Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Bhagavata Purana
Summary
The Bhagavata Purana (भागवतपुराण; ), also known as the Srimad Bhagavatam, Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana () or simply Bhagavata, is one of Hinduism's eighteen great Puranas (Mahapuranas). Composed in Sanskrit and traditionally attributed to Veda Vyasa, it promotes bhakti (devotion) towards Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, integrating themes from the Advaita (monism) philosophy of Adi Shankara, the Vishishtadvaita (qualified monism) of Ramanujacharya and the Dvaita (dualism) of Madhvacharya. It is widely available in almost all Indian languages.
The date of composition is probably between the eighth and the tenth century CE, while it cannot be earlier than the 6th century CE or later than ca. 1000 CE. Manuscripts survive in numerous inconsistent versions revised through the 18th century, creating various recensions both in the same languages and across different Indian languages.
The Bhagavata Purana, like other puranas, discusses a wide range of topics including cosmology, astronomy, genealogy, geography, legend, music, dance, yoga and culture. As it begins, the forces of evil have won a war between the benevolent devas (deities) and evil asuras (demons) and now rule the universe. Truth re-emerges as Krishna (called "Hari" and "Vāsudeva" in the text) first makes peace with the demons, understands them and then creatively defeats them, bringing back hope, justice, freedom and happiness – a cyclic theme that appears in many legends.
The Bhagavata Purana is a central text in Vaishnavism, a Hindu tradition that reveres Vishnu. The text presents a form of religion (dharma) that competes with that of the Vedas, wherein bhakti ultimately leads to self-knowledge, salvation (moksha) and bliss. However the Bhagavata Purana asserts that the inner nature and outer form of Krishna is identical to the Vedas and that this is what rescues the world from the forces of evil. An oft-quoted verse (1.3.40) is used by some Krishna sects to assert that the text itself is Krishna in literary form.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.