more solid foundation through the writing and interpretation of the great Hindu scriptures.
Hinduism was shaped by the actions of a man shrouded in legend, and much of the knowledge of Hinduism as it has been passed down has been attributed to his efforts. He is said to have lived some 3,500 years ago. He was the great grandson of the sage Vasishta, the son of sage Parasara and the fisher girl Satyavati, and he was called Krishna Dvaipayana. He had a desire for order, so he gathered together all the knowledge of his time in the form of Vedic hymns and rituals and edited these works into four huge volumes, producing the four Vedas, the earliest source of information on Indian thought. For this, he was given the title Veda Vyasa, or the Editor of Knowledge. He established a tradition of teaching and learning through his disciples and the legendary forest university in Naimisaaranya, which he founded. It was Vyasa who is supposed to have written the masterpiece the Mahabharata. The central plot concerns the legitimacy of the succession rights to the kingdom of Kurukshetra, the ancestral realm of King Bharata:
The Mahabharata is the story of a dynastic struggle, culminating in an awesome battle between two branches of a single Indian ruling family. The account of the fight between the Kurus and the Pandavas for the fertile and wealthy land at the conference of the Yamuna and Ganges rivers near Delhi is enhanced by peripheral stories that provide a social, moral, and cosmological background to the climactic battle.
The core story developed into the epic that now stands and assumed the name The Mahabharata, or the great story of the Bharata dynasty:
The plot of The Mahabharata is so well laid out that one invariably wonders whether the epic is a deliberate design by a master story teller or it simply is a narration of a dynastic history. Diversity of characters and their truthfulness to nature which characterize Sha...