Bhagavata Wiki - Srimad Bhagavatam

The Book

The writer

Welcome to the wiki of the S'rīmad Bhāgavatam (or the Bhāgavata Purāna). Here you will find the complete second version (2009) in English and Dutch of this most important sacred book of stories of India (see also the up-to-date third version at bhagavata.org) India knows many purānas or storybooks, but this collection of stories is generally accepted as being the most complete and important. The book, arranged in twelve so-called cantos, comprises 335 chapters with about 18000 verses. Truly a Bible thus. It is that collection of stories which stresses the prime importance of the maintaining aspect of God personified by the transcendental form of Lord Vishnu.

The writer of this book is named Krishna Dvaipāyana Vyāsadeva, also called Bādarāyana. He is the Lord, the bhagavān, (avatāra) amongst the philosophers, who in India assembled all the holy texts. He compiled the Vedas, also known as s'ruti, containing the basic wisdom, the mantras for the rituals and the hymns. He as well wrote the Mahābhārata, which is the greatest epic poem in the world. It describes the history (itihāsa) of the great fall that the vedic culture once made. The Bhagavad Gītā is the most important part of it. Vyāsa also wrote the rest of the eighteen great Bibles (the purānas) of India as well as the Brahma-sūtra, his masterpiece on the Absolute Truth.

The person

The culture

The representative of Vishnu on earth is named the Fortunate One in this book. We know Him specifically by the names of Lord Rāma and Lord Krishna. The Fortunate One is thus the Lord who is known in different forms or incarnations, but also the devotees are part of His reality and are also called bhāgavata when they are pure. Thus there is the Lord in His many appearances, the devotee with as many faces and the book. They are all called Fortunate. Fortunate means to be of the opulence, or to carry, or live by, the fullness of God's riches, beauty, fame, power, knowledge and detachment.

Vyāsa was a grandfather of the Kuru-dynasty. He lived a very long time. His long duration of life enabled him to write the story of the Fortunate One and all the other books. He had a son by the name of S'ukadeva who handed the message of this Bible down to another member of the family, Emperor Parīkchit, who had difficulty respecting the classical wisdom. This emperor is the model for us normal people who seek their stability in the wisdom. This knowledge was conveyed by S'uka in disciplic succession (paramparā), to those who teach by example (the ācāryas), the science of devotional service (bhakti). This book, and it's culture, was brought to the West by the Vaishnava, the Vishnu-monk, Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupāda. Together with his pupils (known as the Hare Krishnas of ISKCON, see videos 1 and 2) he realized a verse by verse commented series of books covering the entire Bhāgavatam. This site offers not all these commentaries (see for that purpose vedabase.net) but does offer the basic translation of the verses as well as a concatenated version, translated as-it-is which is regularly updated, being maintained by Anand Aadhar Prabhu (René P. B. A. Meijer), a dutch psychologist converted to the philosophy of yoga who received instruction in the temples of ISKCON. (Proofreading and correcting manuscript by Sakhya devī dāsī]). His predecessor in this duty was S'rī Hayes'var das (Hendrik van Teylingen) who covered most of the translations into Dutch. The present responsibility for the culture of Vaishnavism in Holland lies with the ISKCON vaishnava-monk Kadamba Kānana Swami.