shuka and Vaishampayana. Vaishampayana first recited it in full at the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya, Arjuna's great-grandson, and that recital is the frame in which the whole epic is told. The well-known story that Ganesha wrote the poem down at Vyasa's dictation is a later addition that the critical text leaves out.

Grandfather and narrator

Vyasa is at once inside and outside his poem. He begets its central family, advises its kings and grieves over its dead, and he also stands behind its telling. That double position gives the Mahabharata its peculiar voice: a war between cousins described by their own grandfather, who could foresee the end and could not prevent it.