The Black Sun That Destroys Inner Darkness: Or, How Badarayana Became Vyasa.

• Author: Uskokov, Aleksandar

There is a commonly accepted belief in Hinduism that Vyasa, the alleged editor of the Vedas and author of the Mahabharata, is also the author of the Brahma-sutra (BS). This belief hardly needs substantiating: it would be sufficient to look at the fine translation of Sarikara's Brahma-sütra-bhasya produced by Swami Gambhirananda of the Advaita Ashrama, who customarily renders Sankara's acarya and sutrakara with "the teacher (Vyasa)" and "the aphorist (Vyasa)," (1) orto consult some of the hagiographical material on Sarikara, who is said to have met Vyasa, the author of the Brahma-sutra, at the Badarikasrama on the Himalaya. (2) One may illustrate this belief with the title of Bharatitirtha's (fourteenth-century) Vaiyasikanyaya-mala "Garland of Vyasa's Topics," a versified restatement of the BS in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta. (3) As Bharatitirtha says in his auto-commentary, the garland of topics that ascertain the meaning of the Upanisadic statements, i.e., the BS itself, was composed by Vyasa and is, therefore, Vyasa's. (4) This belief, however, has a roughly determinate birthday or, like most things in Indian intellectual history, a couple of birth centuries. In the oldest preserved commentaries on the BS, all written probably in the eighth century CE, the author of the BS is most commonly called the sutrakara and identified with Badarayana, one of the several authorities cited in the work. This changes at the end of the tenth century, when four Vedantins of great importance all maintain that Vyasa wrote the BS and that Vyasa was Badarayana. The purpose of this paper, then, is to tackle the questions "why this change?" and "why this identity?"

I want to emphasize at the outset that my question here does not concern the actual authorship of the BS or its composition history, which are still very much open issues in the study of Vedanta--inextricably related to the question of the unity or otherwise of the two Mimamsas--and tend to raise Indological dust in occasional spouts. (5) The question that I wish to address, simply, is not one of composition, but of reception history.

My argument here will be that in all likelihood the Badarayana-Vyasa identity was invented by the author of or community behind the Bhagavata Puranu as part of a complex of self-representation strategies. The Bhagavata intentionally makes itself a work of Vedanta, indeed the BS itself, over which it builds a new soteriology that is centered on the idea of hhakti. Two factors in particular stand out in light of the Bhagavata's Vedantic background: Vyasa's paradigmatic character as the preserver of old dharma and the innovator, visionary. of new soteriologies; and the image of Vyasa's son Suka as the model ascetic and ideal candidate for the new soteriological vision, through whom the Bhagavata community chose to represent itself.

Before 1 develop the argument, though, I want to give its synopsis and briefly explain the title of the paper. I begin with a statement of the problem in light of the available textual evidence--how there occurs a break in the attribution of the BS authorship between the eighth and the tenth centuries--and then briefly review prominent scholarly attempts to solve it, all of which are found to be unsatisfactory. I propose, next, that understanding the reason for Badarayana's becoming Vyasa is predicated on understanding Vyasa's character in the Hindu imaginaire. I move, next, to the Bhagavata Purana strategies of self-representation, in which its claims to Vedantic pedigree are contextualized. Two Bhagavata ideas prove significant for the problem. They are naiskarmya and paramahamsya, both thoroughly ascetic ideals in the Bhagavata worldview. I consider these in some detail to argue that the Bhagavata overlays hhakti on a soteriology which is that of Advaita Vedanta in the strong sense of the term, that of Sankara and Suresvara, in which light the subsumption of Badarayana under the character of Vyasa makes sense. After briefly considering issues such as the presence of Badarayana in the wider Puranic literature and the date of the Bhagavata. I finish the paper with an illustration of the circumstances in which Advaita Vedantins and Bhagavata Vaisnavas would have been in the kind of proximity that would be required for the Bhagavata soteriology to develop and Badarayana to become Vyasa.

Right at the last juncture when Vedantins still paid homage to Badarayana as the author of the BS, they began describing him as the sun that opens the lotus of the mind, in Bhaskara's words, or of scripture, in Padmapada's. Our Vedantins were clearly playing on the kavya image of the sun who is the lover of the lotus that blooms at sunrise, such that Badarayana's "dawn" through his Brahma-sutra makes our understanding bloom and opens the secrets of scripture. But then, when Badarayana becomes Vyasa, he acquires a new dimension in his solar identity: he is Krsna, the "black" Dvaipayana. who also goes by the name of Apantaratamas, "he who removes inner darkness." He becomes the black sun that removes inner darkness. As Prakasatman the next mangalacarana author notes, the black sun is like no other. When it is hot and bright it illumines the formless sky with its thousands of rays--it depicts the formless Brahman by means of the words of sruti--yet by being black it is capable of destroying inner darkness. To extend the poetic image, then, the black sun is able to court the lotus even when lhe lotus is closed; to enter, as the Chandogya Up. (8.1.1 ) describes it, the daharampundarikam vesma, the small lotus dwelling, the inner space that is the heart.

THE PROBLEM: BADARAYANA BECOMES VYASA

The scholarly impression that in Sarikara's opinion Badarayana and Vyasa were not identical has been around since the early nineteenth century and Windischmann's Latin work Saneara: Sive de theologumenis vedanticorum. However, the first to weigh most of the evidence and formally make the case was Kashinath Trimbak Telang in 1885, in a paper entitled "A Note on Badarayana, the Author of the Brahma Sutras." The issue has been picked up several times since, but not much more of substance--concerning specifically the question of Sankara's opinion on the authorship--has been added. (6) Let us go briefly through the evidence.

Sankara (ca. 700-750 CE), (7) whose Brahma-sutra-bhasva (BSBh) is the oldest preserved BS commentary, never describes Vyasa, the sage of Mahabharata fame, as the BS author. Throughout the BSBh, for Sankara the author is simply "the venerable aphorist," if one may translate bhagavan sutrakara in those terms, or even more generally "the teacher" (acarya). (8) Still, in the introduction to the last sutra, Sankara puts a name to the sutrakara title: it is the venerable teacher Badarayana. (9) To this core several important elements can be added. First, in BSBh 3.3.32 Sankara mentions the rebirth of the "Vedic teacher and Puranic seer" Apantaratamas as Krsnadvaipayana at the juncture point between the Dvapara and Kali ages. (10) He does not identify this Krsnadvaipayana, the Vyasa of the Mahabharata, with Badarayana or the sutrakara, as one might expect he would while commenting precisely on his work. Second, when Sankara does talk about Vyasa, he generally describes him as a sista, a member of a select group of smrti text authors, and commonly mentions him along with Manu as the other paragon of this group. (11) And third, not only in the BSBh but throughout his authentic works, Sankara never mixes up Vyasa with Badarayana. Sengaku Mayeda (1965: 186-87) has used this observation as one of the criteria by which to adjudicate the authenticity of Sankara's works: if Badarayana or the sutrakara is called Vyasa, a work attributed to Sankara is likely not his.

Two other Vedantins temporally proximate to Sankara were similarly innocent of the Vyasa-Badarayana identity. Sankara's immediate student Padmapada in mangalacarana 2 of his Pancapadika (Bhagavatachãrya 1891) on the BSBh pays respect to the BS author:

namah kruti-sirah-padma-sanda-martanda-murtave | badaravana-samjriava munaye sama-vesmane || Homage to the sage bearing the name Badarayana. an abode of tranquility and an embodiment of the sun for the cluster of lotuses that constitute the summit of scripture. Vyasa himself is never mentioned in the Pancapadika.

Sankara's fierce critic Bhaskara. (12) like his famous predecessor, associates the last sutra, and eo ipsa the whole work, with Badarayana. (13) He throws in a mangalacarana--the first of two--for good measure, intending not only to praise Badarayana but also to put in a good word for himself:

janma-handha-vinivrtti-karanam brahma-sutram idam udbabhau yatah| srotr-citta-kamalaika-bhaskaram badaravanam rsim namami tam|| I bow down to that seer Badarayana, the one and only sun (Bhaskara) for the lotus of the mind of the listener, from whom this Brahma-sutra that is the cause of cessation of bondage through rebirth had arisen. Mangalacarana?, thenceforth become the place to salute the BS author, but once we approach the second half of the tenth century, this author becomes explicitly Vyasa. And it is not small-timers, but three of the greatest Advaitins that make the connection. Let us cite their mangalacaranas, some of which contain poetic merit as well. Vacaspati Misra toward the end of the millennium (14) pays the following respect in his Bhamati (mangalacarana 5):

brahma-sutra-krte tasmai vvasavapara-vedhase| jnãna-sakty-avatãrãya namo bhagavata hareh || Homage to Vyasa. the other creator, the author of the Brahma-sutra, the incarnation of the cognitive power of Lord Hari. (15) Vacaspati is famous for one of the two dominant post-Sankara streams of Advaita Vedanta, the "Bhamati school." However, whichever of the two was philosophically correct--he or Prakasattnan, (16) whose Vivarana on Padmapada's Pancapadika started the other major stream, the "Vivarana school"--surely the second would win out with the...