The Bhagavata, its Philosophy, its Ethics and its Theology

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We love to read a book which we never read before. We are anxious to gather whatever information is contained in it and with such acquirement our curiosity stops. This mode of study prevails amongst a great number of readers, who are great men in their own estimation as well as in the estimation of those, who are of their own stamp. In fact, most readers are mere repositories of facts and statements made by other people. But this is not study. The student is to read the facts with a view to create, and not with the object of fruitless retention. Students, like satellites, should reflect whatever light they receive from authors and not imprison the facts and thoughts just as the Magistrates imprison the convicts in the jail! Thought is progressive. The author’s thought must have progress in the reader in the shape of correction or development. He is the best critic, who can show the further development of an old thought; but a mere denouncer is the enemy of progress and, consequently, of Nature. “Begin anew,” says the critic, because the old masonry does not answer at present. Let the old author be buried because his time is gone. These are shallow expressions. Progress certainly is the law of nature and there must be corrections and developments with the progress of time. But, progress means going further or rising high. Now, if we are to follow our foolish critic, we are to go back to our former terminus and make a new race, and when we have run half the race another critic of his stamp will cry out, “Begin anew, because the wrong road has been taken!” In this way our stupid critics will never allow us to go over the whole road and see what is in the other terminus. Thus, the shallow critic and the fruitless reader are the two great enemies of progress. We must shun them.

The true critic, on the other hand, advises us to preserve what we have already obtained, and to adjust our race from that point where we have arrived in the heat of our progress. He will never advise us to go back to the point whence we started, as he fully knows that in that case there will be a fruitless loss of our valuable time and labor. He will direct the adjustment of the angle of the race at the point where we are. This is also the characteristic of the useful student. He will read an old author and will find out his exact position in the progress of thought. He will never propose to burn the book on the ground that it contains thoughts which are useless. No thought is useless. Thoughts are means by which we attain our objects. The reader, who denounces a bad thought, does not know that a bad road is even capable of improvement and conversion into a good one. One thought is a road leading to another. Thus the reader will find that one thought, which is the object today, will be the means of a further object tomorrow. Thoughts will necessarily continue to be an endless series of means and objects in the progress of humanity. The great reformers will always assert that they have come out, not to destroy the old law, but to fulfill it. Valmiki, Vyasa, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu assert the fact either expressly or by their conduct.

The Bhagavata, like all religious works, philosophical performances and writings of great men, has suffered from the imprudent conduct of useless readers and stupid critics. The former have done so much injury to the work that they have surpassed the latter in their evil consequence. Men of brilliant thoughts have passed by the work in quest of truth and philosophy, but the prejudice which they imbibed from its useless readers and their conduct, prevented them from making a candid investigation. Not to say of other people, the great genius of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the founder of the sect of Brahmoism, did not think it worth his while to study this ornament of the religious library. He crossed the gate of the Vedanta, as set up by the Mayavada construction of the deigning Shankaracharya, the chosen enemy of the Jains, and chalked his way out to the Unitarian form of the Christian faith, converted into an Indian appearance. Ram Mohan Roy was an able man. He could not be satisfied with the theory of illusion contained in the Mayavada philosophy of Shankar. His heart was full of love to Nature. He saw through the eye of his mind that he could not believe in his identity with God. He ran, furious, from the bounds of Shankar, to those of the Koran. There even, he was not satisfied. He then studied the pre-eminently beautiful precepts and history of Jesus, first in the English translations and at last in the original Greek, and took shelter under the holy banners of the Jewish Reformer. But Ram Mohan Roy was also a patriot. He wanted to reform his country in the same way as he reformed himself. He knew it fully, that truth does not belong, exclusively, to any individual man or to any nation or particular race. It belongs to god, and man, whether in the Poles or on the Equator, has a right to claim it as the property of his Father. On these grounds he claimed the truths inculcated by the Western Savior as also the property of himself and his countrymen, and thus he established the Samaja of the Brahmos independently of what was in his own country in the Beautiful Bhagavata.[1] His noble deeds will certainly procure him a high position in the history of reformers. But the, to speak the truth, he would have done more if he had commenced his work of reformation from the point where the last reformer in India left it. It is not our business to go further on this subject. Suffice it to say, that the Bhagavata did not attract the genius of Ram Mohan Roy. His thought, mighty though it was, unfortunately branched like the Ranigunj line of Railway, from the barren station of Shankaracharya, and did not attempt to be an extension from the Delhi terminus of the great Bhagavata expounder of Nadia. We do not doubt that the progress of time will correct the error, and by a further extension, the branch line will lose itself somewhere in the main line of progress. We expect these attempts in abler reformers of the followers of Ram Mohan Roy.

The Bhagavata has suffered alike from shallow critics, both Indian and outlandish. That book has been accursed and denounced by a great number of our young countrymen, who have scarcely read its contents and pondered over the philosophy on which it is founded. It is owing mostly to their imbibing an unfounded prejudice against it when they were in school. The Bhagavata, as a matter of course, has been held in derision by those teachers, who are generally of an inferior mind and intellect. This prejudice is not easily shaken when the student grows up, unless he candidly studies the book and ruminates on the doctrines of Vaishnavism. We are ourselves of the fact. When we were in college, reading the philosophical works of the West and exchanging thought with the thinkers of the day, we had a real hatred towards the Bhagavata. That great work looked like a repository of wicked and stupid ideas, scarcely adapted to the nineteenth century, and we hated to hear any arguments in its favor. With us then, a volume of Channing, Parker, Emerson or Newman had more weight than the whole lots of the Vaishnava works. Greedily we poured over the various commentations of the Holy bible and of the labors of the Tattwa Bodhini Sabha, containing extracts from the Upanishads and the Vedanta, but no work of the Vaishnavas had any favor with us. But when we advanced in age and our religious sentiment received development, we turned out in a manner Unitarian in our belief and prayed as Jesus prayed in the Garden. Accidentally, we fell in with a work about the Great Chaitanya, and, on reading it, with some attention in order to settle the historical position of that Mighty Genius of Nadia, we had the opportunity of gathering His explanations of Bhagavata, given to the wrangling Vedantist of the Benares School. The accidental study created in us a love for all the works which we find about our eastern savior. We gathered with difficulties the famous Karchas in Sanskrit, written by the disciples of Chaitanya. The explanations that we got of the Bhagavata from these sources, were of such a charming character that we procured a copy of the Bhagavata, complete, and studied its texts (difficult, of course, to those who are not trained up in philosophical thoughts) with the assistance of the famous commentaries of Shreedar Swami. From such study it is that we have at least gathered the real doctrines of the Vaishnavas. Oh! What a trouble to get rid of prejudices gathered in unripe years!

As far as we can understand, no enemy of Vaishnavism will find any beauty in the Bhagavata. The true critic is a generous judge, void of prejudices and party-spirit. One, who is at heart, the follower of Mohammed, will certainly find the doctrines of the New Testament to be a forgery by the fallen angel. A Trinitarian Christian, on the other hand, will denounce the precepts of Mohammed as those of an ambitious reformer. The reason is, simply, that the critic should be of the same disposition of mind as that of the author, whose merits he is required to judge. Thoughts have different ways. One, who is trained up in the thoughts of the Unitarian society or of the Vedanta of the Benares School, will scarcely find piety in the faith of Vaishnavas. An ignorant Vaishnava, on the other hand, whose business it is to beg from door to door in the name of Nityananda, will find no piety in the Christian. This is because, the Vaishnava does not think in the way in which the Christian thinks of his own religion. It may be, that both the Christian and the Vaishnava will utter the same sentiment, but they will never stop their fight with each other only because they have arrived at their common conclusion by different ways of thoughts., thus it is, that a great deal of un-generousness enters into the arguments of the pious Christians when they pass their imperfect opinion on the religion of the Vaishnavas.

Subjects of philosophy and theology are like the peaks of large towering and inaccessible mountains, standing in the midst of our planet, inviting attention and investigation. Thinkers and men of deep speculation take their observations through the instruments of reason and consciousness. But they take different points when they carry on their work. These points are positions chalked out by the circumstances of the social and philosophical life, different as they are in the different parts of the world. Plato looked at the peak of the Spiritual question from the West and Vyasa made the observation from the East; so Confucius did it from further East, and Schlegel, Spinoza, Kant and Goethe, from further West. These observations were made at different times and by different means, but the conclusion is all the same (in as much as the object of observation was one and the same).They all hunted after the Great Spirit, the unconditioned Soul of the Universe. They could not but get an insight into it. Their works and expressions are different, but their import is the same. They tried to find out the absolute religion and their labors were crowned with success, for god gives all that he has to His children if they want to have it. It requires a candid, generous, pious and holy heart to feel the beauties of the conclusions. Party-spirit – that great enemy of truth – will always baffle the attempt of the enquirer, who tries to gather truth from the religious works of their nations, and will make him believe that absolute truth is nowhere except in his old religious book. What better example could be adduced than the fact that the great philosopher of Benares will find no truth in the universal brotherhood of man and the common fatherhood of God? The philosopher, thinking in his own way of thought, can never see the beauty of the Christian faith. The way in which Christ thought of his own father was love absolute, and so long as the philosopher will not adopt that way of thinking he will ever remain deprived of the absolute faith preached by the Western Savior. In a similar manner, the Christian needs adopt the way of thought which the Vedantist pursued, before he can love the conclusions of the philosopher. The critic, therefore, should have a comprehensive, good, generous, candid, impartial and a sympathetic soul.

“What sort of a thing is the Bhagavata”, asks the European gentleman, newly arrived in India. His companion tells him, with a serene look, that the Bhagavata is a book which his Oriya bearer daily reads in the evening to a number of hearers. It contains a jargon of unintelligible and savage literature of those men who paint their noses with some sort of earth or sandal, and wear beads all over their bodies in order to procure salvation for themselves. Another of his companions, who has travelled a little in the interior, would immediately contradict him and say that the Bhagavata is a Sanskrit work claimed by a sect of men (the Goswamis) who give mantras, like the Popes of Italy, to the common people of Bengal and pardon their sins on payment of gold enough to defray their social expenses. A third gentleman will repeat a third explanation. Young Bengal, chained up in English thoughts and ideas, and wholly ignorant of the Pre-Mohammedan history of his own country, will add one more explanation by saying that the Bhagavata is a book containing an account of the life of Krishna, who was an ambitious and immoral man! This is all that he could gather from his grandmother while yet he did not go to school! Thus the Great Bhagavata ever remains unknown to the foreigners like the elephant of the six blind who caught hold of the several parts of the body of the beast! But Truth is eternal and is never injured but for awhile by ignorance.

The Bhagavata itself tells us what it is: −

निगमकल्पतरोर्गलितं फलं शुकमुखादमृतद्रवसंयुतम् ।

पिबत भागवतं रसमालयं मुहुरहो रसिका भुवि भावुका: ॥ (1.1.2)

“It is the fruit of the Tree of thought (Vedas) mixed with the nectar of the speech of Shukadeva. It is the temple of spiritual love! O! Men of Piety! Drink deep this nectar of Bhagavata repeatedly till you are taken from this mortal frame.”

The Garooda Purana says, again: −

ग्रन्थोऽष्टादश सहस्र श्रीमद् भागवताभिधा |

सर्ववेदेतिगासानां सारं सारं समुद्धृतम् ॥

सर्व वेदान्तसारं हि श्रीभागवतभिश्यते ।

तद्रसमृततृप्तस्य नान्यत्र स्याद्रति क्वचित् ॥

“The Bhagavata is composed of 18,000 Slokas. It contains the best parts of the Vedas and the Vedanta. Whoever has tasted its sweet nectar, will never like to read any other religious book.”

Every thoughtful reader will certainly repeat this eulogy. The Bhagavata is pre-eminently the book in India. Once enter into it, and you are transplanted, as it were, into the spiritual world where gross matter has no existence. The true follower of the Bhagavata is a spiritual man who has already cut his temporary connection with phenomenal nature, and has made himself the inhabitant of that region where god eternally exists and loves. This mighty work is founded upon inspiration and its superstructure is upon reflection. To the common reader it has no charm and is full of difficulty. We are therefore, obliged to study it deeply through the assistance of such great commentators as Shreedhar Swami and the Divine Chaitanya and His contemporary followers.

Now the great preacher of Nadia, Who has been deified by his talented followers, tells us that the Bhagavata is founded upon the four Slokas which Vyasa received from Narada, the most learned of the created beings. He tells us further that Brahma pierced through the whole universe of matter for years and years in quest of the final cause of the world, but when he failed to find it abroad, he looked into the construction of his own spiritual nature, and there he heard the Universal Spirit speaking unto him, the following words: −

श्रीभगवानुवाच

ज्ञानं परमगुह्यं मे यद्विज्ञानसमन्वितम् ।

सरहस्यं तदड्गं च गृहाण ग्दितं मया ॥

यावनाहं यथाभावो यद्रूपगुणकर्मक: ।

तथैव ‍तक्त्वविज्ञानमस्तु ते मदनुग्रहात् ॥

अहमेवासमेवाग्रे नान्यद्यत् सदसत्परम् ।

पश्‍चादहं यदेतच्च योऽवशिष्येत सोऽस्म्यहम् ॥

ऋतेऽर्थ यत्प्रतीयेत न प्रतीयेत चात्मनि ।

तद्विद्यादात्मनो मायां यथाऽऽभासो यथा तमः ॥

(S.B. 2.9.31-34)

“Take, O Brahma! I am giving you the knowledge of My Own Self and of My relations and phases which is in itself difficult of access. You are a created being, so it is not easy for you to accept what I give you, but then I kindly give you the power to accept, so you are at liberty to understand My essence, My ideas, My form, My property and My action together with their various relations with imperfect knowledge. I was in the beginning before all spiritual and temporal things were created, and after they have been created I am in them all in the shape of their existence and truthfulness, and when they will be all gone, I shall remain full as I was and as I am. Whatever appears to be true, without being a real fact itself, and whatever is not perceived, though it is true in itself, are subjects of My illusory energy of creation, such as light and darkness in the material world.” [2]

It is difficult to explain the above in a short compass. You must read the whole Bhagavata for its explanation. When the great Vyasa had effected the arrangements of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the completion of the eighteen Puranas with facts gathered from the recorded and unrecorded traditions of ages, and the composition of the Vedanta and the large Mahabharata (an epic poem of great celebrity), he began to ruminate over his own theories and precepts, and found like Fauste of Goethe that he had up to that time gathered no real truth. He fell back into his own self and searched his own spiritual nature and then it was that the above truth was communicated to him for his own good and the good of the world. The sage immediately perceived that his former works required supercession, in as much as they did not contain the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In his new idea he got the development of his former idea of religion. He commenced the Bhagavata in pursuance of this change. From this fact, our readers are expected to find out the position which the Bhagavata enjoys in the library of Hindu Theological works.

The whole of this incomparable work teaches us, according to our Great Chaitanya, the three great truths which compose the absolute religion of man. Our Nadia Preacher calls them Samvandha, Abhidheya and Prayojana, i.e., the relation between the Creator and the created, the duty of man to God and the prospects of humanity. In these three words is summed up the whole ocean of human knowledge as far as it has been explored up to this era of human progress. These are the cardinal points of religion and the whole Bhagavata is, as we are taught by Chaitanya, an explanation both by precepts and example, of these three great points.

In all its twelve Skandhas (or divisions), the Bhagavata teaches us that there is only one God without a second, Who is full in Himself and is and will remain the same. Time and space, which prescribe conditions to created objects, are much below His Supreme Spiritual Nature (which is unconditioned and absolute). Created objects are subject to the influence of [time and space], which form the chief ingredients of that principle in creation, [which passes by the name of] Maya. Maya is a thing which is not easily understood by us who are subject to it, but God explains (as much as we can understand in our present constitution) this principle through our spiritual perception. The hasty critic starts like an unbroken horse at the name of Maya and denounces it as a theory identical with that of Bishop Berkley. “Be patient in your enquiry” is our immediate reply. In the mind of God there were ideas of all that we perceive in eternal existence with Him, or else God loses the epithet of omniscient so learnedly applied to Him. The imperfect part of nature, implying want, proceeded also from those certain ideas, and what, but a principle of Maya, eternally existing in God, subject to His Onmipotence, could have a hand in the creation of the world as it is? This is styled maya-shakti of the Omnipresent God. Cavil as much as you can. This is a truth in relation to the created universe.

This Maya intervenes between us and God as long as we are not spiritual, and when we are able to break off her bonds, we, even in this mortal frame, learn to commune in our spiritual nature with the unconditioned and the absolute. No, Maya does not mean a false thing only, but it means concealment of the eternal truth as well. The creation is not Maya itself but is subject to that principle. Certainly, the theory is idealistic but it has been degraded into foolishness by wrong explanations. The materialist laughs at the ideal theory saying, how could his body, water, air and earth be mere ideas without entity, and he laughs rightly when he takes Shankaracharya’s book in his hand as the butt end of his ridicule.[3] The true idealist must be a dualist also. He must believe all that he perceives as nature, created by God, full of spiritual essence and relations, but he must not believe that the outward appearance is the truth. The Bhagavata teaches that al that we healthily perceive is true; but its material appearance is transient and illusory. The scandal of the ideal theory consists in its tendency to falsify nature, but the theory, as explained in the Bhagavata makes nature true, if not eternally true as God and His ideas. What harm can there be, if man believes in nature as spiritually true and that the physical relations and phases of society are purely spiritual?

No, it is not merely changing a name but it is a change in nature also. Nature is eternally spiritual but the intervention of Maya makes her gross and material. Man, in his progress, attempts to shake off this gross idea, childish and foolish in its nature, and by subduing the intervening principle of Maya lives in continual union with God in his spiritual nature. The shaking off of this bond is the salvation of the human nature. The man who has got salvation will freely tell his brother that, “If you want to see God, see me, and if you want to be one with God, you must follow me.” The Bhagavata teaches us this relation between man and God, and we must all attain this knowledge. This sublime truth is the point where the materialist and the idealist must meet like brothers of the same school, and this is the point to which all philosophy tends.

This is called the Samvandha-Jnana of the Bhagavata, or, in other words, the knowledge of relations between the conditioned and the Absolute. We must now attempt to explain the second great principle inculcated by the Bhagavata, i.e., the principle of duty. Man must spiritually worship his God. There are three ways in which the Creator can be worshipped by the created.

वदन्ति तत्तत्त्वविदस्तत्त्वं यज्ज्ञानमद्वयम् ।

ब्रह्मेति परमात्मेति भगवानिति शब्द्यते ॥

(S.B. 1.2.11)

All theologists agree in maintaining that there is only one God, without a second, but they disagree in giving a name to that God owing to the different modes of worship, which they adopt according to the constitution of their mind. Some call Him by the name of Brahman, some by the name of Paramatma, and others by the name of Bhagavan. Those who worship God as infinitely great in the principle of admiration, call him by the name of Brahman. This mode is called Jnana, or knowledge. Those who worship god as the Universal Soul in the principle of spiritual union with Him, give Him the name of Paramatma. This is yoga. Those who worship God as all in all, with all their heart, body and strength, style Him as Bhagavan. This last principle is Bhakti. The book that prescribes the relation and worship of Bhagavan, procures for itself the name of Bhagavata, and the worshipper is also called by the same name.[4]

Such is the Bhagavata which is decidedly the Book for all classes of theists. If we worship God spiritually as all in all, with our heart, mind, body and strength, we are all Bhagavatas and we lead a life of spiritualism, which neither the worshipper of Brahman, nor the Yogi uniting his soul with the Universal Soul (Paramatma) can obtain. The superiority of Bhagavan consists in the uniting of all sorts of theistical worship into one excellent principle in human nature which passes by the name of Bhakti. This word has no equivalent in the English language. Piety, devotion, resignation and spiritual love unalloyed with any sort of petition except in the way of repentance, compose the highest principle of Bhakti. The Bhagavata tells us to worship God in that great and invaluable principle, which is infinitely superior to human knowledge and the principle of Yoga.

[1] This is gathered from what Ram Mohan Roy told the public in the prefaces to the three dissertations, which he wrote about the precepts of Jesus as compiled by him from the Gospels and in answer to Dr. Marshman of the Serampore Missionary.

[2] Shree Chaitanya’s lecture to Prakashananda Saraswati in Chaitanya Charitamrita

[3] The Padma Purana thus puts the following expression into the mouth of Shiva, and Chaitanya puts great stress on this text in his denouncement of Shankar’s Mayavada:

Mayavadamasachchhastram, prachchhannam bouddhamevacha.

Mayaiva kathitam Devi Kalau brahmana rupina.

Maya philosophy is Buddhism in disguise and I (God of Tamo Guna) have give expression to it in the shape of a Brahmin (meaning Shankaracharya).

[4] This explanation is gathered from what Chaitanya said to Sanatana – vide Madhyakhanda of Sri Chaitanya Charitamrita.