Vyāsa / Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana
c. 1500 BCE · Mana
Legendary sage to whom Hindu tradition ascribes the arrangement of the four Vedas and the authorship of the Mahābhārata and Puranas. No historical dates exist; the ~1500 BCE convention reflects his traditional placement at the close of the Vedic age. He is DISTINCT from the ~400 CE author of the Yoga-bhāṣya (also called Vyāsa); this entry is the mythic Veda-arranger, not that later commentator. Historicity is uncertain.
Veda-Vyasa, also called Krishna Dvaipayana, is the legendary sage credited in tradition with dividing the single primordial Veda into four (Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda) and with composing the Mahābhārata and the Puranas. He appears within the Mahābhārata itself as both its narrator-author and a figure in the story of the Kuru dynasty (in tradition the grandfather of the Pandavas and Kauravas), and tradition also ascribes the Brahma Sūtras to him. He is a figure of legend — held in many traditions to be a partial incarnation of Vishnu and one of the deathless Chiranjivis — and is distinct from the later (~4th–5th century CE) Vyāsa to whom the Yoga-bhāṣya, the classical commentary on Patañjali's Yoga-sūtras, is traditionally attributed.
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Mana
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