Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa and the Mahabharata: A New Interpretation.

Fitzgerald, James L.

This book, which is based on a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Chicago, is an overview of Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa's role in the Mahabharata that alternates between cataloging the ways Vyasa is presented, on the one hand, and making an argument that Vyasa in the MBh should be seen as fundamentally connected to the God Brahma. This latter point is the main and original contribution of the book and is an interesting and important suggestion.

Sullivan's main argument is conducted along the lines of the "myth and epic" approach to the MBh pioneered by Wikander and Dumezil and used and refined and extended by Biardeau and Hiltebeitel. Sullivan argues that Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa was intended to be seen as the human representative of the God Brahma in the Mahabharata's epic narrative, just as Krsna Vasudeva represents Visnu Narayana and as Draupadi represents the Goddess Sri. He makes his argument that the MBh depicts Vyasa "as if he were the amsa or avatara of Brahma" (p. 113) on the basis of three parallel features he says the epic develops between the human seer and the God: "1) each represents . . . brahminical orthodoxy; 2) each creates and disseminates Veda; and 3) each is . . . [a] 'grandfather' . . . [whose offspring] splits into two factions which fight for sovereignty" (p. 81). I have some disagreements with the way Sullivan develops points one and three of this set, but I do think that he has successfully established a broad parallelism between the depiction of Vyasa in the MBh and the God Brahma, a connection that should prove fruitful in future reflection on the epic.

One problem for Sullivan's thesis is that the MBh never actually makes an explicit connection of Vyasa to Brahma though it does explicitly connect humans to counterpart Gods in the cases of K.r.s .ha Visudeva, Draupadi, and many other figures of the epic narrative. Another problem with his thesis is that the Nirayaniya episode of the MBh, followed by a number of puranas, views Vyasa as an earthly incarnation of Narayana, a kind of "double" of Krsna Vasudeva, as Madeleine Biardeau put it, ("Etudes de mythologie hindoue, I," Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient 44 [1968]: 35, n. 1). Because Sullivan unnecessarily insists upon casting his argument about Vyasa and Brahma in terms of human amsas and avataras of Gods, he is forced to resolve these two difficulties and he offers a number of dubious explanations for them that muddle the valuable insight that Vyasa and Brahms exhibit an interesting degree of parallelism. In my opinion, Sullivan would have done better first to accept what has to be regarded as the epic's deliberate eschewing of any language of incarnation to express the parallelism between Vyasa and Brahms and then investigate the roots and ramifications of the connection. Instead, having argued his case that "Vyasa is Brahms on Earth" in chapter four, Sullivan drops the point and gives us "Other Perspectives on Vyasa" in chapter five, where he interestingly and informatively discusses some jataka and purina accounts of Vyasa's role in the self-destruction of the Andhaka-Vrsnis and then presents and discusses the role of Vyasa in Jean-Claude Carriere's adaptation of the Mahabharata, which formed the basic script of Peter Brook's theatrical productions of the Mahabharata. In his sixth and final chapter, Sullivan returns to his main argument and concludes merely that "the epic's depiction of Vyasa as the earthly counterpart to Brahma . . . serves to augment the status and authority of the MBh as a religious text" (p. 113). This conclusion hardly seems commensurate with the interesting idea Sullivan opened up in his fourth chapter. Also the status and authority of the MBh are quite well grounded in Vyasa the seer, whether Brahma is seen hovering behind him or not.

Sullivan's book performs a valuable service in surveying what the epic has to say about Vyasa, but the basic survey in his second chapter, "The Author in His Own Composition," sometimes overlooks important aspects of Vyasa or judges matters too quickly. Sullivan relates the story of Parasara's ravishing of Vyasa's mother Satyavati three times in chapter two; he takes cognizance of Vyasa's prior ancestors Vasistha and Sakti; but he does not mention the important history of Vasistha and King Kalmasapada (MBh 1.166-68) which eventuated both in one of many epic instances of a brahmin seer being invited to impregnate a ksatriya woman (an important theme pertinent to Vyasa's similar service to the Bharatas) and in Parasara's ritualized, genocidal violence against the Raksasas (MBh 1.172). "The divine plan in the epic" (Sullivan uses this phrase as an apt title for his chapter three) was essentially a divinely led, genocidal purge of ksatriyas upon the earth facilitated in various ways by the brahmin Vyasa, and the seer's great composition narrating this horror was first recited to the descendant of the sole ksatriya survivor, Janamejaya Bharata Pariksita, at that king's own genocidal rite against the world's serpents. Of course Vyasa's connection to these three orgies of death also has echoes in the mythology of Brahma - that God needed once to create death upon earth because creatures were proliferating too much (told at MBh 12.248-50). I also find Sullivan's statement, "[a]mong all the brahmins in the MBh, Vyasa is the one whose way of life most corresponds to the orthodox ideal which was then being formulated; he is the epic's most dharmic brahmin" (p. 27), hasty and incomplete. Labeling Vyasa this way is not without some basis, of course, but Vyasa had no childhood, no initiation, and no marriage; he was a born vanaprastha - he lives in a hermitage in the Himalayas as a learned man, ascetic, yogin, and teacher. Vyasa may represent some fantasy of an ideal brahmin, but he is hardly the exemplar of an orthoprax brahmin. I agree with Sullivan when he says that "the orthodox ideal [of a brahmin] was then being formulated" in the MBh, but I think the MBh furnishes abundant materials making the determination of just what that ideal, or those ideals, was or were a very complicated and interesting project unto itself.

There are a number of smaller points scattered throughout the book where I differ with Sullivan. A few of the more interesting or significant ones are:

On p. 7, note 26, Sullivan says Vyasa agreed with the request of his five pupils to be his only students, a point he repeats on p. 44. Only the four students who were not his sons made this request (at 12.314.31-38), and while Vyasa did not directly refuse their request, his initial response implies that he did not comply ("The brahman must always be given to a brahmana who wants to hear it, who wants to be sure of dwelling in brahmaloka" 12.314.40).

On p. 48, with note 77, Sullivan overstates Vyasa's guidance of the Pandavas' regarding their "final journey" (mahaprasthana) and inappropriately likens what is actually a form of suicide to the transition from householding to asceticism.

On p. 75, Sullivan suggests that the Pandavas and Kauravas were characterized by "religious differences," that "the epic seems to be suggesting that the Pandavas are aligned with the Vaisnava religious tradition and the Kauravas with the Saiva tradition." True, the Pandavas are closely allied with the incarnation of Visnu-Narayana and Asvatthaman is a devotee of Siva (while Duryodhana has a connection to Siva in his background), but these alliances hardly justify such terms as "religious traditions" (furthermore, the Kaurava Bhisma was one of the most overt and pious of Krsna Vasudeva's devotees in the epic).

On p. 104, Sullivan writes, "The Arthasastra is widely regarded as having been composed about 300 B.C.," and he quotes R. P. Kangle (The Kautiliya Arthasastra, pt. 3: A Study [Bombay: Univ. of Bombay, 1965], 106). I think Thomas Trautmann's date of c. 150 A.D. is more reasonable (Kautilya and the Arthasastra: A Statistical Investigation of the Authorship and Evolution of the Text [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971], 184).

There are very few typographical or mechanical errors in the book: On pp. 39 and 43, n. 62, vanaprastha is misspelled vanaprastha; on p. 71, Vaisampayana is missing its third "a"; and on p. 100, brahmanascamsah should be brahmanascamsah.

JAMES L. FITZGERALD UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE