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Bhagavad Gītā

A modern Gītā

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The Book

The writer

Welcome to the site of the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam (or the Bhāgavata Purāṇa). Here you will find the complete and up-to-date version maintained in Sanskrit, English and Dutch of this most important sacred book of stories of India. India knows many Purāṇas 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 [a so-called Samhitā]. It is this collection of stories that stresses the prime importance of the maintaining aspect of God personified by the transcendental form of Lord Viṣṇu.

The writer of this book is named Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsadeva, also called Bādarāyana. He is the Lord, the bhagavān, among the philosophers, who in India assembled all the holy texts. He compiled the Vedas, also known as śruti, containing the basic wisdom, the mantras for the rituals and the hymns. He also 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 story books (the Purāṇas) of India as also the Brahma-sūtra, his masterpiece on the Absolute Truth.

The person

The culture

The representative of Viṣṇu on earth is named the Fortunate One in this book. We know Him specifically by the names of Lord Rāma and Lord Kṛṣṇa. 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 of  pure devotion. Thus there is the Lord in His many appearances, the devotee with as many faces and the book. They are all called Fortunate. To be 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 called Śukadeva who handed the message of this bible down to another member of the family, Emperor Parīkṣit, who had difficulty respecting the classical wisdom. This emperor is there as a model for us normal people who seek their stability in the wisdom. This knowledge was conveyed by Śuka in disciplic succession  (paramparā),  to those who teach by example (the ācāryas) the science of devotional service (bhakti). This book, and its culture, was brought to the West by the Vaishnava, the Viṣṇu-monk, Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupāda. Together with his pupils (known as the Hare Kṛṣṇas of ISKCON) he realized a verse by verse commented series of books covering the entire Bhāgavatam. This site offers not all these texts (see for that purpose vedabase.io) but does offer under the Creative Commons copyright an as-it-is translation of the verses in a concatenated form complete with the previous version. This text is regularly updated and 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 and elsewhere. His predecessor in this duty was Śrī Hayeśvar das (Hendrik van Teylingen) who covered most of the translations into Dutch.