So who wrote this?

"I have duly respected the Vedas, the teachers and the sacrificial fire, I have put the sense of all the Vedas into the Mahâbhârata and have made their sacred lore accessible to all classes of men. I have done all this, nay, much more. Still I think my work is not fully done." So thought Veda Vyâsa, the adept author of the Kali Yuga, while meditating on the sacred banks of the Sarasvati, and his heart became heavy with something, he knew not what. At this time Nârada appeared before him—Nârada, who knew all that transpired in the Trilokî and who could enter into the hearts of all beings. "Thou hast fully known," said Nârada, "all that is knowable, for thou hast written the excellent Mahâbhârata, which leaves nothing unsaid. How is it then thou feelest dispirited as if thy object were not gained?" What could Vyâsa say in reply; he only inquired from the seer Nârada the cause of his uneasiness.

The Bhagavata Purana, like all scriptures, is a work based on human imagination. Of course nobody will take a scripture seriously that some human just made up, so there needed to be some kind of cover story explaining the miraculous origin of the book.

The Bhagavata Purana is something of a sequel to the Indian epic The Mahabharata. That book is a story of the Pandavas, five brothers who fight a war to regain a kingdom. They have a friend Krishna, who ends up being the most interesting character in the book. It is quite possible that the authors of The Mahabharata did not intend for him to be. Sometimes when you write a story the characters take on a life of their own and get away from you, and I think that is what happened with Krishna.

The most famous chapter of The Mahabharata is of course the Bhagavad Gita, or the Song of God. In this chapter the big battle is about to begin and Arjuna, one of the Pandava brothers, is having second thoughts. He will be required to kill his own relatives in this battle, and he can see no good coming from that.

Krishna has agreed to give aid to both sides in this battle, and Arjuna was given first choice of either thousands of soldiers or Krishna himself. Krishna will only serve as a non-combatant chariot driver to the side that gets him. Arjuna chooses Krishna over the soldiers.

As the battle is about to begin Krishna is driving Arjuna's chariot and hears Arjuna wanting to call everything off. He accuses Arjuna of cowardice and then gives him a lecture full of profound philosophy, in the middle of which Krishna reveals himself to be the supreme lord of all. He displays a form that looks like the album cover of Axis Bold As Love by Jimi Hendrix. Hearing this, Arjuna agrees to fight.

Krishna gives Arjuna advice on how to win the battle but does not do anything much in the way of miracles after that. Everyone seems to think of him as a human being after the Bhagavad Gita is over, even though everyone on the battlefield saw and heard it perfectly.

So what you have in The Mahabharata is a story where God Himself is a character and it doesn't change the story all that much. Sort of like Dei without the ex machina.

There must have been a demand for more stories about Krishna. What was His birth like, why did he come to earth, who were His friends, His lovers, His wives? The Bhagavata Purana answers these questions, and many more besides. The answers are quite interesting.

The authors of the Bhagavata Purana decided to give author credit to Veda Vyasa, the mythical author of The Mahabharata. To do that they had to somehow explain why he had not had more to say about Krishna in that book. The honest answer might have been "We didn't know that Krishna was going to turn out to be God when we started the book. It just kind of happened." That answer just wasn't going to work for their purposes, so they came up with another one.

Veda Vyasa finishes The Mahabharata but he is unhappy with it. He asks his friend Narada Muni for advice, and Narada Muni tells him:

"O thou great Muni, as thou hast treated of Dharma and of other things, so thou hast not recited the glory of Vâsudeva".

"This universe is also an aspect of Bhagavân, for its creation, preservation and end proceed from Him. Thou knowest all this thyself. But thou hast shown to others only a portion of this truth."

So that's the answer. Veda Vyasa wanted to write the ultimate book about Life, The Universe, And Everything and he almost succeeded. Unfortunately, he did not include much information about God in the book, even though God was an important character.

That was what Narada Muni said to Vyasa: you left out the most important part of the story!

It was too late to rewrite The Mahabharata, so Vyasa did the next best thing: he wrote the prequel.

Think of the Bhagavata Purana as Mahabharata Part II: The Beginning!