Anonymous

The Bhagavad Gita’s authorship is uncertain and widely debated, but the entire Mahabharata (of which the Gita forms a part) was certainly passed down through various oral traditions before a number of standardized written versions emerged many hundreds of years later. However, scholars have suggested that the Gita was originally a separate text from the Mahabharata and inserted into the longer epic later on. Conventionally, the Mahabharata’s composer is identified as Vyasa, an ancient, immortal, legendary poet who appears in the epic as the Pandavas’ and Kauravas’ grandfather and who ostensibly dictated it to the god Ganesha. Vyasa is said to have grown up in the forests of northern India as the son of a sage and the princess Satyavati, who was raised as a commoner by a fisherman. In the forests, hermits taught him the Vedas, the earliest Sanskrit scriptures of Hinduism, which he compiled and divided into their contemporary four-part form. Later in his life, Vyasa supposedly lived on the banks of the mythic Sarasvati river and in Himalayan caves, where the Mahabharata was ostensibly composed. Some branches of Hinduism consider him a worldly incarnation of Vishnu (like Krishna).