Purāṇa / The eighteen / Brahma-vaivarta Purāṇa
Brahma-vaivarta Purāṇa (ब्रह्मवैवर्तपुराण)
About 18,000 verses in the traditional lists. Rajas in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting. Neither figure is this shelf's own measurement.
About eighteen thousand verses in the lists, rajas in the Padma sorting. The name is Brahmā's transformation, the turning of the creator's knowledge. In the form a reader actually meets, this is a Kṛṣṇa theology more than a five-topic digest. The creation proceeds through Kṛṣṇa and through Rādhā. Goloka, the world of cows and of their play, is the highest place, above the heavens the other books arrange. The book is late in the shape we have. That lateness is not an insult. It is a date to remember when a cosmology centers a beloved the earlier lists did not center.
Rādhā is śakti, the power without which the play does not begin. The stories of their love are the book's signature, and this page will not retell them as erotic narrative and will not linger on bodies. What it keeps is the doctrinal picture. The world is devotion before it is matter. A beloved is not an episode in the god's life. She is the reason the life can be told as a world. Kṛṣṇa's other famous deeds appear, subordinated to that center.
The teaching is a bhakti of intimacy, and the risk of the teaching is sentimentality. The book at its best does not say the world is unreal so it can ignore suffering. It says the world's origin is a relationship, and a relationship is a more serious metaphysics than a mechanism. The shelf does not sit a verse from it. The famous lines people recite are not checked onto this page.
What it tells
Creation through Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa; Goloka; the play as the origin, not as an interlude.
The teaching
Intimacy is the cosmology. Rādhā is not a side-story. She is the śakti the creation goes through.
What a reader keeps
- About eighteen thousand, as a list-number.
- Rajas in the Padma list.
- No erotic retelling, and no unchecked śloka.
A line
A line people recite from this book is not sat here. The shelf does not print a verse it has not checked.
नेपालीमा
सूचीले करिब अठार हजार श्लोक र रजोगुण भन्छ। हामीले भेट्ने रूप कृष्णको भक्ति-दर्शन हो, पाँच विषयको संक्षेप मात्र होइन। सृष्टि राधा र कृष्णमार्फत हुन्छ। गोलोक माथिल्लो लोक हो। पुस्तकको यो रूप पछिल्लो हो। राधा शक्ति हुन्। यो पृष्ठले प्रेम-कथालाई काम-कथा बनाउँदैन, शरीरमा अल्झँदैन। संसारको उत्पत्ति सम्बन्ध हो भन्ने चित्र राख्छ। प्रसिद्ध पङ्क्ति यहाँ समावेश गरिएका छैनन्।
Where it sits
The sat Kṛṣṇa-verses of this shelf are the Bhāgavata's, not this book's.