Srimad Bhagavatam III

Overview of the Bhagavat:

The 10 Subjects of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahāyogi

The Bhagavat is a vast and arcane literature. It will not yield up its secrets to a casual reader. The casual readers of the Bhagavat fall into different categories. Most of them will skip the first 9 Cantos of the work altogether and jump immediately to the 10th Canto which describes in detail the pastimes and qualities of the Lord.

Since these descriptions have a charming and intimate quality, the reader will often mistake the pastimes of Śrī Kṛṣṇa for entertaining fairy stories, useful for lulling children to sleep at bedtime. Ladies in India recognize the virtue of giving their children an early education and so expose their children to the delightful stories of Kṛṣṇa.

Unfortunately, this approach has the negative effect of convincing the public that Krishna stories are just that: charming tales for children. Adults must outgrow the fairy-tales of childhood. And so, the impersonal theories of Buddha and Shankar are taken more seriously than the wild fantasies promoted in the Bhagavat. Since these superficial readers have skipped over all the ontology and philosophical reflection contained in the previous nine Cantos of the work, they are bewildered by the 10th Canto and are unable to penetrate its mysteries.

Others sincerely attempt to go through the first 9 Cantos and are baffled by its esoteric nature. The uninitiated will be confused and lost in the forest of arcane mythological references to previous Puranas. Still others become obsessed with the minutia of the Bhagavat and its descriptions of time from the atom and the cosmology of the universe.

For this reason it is indispensable to follow the guidance of an expert in the matter of the Bhagavat. Such a person is also called Bhagavat since he embodies the teachings of that great and transcendental book.

One who attempts to approach the pastimes of divinity in the 10th Canto without reflecting on the ontology of consciousness and the avatars of God outlined in the other Cantos is doomed to failure.

According to analysis, Bhagavat unwinds its argument in 18,000 Sanskrit verses, but focuses on 10 important subjects:

1. sarga or the primary subjective evolution of consciousness as the foundation of existence,

2. visarga or secondary aspects of this evolution, as for example the origins of matter and energy, the time-space continuum, and the structure of the phenomenological universe,

3. sthanam or the cosmology of physical and metaphysical reality,

4. poshanam (the relationship between individual consciousness and the supreme consciousness and how the individual souls are ultimately under the protection of Divinity),

5. utayah (the karmic impetus of ego and its consequences, both in cause and effect),

6. manvantara (different eras of human civilization and the ancient dynasties of kings),

7. isha-anukatha (the ontology of divinity),

8. nirodha (the temporal, cyclical nature of universal reality as seen in its ultimate dissolution),

9. mukti (liberation from the temporal cyclical world of matter, time, and space),

10. ashraya (The Personality of Godhead, Bhagava, as the supreme shelter of all living entities).

While throughout the duration of its 18,000 verses the Bhagavat concentrates on these 10 important subjects and enters into a great number of ancillary matters, one must keep in mind that the purpose of the Bhagavat is Krishna-bhakti. In this context such considerations as the nature of the material universe and its origin takes secondary importance. These subjects are touched upon in their context. Spiritual practice without philosophical backing is often no more than fanaticism. A well-considered philosophical system provides a proper framework for spiritual practice. The Bhagavat concentrates on these matters to demonstrate its dominion over all the various realms of philosophy including cosmology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, and metaphysics. The Bhagavat is, therefore, not a mere compendium of fantastic mythological tales. It is a well-considered theological thesis about the nature of divinity. The Bhagavat claims that divinity is personal. It promotes dedication to a monotheistic divinity who is recognized in its pages as Bhagavan Śrī Kṛṣṇa. If there are other avatars or personalities who derive from Godhead, Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

The Bhagavat’s views on creation are subtle. The Bhagavat does not describe creation as the singular creative act of an all-powerful Deity who creates the universe out of nothing ex nihilo and then allows the laws of physics to govern everything. The creation does not proceed from the finger of God, but as an evolutionary process involving His Universal Mind. The sleeping Mahavishnu dreams the world, casting his vision through half-closed eyes towards the potential of material reality. It evolves as a gestalt of nested cocoons with different layers of conscious and sub-conscious energy developing their own layers of dark matter, dark energy, subtle ego and mind from the most subtle undifferentiated energy of pure consciousness. How the ethereal energy of undifferentiated Brahman binds to the grosser aspects of subtle ego and mind is reflected upon in the pages of the Bhagavat as it informs us of the soul’s sojourn in the material world.

In a backwards-evolution of subtle to gross, consciousness spins the world out of ego, intellect and mind, creating objective phenomenology out of subjective existence. The teaching of the Bhagavat reflects on how all material existence as the phenomenal universe is concretized as mass hypnosis. The vision of divinity as Mahavishnu reinforces the quantum experience of the collective unconsciousness of infinite jiva souls, overseen by the perception of the Paramatma or Supersoul. Whether you agree entirely with the thesis of the Bhagavat or find its explanation inadequate to face the challenge of modern science, you must first enter into the subtlety of its argument. And, if you are capable of doing so, you will find a supple and flexible means to, as Milton put it, “justify the ways of God to Man.”

The Bhagavat, therefore, responds to the arguments of Vedanta--that all is one--by giving us insight into the nature of the personal divinity. Modern Christianity has borrowed these ideas through the theology of German thinker Rudolf Otto. Otto was a Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion. He felt that despite the fact that one may speak of the functions or levels of consciousness, consciousness itself is beyond classification, irrational, “plainly strange,” “wholly other,” non-deducible, irreductable, and unclassifiable. Otto was intrigued by the mysticism he found in India as a student of Sanskrit and the Vishnu-bhakti of the Śrī-Vaiṣṇava school. He studied the system of qualified dualism promoted by Ramanuja, a great student of the Bhagavat. Otto even went so far as to translate certain excerpts from the Bhagavat and Vishnu Purana into German.

Otto's book The Idea of the Holy, is an important theological work, read by Catholics and Protestants alike. Since its publication in 1917 it has remained popular as a powerfully felt answer to Kant’s Critique.

Idea of the Holy promotes the idea of the “holy” as what he calls, “numinous.” In his attempt at explaining a self-evident mystical experience, he employs a special philosophical vocabulary. Otto’s numinous is a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self".

His term derives from the Latin numen which means “divine power”. Oddly, he picks a term with echoes of Kant's noumenon, a Greek term referring to unknowable reality. For Otto, the numinous or “intuitive divine mystic experience” is characterized by awe and reverence. Based on his insight into South Indian bhakti, this strange German philosophy teacher finds that an experience of God is characterized by a sense of mystery which he calls mysterium, awe and reverence or tremendumand fascination fascinans all at once.

Otto points out that the conscious state of awe and reverence achieved through mystic communion with the divine is beyond classification and cannot be understand rationally. The numinous, therefore, as he calls it cannot be cognized.

Many 20th Century theologians such as Otto did their best to revive Christianity by referring to the esoterica arguments found in the traditions of Krishna-bhakti, since the bhakti tradition offers the strongest arguments for personal monotheistic devotion. Of course, even while getting help from the Indian scriptures many thinkers are careful to hide their tracks and obscure the origins of their thought. It simply would not do to justify Christianity with the arguments taken from the Bhagavat.

Christians often demonize the beliefs and traditions of India by calling them “pagan.” The fantastic mythology of thousands of gods is evidence of a backwards society, they explain. How curious that the wisdom traditions of India have not only withstood the onslaught of hundreds of years of missionary activity, but are secretly absorbed into Christianity as the basis of their doctrine by Theologians like Rudolph Otto.

The Bhagavat is not a motley collection of weird mythologies; it offers a metaphysical framework for understanding the subtleties of the material cosmos.

Writing half a century before the birth of Christ, the great Roman orator Cicero remarked, “Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence when it gives birth to conscious intelligence?”

We may fault the writer or writers of the Bhagavat for not using the most modern of science in their calculations about the universe. But the big questions about consciousness and reality remain unchanged even since the time of Cicero. Modern physicists such as Stephen Hawking may tell us much about the space-time continuum, but still lack the tools to explain how space and time is nested within the cocoon of consciousness. Lately we have discovered that something like 90 percent of the universe may be composed of “dark matter.” “Dark energy” may become a factor in our understanding of the universe. And yet we know so little about concsiousness and its relationship to reality. But an understanding of life and consciousness are fundamental to understanding the universe and our place within the cosmos. Just as it is impossible to use Euclidean geometry to analyse the quantum universe, it is impossible to use the tools of modern physics to investigate the metaphysical realm. The Bhagavat, however, offers us insight into these important issues. Why not read it?