The Book of the Lord

A king has seven days to live. Parikshit, grandson of the Pandavas, has been cursed to die of snakebite within a week, and rather than spend his last days in fear he sits on the bank of the Ganga and asks the one question worth asking: what should a person do who is about to die? In answer, the sage Suka, son of Vyasa, begins to speak, and what he speaks, across those seven days, is the Bhagavata Purana. The whole of the most beloved Purana is framed as a dying man’s final education, delivered in the time he has left.

It is a fitting frame for the book it introduces, because the Bhagavata is the Purana that took the immense cold scale of the previous chapter, the billions of years and the dissolving worlds, and answered it with something warm and small and personal: love for a particular God with a particular face. This chapter is about the one Purana that outgrew all the others, not in length, but in the hold it took on the heart of Hindu India.

The teaching of devotion

The Bhagavata Purana, also called the Srimad Bhagavatam, the beautiful book of the Lord, runs to twelve books, the skandhas, and around eighteen thousand verses. By every measure of influence it is the most important of the Puranas, and its importance rests on a single move: it makes bhakti, loving devotion, the highest thing a human being can do.

This was not a small claim to make. The older tradition had ranked the paths to liberation with knowledge or ritual at the top. The Bhagavata engages all of that, the philosophy of Vedanta and Samkhya, the discipline of yoga, and then sets above them the simple, total love of the devotee for the Lord, available to anyone, requiring no Sanskrit and no priesthood and no high birth. It gives that love a structure, in one of the most quoted passages in all of devotional Hinduism. In the seventh book the boy Prahlada, who loves God even as his demon father tries to kill him for it, lists the nine forms devotion can take: hearing about the Lord and singing of him, remembering him, serving his feet, worshipping his image, bowing to him, serving him, befriending him, and at last surrendering oneself to him entirely. Hearing, chanting, remembering, serving, worshipping, bowing, serving, befriending, surrendering. The nine-fold path, navadha bhakti, became the map by which centuries of devotees understood their own hearts.

The life of Krishna

The reason the Bhagavata is loved, though, is not its theology of devotion. It is its tenth book.

The tenth skandha is the longest of the twelve and the most cherished single stretch of writing in popular Hinduism, because it tells the life of Krishna, and it tells it as no text had before. Krishna is born in a prison cell to parents hidden from a murderous king, and smuggled across a river to grow up among cowherds in the pastoral country of Vrindavana. The book lingers, with extraordinary tenderness, on his childhood: the baby who steals butter and is caught with it on his face, the boy who holds up the whole of Mount Govardhana on one finger for seven days to shelter the village from a storm, the youth whose flute calls the cowherd women, the gopis, out into the autumn night for the circling dance of divine love, the rasa-lila. These are the scenes painted on ten thousand temple walls and sung in a hundred languages. The Bhagavata gave Hindu India its most intimate image of God: not the cosmic sovereign of the wheel of ages, but a child with butter on his hands, a boy with a flute, a God you could love the way you love your own.

That intimacy is the point. The Bhagavata answered the vastness of Puranic time with a face you could hold in the mind.

A late and southern masterpiece

The tradition holds the Bhagavata to be the work of Vyasa, composed after all his other Puranas as the ripe fruit of his labour, timeless and beyond date. The historian’s account is different, and it is one of the more interesting findings of modern scholarship.

By the evidence of its language and its theology, the Bhagavata is relatively late among the Puranas, placed by most scholars around the ninth or tenth century of the Common Era. And it appears to have been composed in the south. Friedhelm Hardy, in a major study, argued that the intense, yearning, emotional devotion that fills the Bhagavata first arose among the Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints of Vishnu who sang their longing for God in the centuries just before, and that the Bhagavata took that southern devotional fire and rendered it back into Sanskrit, carrying it across the whole subcontinent. The text even seems to know it is doing something old in a new way: J. A. B. van Buitenen noticed that its Sanskrit is deliberately archaic, written to sound ancient, a literary choice rather than a sign of real antiquity. Not every scholar accepts the southern origin in full; Edwin Bryant has noted the text’s northern geography and pointed out that the question is not closed. But the broad picture holds: a relatively late Purana, drawing deep on southern devotion, written to sound timeless.

What is beyond dispute is what it set in motion. The Bhagavata Purana became the fountainhead of the great Krishna bhakti movements that reshaped Hindu life across the medieval centuries, from Chaitanya in Bengal to Vallabha in the west, and the devotional poetry of saints like Surdas. A Purana composed, perhaps, by southern devotees writing in archaic Sanskrit became the book that taught much of a subcontinent how to love God. The tradition’s instinct, that this book is special among the eighteen, is one the historian can only confirm, even while telling a different story about where it came from.

The Bhagavata gave the tradition its most beloved God. The next chapter turns to the Purana that gave it, for the first time in Sanskrit, its supreme Goddess.