Another try at an Introduction

I am not happy with my first attempt at an introduction, so let's throw it out and start over.

Special Introduction: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavata Class

The Srimad Bhagavatam (AKA Bhagavata Purana) and I have a bit of a history. Back in 1978 I first came in contact with the Hare Krishna movement. The improbable story of how that happened and what it led to will be found in my book The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim.

I was quite familiar with the Bhagavata Purana before I became seriously involved with the Hare Krishnas. My college library had a complete set of the books of the Hare Krishna movement, plus it had many other books on the subject of Indian religion and philosophy. I spent a lot of my free time in college reading these books. I found them compelling reading even though I couldn't fully believe in them. My first exposure to the Bhagavata Purana was through what we in the movement called Krishna Book, which was a summary of the tenth canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam. This book was all about the life of Krishna.

Back then Krishna Book came in three volumes and was lavishly illustrated. It had an introduction by George Harrison which promised that if you chanted the Hare Krishna mantra you would one day not only see God but would get to play with Him.

I also remember being surprised reading one of the chapter titles in the first volume, "Stealing the Garments of the Unmarried Gopi Girls". This turned out to be more of a childish prank by Krishna than anything else, but it did indicate that Krishna was a different concept of God than anything I had encountered before.

A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana Or Esoteric Hinduism is a translation of most of the Bhagavata Purana. It was published in 1901, apparently for the Theosophical Society, and was dedicated to one of its leaders, Annie Besant. I know very little about Annie Besant, but the idea that a woman could be a leader of a spiritual movement and be praised as the "Bhagavata of Bhagavatas" back in 1901, when Srila Prabhupada was only five years old, is quite remarkable. Women do not have leadership positions in the Hare Krishna movement and are not generally praised for their spiritual advancement.

I dedicated The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim in part to the women I knew at the Evanston Hare Krishna temple. That honor, such as it is, is more than they are likely to get from the movement.

This translation by Narayana Sinha is a worthy alternative to reading the complete one published by the Hare Krishna movement. That version is very expensive, has more volumes than an encyclopedia, and has elaborate (and frankly, repetitive) commentary on every verse. On the other hand this book benefits from commentary by Sridhara Swami and the thoughts of its translator, which for most readers should be more than enough. If after reading this you feel that anything important has been left out you can check out the online version of the full translation that the Hare Krishna movement provides.

The Hare Krishna movement considers the Bhagavata Purana to be five thousand years old and infallible. I consider it a work of literature that is not nearly that old. While I think this book does as good a job of justifying God's ways to man as anything human minds have created, I know that it is absolutely wrong on many points, and might be wrong on many more.

I remember my reaction on reading the Fifth Canto of Srimad Bhagavatam in the college library. It describes the universe in a way that cannot be reconciled with reality. The Earth is flat, the Sun goes behind an enormous mountain at night, the Moon is farther away from the Earth than the Sun is, the Sun is the only source of light in the universe (the stars being planets that glow with reflected light), etc. It disturbed me that Srila Prabhupada believed the moon landings to be a hoax because the Fifth Canto described the Moon as a heavenly place where demigods lived, not the barren place the astronauts landed on.

The Bhagavata Purana is the book that introduces the character of Srimati Radharani. An earlier book, the Harivamsa describes most of the same events in Krishna's life that occur in the Bhagavata Purana, but while Krishna is described dancing with the Gopis no single Gopi is given special attention.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Gopis in the mythology of Krishna, and among the Gopis Srimati Radharani is supreme. She is worshiped alongside Krishna in every Hare Krishna temple.

Having said that, there is reason for me to believe that the authors of the Bhagavata Purana never intended her to be such an important character. Why do I say this? It is because she is never named in the story.

I cannot emphasize the importance of this detail enough. I am in a good position to recognize just how significant not giving her a name is.

I transcribed this book from page images from the Internet Archive. My donation to Project Gutenberg consisted of a plain text document and a web page, both automatically generated from a common source file. There are many, many family tree tables in this book. For the plain text version of the file I had to convert these diagrams into what is known as "ASCII art" and it was not fun.

When I prepared my submission to CreateSpace I wanted to add an index to the book, something the original book never had. To make an index you need to first make a list of all the words you want to index. I used a series of Linux commands to scan the plain text document looking for words that were not in the English spell checking dictionary. Another command counted how many times each of these words was used in the text and a third command sorted the list so the most used words came first. When I was finished I had a list of over four thousand words, the majority of them names. I got this list down to 435 names and technical terms that were used enough to be worth indexing. There is no shortage of names in the Bhagavata Purana. Even women's names are well represented. We can only assume that the authors of this book deliberately avoided naming Krishna's most favored Gopi.

To put this in Biblical terms, imagine that the part of the Bible that my mother refers to as "The Begats" ran on for hundreds of pages and the Blessed Mother was not referred to as Mary but only as "Jesus' Mom." That may give you some idea.

For an example of how strange it is that the Gopis are never named, imagine a New Testament where none of the twelve disciples is named.

Many of the Gopis would eventually be given names: in other Puranas, in the poetry of Jayadeva and Vidyapati, and in the plays of Rupa Goswami.

The Chaitanya movement (which the Hare Krishna movement is based on) considers the Gopis the most exalted worshipers of Krishna. They abandoned their husbands, their families, and their worldly duties to be with Krishna.

There is a story in the Gospel of Luke where a man wants to follow Jesus, but only after he buries his father. Jesus tells him that he must abandon such worldly duties and follow him immediately. The Gopis did not need to be told.

The Bhagavata Purana contains more than the life of Krishna. You will read of the origins of the Universe, the spiritual evolution of all living beings, the other avataras of Vishnu that incarnated themselves before Krishna, and much much more. There is plenty to interest the student of mythology, of philosophy, or anyone who enjoys high fantasy or just a good story.

This book is not simply a transcription of the original book. The original was very badly proofread and inadequately typeset. Names were not always spelled consistently either: Hiranyakasipu was spelled three different ways, sometimes on the same page. As for the typesetting, the author clearly wanted to use the macron to indicate a longer than usual vowel sound but was forced to settle for a combination of circumflexes for lower case characters and accents for upper case characters. This combination made an already error-filled book look even worse.

I have spent many hours correcting these errors and consider it a labor of love, even if the love fell short of actual bhakti.

While I am at best a lapsed Vaishnava I do have the desire to make the Bhagavata Purana more widely read. My donation to Project Gutenberg has been downloaded for free 703 times as I write this. That's a lot more transcendental literature than I ever distributed in the movement.

I cannot promise you that reading this book will make it possible for you to one day play with God. I left that path thirty years ago and can't imagine returning to it. But I can promise you some very interesting reading!