The Bhagavatam, also known as Bhagavata Purana, is one of the most influential spiritual texts of ancient India. While it’s well known and loved within the Indian culture, the same isn’t true of the West. This might be because it’s not an easy text to access. It spans 12 volumes and thousands of verses. It contains stories within stories and there is no obvious thread connecting them. There are creation myths and cosmologies, genealogies of kings and sages, stories of avatars and philosophical dialogues. People retell stories about other people, who are retelling stories about other people.
The text is a labyrinth. It can feel overwhelming if it’s approached with the expectation there will be a neat linear presentation moving in an orderly fashion from start to finish.
But Bhagavatam plays by its own rules. This is a text that declares its value confidently. According to its own testimony, it contains the supreme truth that describes the ultimate reality, thereby removing illusion and eradicating all suffering.
When it tells us the qualifications the reader needs to understand the supreme truth we expect it to mention intelligence, or some kind of prowess the reader would need to possess so they could achieve such a lofty goal. But instead, Bhagavatam tells us we need to be free of envy and pure of heart.
With Bhagavatam we’re introduced to a way of knowing that’s foreign to the Western mind. It’s knowledge gained from hearing. We’re not listening to facts, we’re listening to a narrative. The stories themselves bring us in contact with the divine. They enter the ears and travel directly to your heart. In this way a living truth captures you with charm, not argument.
When I first encountered Bhagavatam I was surprised by a presentation of philosophy that was also a love story. I grew up with two pictures of reality. There was the scientific view in which the universe can be measured and its behaviour predicted and thereby mastered. And there was the biblical view, in which God was a patriarch, powerful, distant and often displeased.
And then I encountered Krishna. He was unapologetically mischievous. Playing with his friends, stealing butter and feeding it to the monkeys and being chastised by his mother. Making music with his flute in the moonlight and causing the cowherd women to forget their family duties.
This was a picture of reality in which love was the supreme controlling principle and even God himself had surrendered control to it. It’s a world where beauty isn’t ornamental, it’s the substance the world is made from. A reality composed not of matter or force, but the many flavours of loving relationships. A place where every step is a dance and every word is a song.
I spent a long time looking for the thread that connected the seemingly disparate subjects in the Bhagavatam. I looked at the structure, examined the titles of the Cantos, tried to map the 10 subject matters to the text itself. I searched for an organising principle around which the whole text could cohere.
And eventually I realised the answer was right at the start of the narration of Bhagavatam. King Pariksit had been cursed to die in 7 days and so he approached the sage Suka Goswami. He asked him to explain the path of perfection for all people and particularly for someone who is about to die. Suka Goswami responded that anyone who wishes to be free from all suffering must hear about, glorify and remember the Supreme Lord. Everything else in the Bhagavatam is commentary on that.
That is the essence of Bhagavatam, everything else is in service of that. And so I called this presentation The Essential Bhagavatam. The word essential has a particular meaning within the Gaudiya tradition. It signifies extracting the essence of the teachings from the vast Vedic corpus without being distracted by the flowery language and promises of material rewards.
This book is an attempt to do that. This isn’t a translation, but a retelling of selected stories that I think reveal the heart of the Bhagavatam. Not only do they contain the essential teachings, they promise a variety of blessings to anyone who hears them. The language aims to be accessible because the hearing is the key. It’s not intended as a text to study, but as one that can be read for pleasure and savouring the vision of God it offers.
The Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition holds the Bhagavatam in the highest esteem considering it the foremost source of divine knowledge. Accordingly, this presentation is an offering to Sri Gauranga and all those in his line of devotion. I hope it pleases them.
