Vyāsa
Contents11 of 12
  1. Born on the Island
  2. The Veda Divided
  3. His Mother's Call
  4. A Hundred Sons from a Lump of Flesh
  5. The Grandfather in the Forest
  6. The Son from the Fire-Sticks
  7. Sight for Sañjaya
  8. The Night the Dead Came Back
  9. The Poem and Its Scribe
  10. Unsatisfied by the Sarasvatī
  11. The Bhāgavata
  12. The Echo on the Mountain

The Bhāgavata

On the western bank of the Sarasvatī there is a hermitage called Śamyāprāsa, in a grove of jujube trees. There Vyāsa sat down, touched water and steadied his mind. With his mind made still and clear by devotion, he saw the Person whole, the Lord himself, and māyā, his power, dependent on him: the māyā by which a living being, bewildered, takes itself to be made of the three strands of nature, goodness, passion and darkness, though it is beyond them, and so comes to harm. He saw that the end of that harm is devotion to the one beyond the senses, and that the world did not know it, and so he made the Bhāgavata, the hearing of which awakens love for Kṛṣṇa, the Lord, the supreme Person, and takes away grief and delusion and fear. When he had made it and gone over it, he taught it to his son Śuka, who already delighted in turning away from the world.