Vyasa wrote the Mahabharata and fathered both sides of its war
Hindu tradition credits the sage Vyasa with composing the Mahabharata, splitting the one Veda into four and writing the eighteen major Puranas. He is also a character inside his own epic, grandfather to both rival branches of the Kuru family, so its central war has been described as a feud among his descendants.
His name is really a title meaning compiler or arranger, also carrying senses of dividing and describing. He was born Krishna Dvaipayana: Krishna for his dark complexion, Dvaipayana because he was born on an island in the Yamuna. His mother Satyavati, raised in a family of ferry operators, later married King Shantanu. Many Hindus regard Vyasa as a partial incarnation of Vishnu and count him among the Chiranjivis, immortals believed to be still alive in the present Kali Yuga.
The Vishnu Purana places him in a vast cyclical cosmology. In every Dvapara, the third of four declining ages, Vishnu takes form as Vyasa and divides the Veda so that people of limited energy can grasp it. Twenty-eight such Vyasas are said to have lived in the current cycle, and the text names Ashwatthama, son of Drona, as the next.
Within the epic, Satyavati's two sons by Shantanu died without heirs. When Bhishma refused to break his vow of celibacy, she summoned Vyasa under the custom of niyoga to father children with the widowed queens. Dhritarashtra, father of the hundred Kauravas, and Pandu, nominal father of the five Pandavas, were the result, alongside the wise Vidura. Vyasa later advised both sides, helped arrange Draupadi's marriage to the Pandavas and anointed Yudhishthira after the Rajasuya sacrifice.
Scholars treat some traditions cautiously. The famous story that Ganesha wrote the epic down at Vyasa's dictation is regarded as a later addition and is left out of the Critical Edition. The core narrative, called Jaya, frames the eighteen-day Kurukshetra War as a conversation between the blind king and his adviser Sanjaya. Embedded within it is the Bhagavad Gita, usually placed in the later centuries of the last millennium BCE and admired by readers from Gandhi to Thoreau. The epic's name even echoes in Bharat, the Hindi name for India used in its constitution.
Source: Vyasa
