Will the real Vyasa please stand up? Please stand up? I guess this will go unanswered. For Vyasa literally means collator and there were so many by the pen name of Vyasa. Veda Vyasa is the one that collated the Vedas and wrote Bhagavad Gita apart from other works.
I was thinking that Bhagavad Gita was written after Yoga Sutras solely because of the reason that Vyasa had written the first commentary on Yoga Sutras. Many of the books that I was reading say that Bhagavad Gita was ahead of Yoga Sutras by three centuries. There are a few books that do say that Yoga Sutras was written ahead of Bhagavad Gita. But I think I will not delve into this topic anymore as both these works are masterpieces and I don’t care even if there are quite a few common concepts between these works. Especially when the experts are having issues dating all these works.
When it comes to the very first commentary of Yoga Sutras by Vyasa, many scholars doubt if it is the same Veda Vyasa who wrote the Bhagavad Gita. I read this in a book(1) that
The commentary does not in any way match up to the great heights of the Veda Vyasa either in diction or thoughts. It is quite probable that this particular Vyasa assumed this pen name, with no pretentions to the great Vyasa of Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita fame, but in quiet humility of anonymity, as at his time Vyasa had become a generic name for any commentator.
The first commentary for Yoga Sutras was written after a few centuries since the original work. Then there was a gap and then there were subsequent commentaries. Many commentators assumed the very first one by a Vyasa as the Veda Vyasa and do not question any of his mistakes. They simply accept his interpretation even though these commentators were extremely intelligent. It is thought that these subsequent commentators put on bandages of respect on their eyes.
Then I read in a different book(2) that Patanjali was also a pen name. So, there were quite a few of them. In my class I was told that Patanjali wrote Yoga Sutras and he also provided Sanskrit grammar. But this again need not be true. There was a gap of four to five centuries between these two works. It is clear that many authors used pen names or there were no names at all.
In fact the entire Vedas were written by various people and no one takes credit. This makes way for the claim that these were given directly by god as these were heard by the sages in their deep state of meditation. It may be true.
Now in the days of Patents and false claims, it is so interesting to read that in ancient India, writing anonymously had been the rule rather than the exception.
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1. Yoga Sutras of Patanjali – a commentary by M.R. Desai, Principal, Gopal Krishna Gokhale College, Kohlapur, 1972
2. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali – A new translation and commentary by Georg Feurestein
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