Krsna Dvaipayana Vyasa and the Mahabharata: A New Interpretation.

• Author: 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...