Vedvyas

Vyasa – The Versatile Genius

- Sw. Chinmayananda

The goal of life as declared by the discoverers of Truth was handed down from Guru to disciple in the distant days of known human history, and along the avenue of time the teaching descended from generation to generation. The torch-bearer of knowledge maintained the relay efficiently up to the time of Veda Vyasa, the poet-seer. Then, Vyasa’s acute intelligence detected a growing danger : a possible threat to the continuation of that sacred relay race.

Hinduism was then facing the danger of total annihilation. The Scriptures were fast fading away even among those who were supposed to be the custodians of the sacred lore. The mantras of the Vedas were being slowly forgotten by the people; in that general forgetfulness of the generation the entire subjective science of the Vedas would have been lost – had it not been for the great revolutionary reformer, the poet philosopher known as Vyasa.

Vyasa found that the members of his generation had come to live in an age of increased competition. In their pre-occupation with life, learning dwindled, because they suffered- as we do today – the consequences of their intemperate living and the natural sorrows of an age of growing population pressure on the land. These conclusions

Are all conjuncture since we have no data to substantiate any positive view. Vedic India is to us a land of no historical reports, it refuses to talk to us.

The Vedas

Whatever the reason – and certainly there must have been sufficient reason – Vyasa, who was at once a far-sighted visionary and close observer of the cultural trends of his time, found the heroism to blast the then existing tradition and for the first time gathered the vedic mantras and recorded them in written language. Until his time, every new edition of the Vedas had been composed in the mouth of the Guru and directly on the memory slabs of his pupils’ hearts. As Vyasa moved around the country, he soon realized that various versions of the same Vedas, such as the Benares version and the Deccan version, had slowly infiltrated the original texts. He, therefore, collected all the vedic passages and for the first time edited them into written volumes which constitute the four great Vedas as they are known today.

In compiling the vedic mantras, Vyasa edited them into four books, the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. However, the systematic thinker in Vyasa was not satisfied with merely classifying the entire wealth
of Vedic knowledge into four volumes; in each volume he also brought about the harmonious rhythm, both in the arrangement and classification of the contents. He divided each book roughly into 4 sections; Mantras(Chants or hymns), Brahmanas ( rituals and rules of conduct), Aranyakas ( methods of subjective worship) and Upanishads (philosophical revelations). The Upanishads are thus found in the last section of each Veda, and therefore the philosophy of the Upanishads has come to be called Vedanta, “the end of the Veda”.

THE BRAHMASUTRAS

When Vyasa had finished, he must have sat back and thought, ‘What have I done? Who is going to benefit from these books? May be a handful of people in this country.” How many teachers of the Vedas were there to read this literature? The public would not be benefitted in large numbers. And again, even among the pundits, the essence of the Vedanta or the Upanishadic literature had been slowly getting atrophied and completely forgotten, although the ritualistic portion was being followed faithfully. The karmakandins ( practitioners of rituals) had started believing that the Upanishads were only for mere repetition and that by repeating
them the students would become purified and fit for the Karmakanda, the rituals.

Veda Vyasa therefore crystallized the philosophic thought enshrined in the Upanishads and wrote the famous textbook called the Brahmasutras. After Vyasa’s time all philosophy in India came to be written in the sutra style ( aphorism)- the style employed by Vyasa in the Brahmasutras. The Brahmasutras became the definitive text of Advaita Vedanta. Since his time, all others have been writing commentaries on it. Vyasa’s work became the substratum, the very foundation for the entire Hindu culture that grew out of the Vedantic tradition.

The Puranas

When Vyasa had finished his entire exposition of Advaita Vedanta in the Brahmasutras, again he must have sat back and thought, “Now what I have done? First I wrote a book, an un-necessarily elaborate book, which might be useful perhaps for only half a dozen people in the country. Now the Brahmasutras are written, maybe for three dozen scholars in this country. How can I touch
the average man, the layman, the man behind the plough, the mason, the ordinary worker?” He, therefore, evolved a new literature called the Puranas.

The Puranas appeal to all. In the case of the average individual, reading of the Puranas generates devotion and the person feels elevated, with his or her weaknesses sublimated and the heart purified and exhilarated. To a student who is well read in the Upanishads and Brahmasutras, the same Puranic literature becomes a demonstration of the subtle mystical truths of the Upanishads played out on a dynamic and massive stage.

Much controversy has surrounded the question of whether the Puranas are historically true. Vyasa was not a historian, and therefore did not write history. He was a great student of the Vedas and a man of realization. All the stories must ultimately be indicative of the one Truth. It is a unique literature. It is not a literature that can fall under the category of philosophy or history, nor can it be approximated by the west as Mythology. The nearest kind of literature in the West that approximates our pauranic stories is the mythology of the Greeks and Romans. And so the west calls the pauranic literature as “Hindu Mythology”. The Hindus have no mythology; nor did the Hindu rishies ever care for history. History is only a chronological account of the repeated stupidities of the past. Human beings have never learnt from history. Besides, history is limited in time, and what the seeker is interested in is the Timeless, the source from which all this springs.

So what is this pauranic literature? To those who have ears to listen
(not just hear) and to those who have eyes to see, Vyasa has already announced what it is: Purana Purusha is the word used in the Vedas for the Highest Reality; therefore, the Highest Reality is obviously the theme of the Puranas.

The Bhagavad Geeta

Not only was Vyasa’s intellect mighty, but he was completely tolerant, holding in his embrace of Love the entire universe of living beings. In the “ song of the Lord”, the Bhagavad Geeta, the poet-seer Vyasa brought the Vedic truths from the sequestered Himalayan caves into the active field of politics and confusing tension of imminent fratricidal war. In Vyasa’s depiction of the story of the Divine incarnation Krishna, Lord Krishna is made to declare the message of the Geeta, which is nothing but a reinterpretation of the ancient wisdom of Upanishads with proper emphasis upon certain vital factors that seem to have been distorted and dried out of recognition in the parched mouths of the pundits. With the deification of Krishna, Hinduism entered its theistic era; it recognized the Lord as having descended in the form of a mortal in order to reorient India’s forgotten Dharma and to pull the decadent culture back again on its high pedestal. This is the most daring and original thought of Vyasa in the whole Geeta; that the Supreme, in His unlimited freedom, by His own perfectly free will, takes upon Himself the conditioning of matter and manifests Himself in a particular embodiment in the world for serving the deluded generation of the time. To the Lord, His ignorance is but a pose assumed, not a fact lived. A mortal becomes victimized by his Avidya (ignorance), whereas the Lord is the master of His maya.

An Institution

Vyasa is a great poet-philosopher and has become an institution representing the Hindu heritage. No scriptural study or Vedic chanting has ever begun without prostrations unto this greatest of seers. If we must attribute Hinduism to any single individual there is none else to whom we can most appropriately attribute its present existence and past glories except to Veda Vyasa.

It is believed that Vyasa was born as the son of a Brahmin rishi and fisherwoman. The story need not be taken as a literally historical incident, but it may be considered symbolically significant. The father, the Brahmin, represents sattwa, the creative wisdom born out of a life of study and contemplation, while the fisherwoman represents a daring adventurousness with which she has to sail forth day by day in her frail craft into the deep sea, where she captures the unseen food and hauls it to the shore, where dwellers can easily get their nourishment at their own door steps. Similarly, on the shore of Vedic knowledge, Vyasa sailed out to gather the best that it contained, and bring us the nutritive essence of Hinduism. In short, Vyasa was not merely a man of realization but was also one who had the spirit of adventure to serve his generation throughout his life. He was a revivalist who contributed the maximum to the Hindu Renaissance of that critical era. In fact, he was the most daring religious revolutionary that ever appeared on the horizon of Hindu cultural history.

Vyasa was one of the sages who had a vast vision of the past and the great imagination to see the future both of which he brought forth in order to tackle the problems of decadence in his immediate present. Had he declared these re-statements of Truth as his own original ideas, it would have been difficult for him to persuade his generation to follow them. It is the character of the Hindus that they will not readily accept a new idea or ideal unless those new idea have the sanction of antiquity and the authority of the ancient rishies.

The versatile genius of Vyasa never left anything that he touched without raising it to the most sublime heights of perfection through his rare capacity of composing incomparable poetry and unique diction. Creating innovations both in thought and form, he was a brilliant philosopher, a man of consummate wisdom, and a genius in worldly knowledge. At one time in the place, another time at the battle field, at still another time in Badrinath, and again among the snow peaks of Himalayas, Sri Vyasa is the embodiment of what is best in the Hindu tradition. Yet, Vyasa’s philosophical thought is not sectarian or creedal. It is not a philosophy only for Hindus. It is universal in its application and is addressed to all mankind.

[Courtesy: Tapovan Prasad 1987]

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