Finally Reading The Tenth Canto

Srimad Bhagavatam, Tenth Canto Part One: The Summum Bonum by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Back in the late 1970's I discovered Srila Prabhupada's books in the Western Illinois University college library. I started reading Krishna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead (known by all ISKCON devotees as Krishna Book) and continued until I had read every one of them.

I can say that I understand these books better now than I did when I was a practicing devotee. This is not because of any spiritual advancement, but only because I am more mature than I was back then. (Or as Robert A. Heinlein would have it, too tired).

Back when I was a devotee I was required to think of these books as describing actual historical events. I had a very hard time doing that. Every scripture there is contains a part that is stories that just couldn't have happened that way, another part a collection of prejudices in force at the time it was written, and a third part something else. In my opinion, the "something else" gives the scripture its real value, and the rest you need to come to terms with as best you can.

When I first read Krishna Book I identified with Krishna, as He was clearly the hero of the story. Krishna Book is a summary of the Tenth Canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, the part of that scripture that tells of Krishna's life. Srila Prabhupada did not live to finish his translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam. He died shortly after beginning the Tenth Canto, so the rest of the translation was done by his disciples. There are apparently devotees who refuse to read these later translations. To accommodate these devotees, the BBT sells a version of the Bhagavatam that only contains the first nine cantos and includes Krishna Book as a substitute for the Tenth Canto. It is a reasonable substitute, in my opinion. In fact, in their commentary on the verses of the actual Tenth Canto the disciples frequently quote passages from Krishna Book.

I note also that if Srila Prabhupada translated a verse of the Tenth Canto (as he often did when translating the Chaitanya Charitamrita) the disciples will use that translation, giving Srila Prabhupada credit for it, rather than doing their own.

The translation of the Tenth Canto had not gotten far while I was still a devotee, but now, so many years later, I found myself still interested in reading it. I bought the Kindle edition, and this is a review of that edition.

Srila Prabhupada's translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam is unique. I am not aware of any other complete and literal translation of the Bhagavatam. Each verse is explained with references to other books like the Harivamsa and the writings of the Goswamis. It is a translation by a believer, and that is a big part of its value.

Reading the book now, I identify more with the devotees of Krishna than I did before. Again, this is the result of a certain amount of maturity, nothing more. I no longer try to reconcile the events in the book with things that could have actually happened. For example, we are encouraged to think of Krishna living a simple life among the cowherds, but his father Nanda possesses millions of cows and is in the habit of giving them away by the thousands to the brahmanas (the priestly caste) to get their blessings. Not only does he give them the cows, he has the cows decorated with gold and jewels first. The point seems to be that back when the world was more righteous there was a lot more wealth around, and if everyone would be more generous with the brahmanas that wealth could return. More than one religion believes this, (think of the story of King Solomon, for example) so I can't be too critical.

Srila Prabhupada believes that you cannot understand the Tenth Canto without going through the first nine first. I would agree with that. In the first nine you will learn about the other avatars of Vishnu, about the creation of the universe, about how the universe is laid out, about gods and demons and their efforts to produce the nectar of immortality by churning the ocean that fills the bottom of the universe using an enormous mountain as a pestle and an enormous snake wrapped around that mountain to produce the churning action. You will learn about how the Ganges river flows from a hole in the top of the universe that was caused by Vishnu incarnating as a dwarf and making that hole by poking it with His toe. You will learn about oceans of milk, sugarcane juice, and ghee. You will learn about heavenly planets and hellish planets. You will learn that women have their monthly courses because they collectively agreed to take on a portion of a curse given to Indra by a brahmana, in return for the ability to feel sexual desire even while pregnant. You will learn, in short, that the story of Krishna takes place in a universe not much like the one we live in.

You will also learn about the path of Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti is devotion to God. In the earlier Cantos this concept is developed gradually, but in the Tenth it reaches its highest form, where devotees of Krishna love Him without understanding that He is God. This makes a kind of sense. Being in the company of God, knowing He is God, could get to be oppressive very quickly. Read the classic short story "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby if you don't see why.

In the earlier cantos Vishnu makes an appearance, but He doesn't stay long. In the Tenth Canto His devotees see Him all the time, and those who do not wish they could. Krishna is their friend, their child, their husband, or their lover. Occasionally He demonstrates awesome power, but even then His devotees don't think of Him as God.

Srila Prabhupada's commentary on Krishna's childhood pastimes answers questions you probably never thought to ask. For example, in one passage Krishna is described as herding unlimited cows. You might think this is just hyperbole, but Srila Prabhupada and the Gaudiya Math will tell you that it is not. He had an infinite number of cows, because He is God and God can fit unlimited cows in a finite space.

Frequently, Krishna and the cowherd boys would be attacked by a powerful demon, which Krishna would defeat. To attack Krishna, the demon had to interrupt the transcendental activities of Krishna and His friends. Since those activities are eternal, a devotee might wonder how a mere demon could interrupt them. Srila Prabhupada points out that the demon did not in fact interrupt them. The boys would be playing all morning, then they would take tiffin (lunch). In the moments between playing and tiffin there were no transcendental activities to interrupt, so during those moments the demons could attack.

Another thing you probably never thought about was that the people of Vrindavana thought Krishna's footprints were such a fine decoration for the Earth that they did everything they could to preserve them and never stepped on them, ever. Everything in the story that seems like an inconsistency is explained by referring to the writings of previous acharyas.

The most famous childhood pastime of Krishna is being the lover of the cowherd girls, or gopis, who are all married to others but sneak out at night to be with Him. There are more pictures of Krishna with the gopis than there are of Krishna doing anything else with anyone else. The pictures tend to show Krishna being older than He actually was. He was only eight years old when these pastimes took place.

Srila Prabhupada passed on before he could translate those most difficult chapters, so the work was left to his disciples to finish. Many devotees believe that you need to be a pure devotee to even read these chapters, and ISKCON has not yet produced a devotee other than Srila Prabhupada who is on the level needed to translate them.

The spiritual point of these stories seems to be similar to Jesus saying "the last shall be first." The gopis sneak away from their husbands and families to be with Krishna. Materially they are low status, because they are ordinary women, and their status would be considered even worse because they are unfaithful to their husbands. As Krishna's lovers they have everything to lose and nothing to gain, as Krishna will soon go to Mathura to claim his birthright as a prince and will not see them again. Spiritually speaking, they are the most exalted for that reason. If you ask what they do with Krishna, you're asking the wrong question. They are more interested in His pleasure than their own. Often they feel abandoned by Him, which gives them a kind of intense ecstasy. Only a very spiritually advanced person can understand that. Again, I am not that person.

If you expect to read more about Krishna and the gopis than you did in Krishna book, you will, but only a little and that little may be troubling. For example, the verses about Krishna stealing the clothing of the unmarried gopis says that Krishna went with his friends to the forbidden spot where the girls were bathing. The friends somehow don't seem to be present during the stealing of the clothes, but it is clearly mentioned that they went with him. A well known acharya explains this by saying that these were NOT the friends Krishna normally hung out with, but were instead some toddlers that tagged along when Krishna went. I don't think this explanation improves the story at all.

Krishna is described as being a seven year old boy when He lifts Govardhan Hill, and He steals the clothes of the gopis that same year. The gopis are older than He is, but according to Srtila Prabhupada in Krishna Book they could have been as young as twelve.

Krishna spends the morning doing the clothes stealing pastime, then later that day He and His friends of the same age (we know this because many of them are named) try to get some food from some brahmanas. They have no luck, so Krishna advises them to approach the wives of the brahmanas and mention His name. All of the brahmana wives are in love with Krishna, so the cowherd boys get plenty of food from these wives. None of these wives have names, but to be fair the brahmanas aren't named either. They don't do much in this part of the story. Mostly they suggest to Krishna's foster father Nanda that he donate more cows to the brahmanas so they can pray that Krishna stops getting attacked by demons. Nanda always does, even though it doesn't seem to be helping.

Much harder to explain is why none of the gopis is ever named. Not even the most important gopi, Srimati Radharani, is given a name. The gopis are of course the greatest of all Krishna's devotees according to what we were taught, but you'd never know that from reading the Bhagavatam. Actually, the names of gopis that we know about all came from poems by Jayadeva, Vidyapati, and others that were written much later. It's like these poets wrote Krishna fan fiction, and this fiction became so popular it was accepted as canon.

This has happened in other religions. Most Christian ideas about Hell come from The Divine Comedy by Dante, not the Bible, and many Christians have ideas about the book of Revelation that do not appear in that book at all, but were invented for a series of very bad novels.

The Srimad Bhagavatam is not the oldest scripture about Krishna. According to tradition, the Mahabharata was written first, then the sage Narada criticized Veda Vyasa for not putting more in that book about Krishna. In response, Vyasa wrote the Bhagavatam. However, this account is not likely to be true. The Bhagavatam mentions the Buddha as a ninth avatar of Vishnu (who appears to deceive the atheists). Devotees in ISKCON consider this an example of prophecy, but I do not. This suggests that the Bhagavatam was written after the Buddha's appearance.

However, the stories about Krishna's life also appear in the Harivamsa, an addendum to the Mahabharata, so while the Bhagavatam was written much later the stories of Krishna's childhood, etc. are as old as the Mahabharata.

In both the Harivamsa and the Bhagavatam the gopis are not named. This would make them minor characters in any other book. We know the names of Krishna's father and mother, His foster father and mother, many of his male friends, the most important of the sixteen thousand one hundred and eight princesses that He would later marry, a hunchbacked woman He cures, the heroes and villains of The Mahabharata (in which He plays a vital role), and the names of all the demons He slew.

But not the name of even one gopi.

Imagine the New Testament if it told us the names of every character except those of the twelve apostles. Or imagine the New Testament as it is, but learning that Jesus's greatest follower was the unnamed woman caught in the act of adultery, or the unnamed woman at the well.

Now the commentators will object that Srimati Radharani is named, indirectly. Sukadeva Goswami, the narrator of the Bhagavatam, tries to keep her name a secret but uses a word that sounds a bit like "Radharani" to describe her. I can just imagine myself asking Tamal Krishna Goswami why Sukadeva Goswami would feel the need to keep her name secret, or if he did why the rest of us did not. TKG probably would have killed me for that.

The actual rasa dance is described pretty much as it was in Krishna book. It is meant to describe romantic love in the spiritual world, and show how mundane romantic love is only a perverted reflection of that perfect love. Krishna is eight years old but already inspiring romantic feelings in the young women of Vrindavana, even those that are already married to others and have children. (If you're the kind of person who thinks that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to be a virgin her whole life even though the Bible says that Jesus had brothers and sisters, you will be reassured by the arguments here explaining how the married gopis were still fit to be Krishna's lovers). The sound of Krishna's flute calls the gopis to meet Him in the forest, and they are powerless to resist. When He sees them He tries to convince them to return to their homes, but they give Him various philosophical arguments why they must remain. He allows them to stay, but because they are proud to be His lovers He disappears. They go looking all over the forest for Him and their love for Him becomes a kind of madness, where they start acting out His childhood activities of killing demons, etc. Eventually they track Him like a Boy Scout would, by following His footprints and other spoor, and determine that He has taken one gopi that He favors above all others to a private spot. She, too, is abandoned by Krishna when she becomes too proud of being His lover.

Then Krishna returns and the actual rasa dance begins. This is remarkable because Krishna expands Himself into multiple bodies, one for each gopi, so that each gopi thinks He is dancing with her alone. There are a lot of gopis. The number I read when I was in ISKCON was 16,108, the same number as Krishna would later have as wives. The commentary for these verses gives a different number: three billion. Somehow the child Krishna herding infinite cows does not bother me as much as the idea of three billion gopis. Hindu mythology seems to like large numbers. For example, the number of soldiers who fought in the Mahabharata war was almost four million, and nearly all of them died in a war that lasted only a couple of weeks.

In addition to a very large number of gopis, plus one plenary expansion of Krishna for each gopi, we are told that there are hundreds of Vedic airplanes (called vimanas) flying overhead, each one containing a demigod and his wife. They have all come to witness the rasa dance and occasionally throw flower petals on the dancing couples.

If that wasn't enough. we are told that this dance lasted one night of Brahma, although at the end of it only one terrestrial night had passed. A night of Brahma is billions of years. I would not have a problem with Krishna creating a time bubble for Himself and the gopis to make this possible, but I do wonder about all those demigods flying overhead, and just how they experienced that passage of time.

In addition to the actual verses from the Tenth Canto, there are writings by various acharyas describing conversations the gopis have with Krishna or with each other. I wish we had some context for these. Are they the product of realization, and thus considered canon, or are they Krishna fan fiction? There's no indication.

Back in the nineteen eighties, when this Tenth Canto translation was done, the best devotees in the movement were supposed to be the zonal acharyas, the initiating gurus that Srila Prabhupada had created to carry on his work. If any men were qualified to carry on the translation, these men should have been. However, nearly all of them got involved in some scandal that proved that they were not as spiritually advanced as we had hoped they were. Some of them were forbidden to take more disciples, or kicked out of the movement entirely. One was murdered.

Even if these devotee translators were sufficiently advanced, the Tenth Canto would be a tough place to begin. For someone new to translating Sanskrit, which they were, it would be like taking your driver's license exam while competing in the Indy 500. It isn't that the Sanskrit itself would be any more difficult, but that the expectations would be much higher. Again, some devotees believe you should be a pure devotee before even reading the Tenth Canto; it would be spiritually dangerous to do otherwise. However, anyone can read Krishna Book. Knowing that, anyone who has read Krishna Book and comes to the Tenth Canto expecting to read something much more profound or detailed or potentially dangerous to his Bhakti creeper than Krishna Book was will be disappointed. Maybe not as disappointed as the Scientologists must have been when they learned about Xenu and the volcano, but still pretty disapointed.

There is some demarcation in the book that tells you when Srila Prabhupada's work ends and his disciples take over. Towards the end of the story of Brahma hiding the cowherd boys and calves the style of the commentary seems to change. In the Prayers By Lord Brahma immediately afterwards the purports start saying "Srila Prabhupada said", and the end of the chapter acknowledges that the disciples wrote it. I got an impression that the changeover happened a bit earlier, based on a slight difference in the style of the commentary.

The advantage this book has over other translations is that the original Sanskrit text appears (in the printed books I had actual Sanskrit characters followed by a romanization, in the ebook just the romanization) with a word by word breakdown of the translation. You might argue with the meaning, but you can't say that anything has been added or removed. (Sometimes the commentary adds something, but there is nothing hidden about that).

The toughest audience for this particular Canto will be Srila Prabhupada's disciples. I joined the movement too late to be one of them, but I had read all of Srila Prabhupada's books and when I met some of the new zonal acharyas back then I would always be looking for some sign that they could teach me something that Srila Prabhupada's books could not. I never saw it. Perhaps that isn't a fair thing to want; I wouldn't know. On the other hand, they were asking a lot of me, and it is understandable that I would want some reassurance that they were worthy of it.

It is a shame that Srila Prabhupada did not live to finish his translation, but I suspect it would not have been much different in content than what we are getting here. Srila Prabhupada's distinctive voice is missed, but the translation and commentary in this Canto are as good as we have and far superior to any others I know of.



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