Key Ideas
Bhakti as the supreme path — even above liberation.
Kṛṣṇa’s childhood — the butter-thief who shows the universe in his mouth.
The rāsa-līlā — Kṛṣṇa multiplying himself to dance with every gopī.
The gopīs’ love as the model of devotion.
The ten avatāras of Viṣṇu.
The Bhāgavata Purāṇa (also Śrīmad Bhāgavatam) is the most influential of the eighteen major Purāṇas, the encyclopaedic Sanskrit texts of myth, cosmology, genealogy and devotion. Composed probably in South India in the ninth or tenth century, in twelve books (skandhas), it is the scripture of Kṛṣṇa devotion and the foundation of much of the The Bhakti Movement movement. It is framed as the recitation by the sage Śuka to King Parīkṣit (the grandson of Arjuna), who has seven days to live after a curse.
Its tenth book, the longest and most beloved, tells the life of Kṛṣṇa: his birth in prison in Mathurā, his rescue across the flooded Yamunā to the cowherd village of Gokula; his childhood pranks — stealing butter, teasing the cowherd women (gopīs), being tied to a mortar by his mother Yaśodā — and his miraculous destruction of demons; the moment when Yaśodā, checking whether he has eaten mud, opens his mouth and sees the entire universe inside; his lifting of Mount Govardhana to shelter the villagers from Indra’s storms; his flute that draws the gopīs from their homes at night; the rāsa-līlā, the circle dance in which Kṛṣṇa multiplies himself so that each gopī dances with him alone; his departure to Mathurā; and the gopīs’ anguish of separation.
The Bhāgavata teaches that bhakti, loving devotion, is superior to knowledge, ritual and even liberation, and that the gopīs’ love — passionate, self-forgetting, transgressing every social rule — is its model. It inspired the theology of Vallabha and Caitanya Mahāprabhu, the poetry of Sūrdās, Mīrā and Jayadeva, and centuries of painting, dance and music.
Curiosities
did you know?- When the child Kṛṣṇa is accused of eating mud, his mother opens his mouth to check — and sees the entire universe inside.
- It is recited in seven-day public readings (Bhāgavata Saptāha) across India.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Why would God want to be loved as a child, a friend or a lover?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Universal Form
Arjuna asks to see Kṛṣṇa’s true form — and beholds the whole universe, all beings, all gods, and all the warriors rushing into Time’s blazing mouths.
The Bhakti Movement
The great devotional revolution of Indian religion — from the Tamil Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs (6th–9th centuries) to Kabīr, Mīrābāī, Tulsīdās and Tukārām — which made passionate, personal love of God, sung in the languages of the people, a path to liberation open to every caste and to women.
Gītagovinda
Jayadeva’s 12th-century Sanskrit song-cycle on the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa — jealousy, separation, longing and reunion — the most musical and sensuous poem in Sanskrit, read as an allegory of the soul’s love for God.
Jñāneśvar
The 13th-century Marathi saint-poet who, at about twenty, wrote the Jñāneśvarī — a 9,000-verse commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā in Marathi that founded Marathi literature and the Vārkarī devotional tradition — and entered living samādhi at twenty-one.
Madhva
The 13th-century philosopher from Udupi who founded Dvaita Vedānta — the uncompromising teaching that God, souls and matter are eternally distinct, and that Viṣṇu alone is independent.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.