[Advaita-l] Books on Bhagawatam

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Tue, 29 May 2012, Sunil Bhattacharjya wrote:

> Dear friends,
>
> With all respects to the great Shridhara swami for the trouble he had 
> taken to write the commentary on the Bhagavatam but at the same time I 
> feel sad for Vedavyasa as it appears that he failed in his mission. 
> According to the Padma purana Vedavyasa wrote the Mahabharata for the 
> layman and woman and at the end of it he was sad as he found that the 
> Mahabharata did not become as easy as necessary  for the intended 
> readers to understand it fully.
>
> At that stage Narada advised him to write the Bhagavatam so that it 
> should be intelligible to all and he promptly  listened to Narada's 
> advice. It is pity that Sridhara swami found that more elucidation of 
> Bhagavatam is required.

Manana and chintana is always necessary no matter how easy the text and 
for that reasons commentaries exist.

As for the text itself, by and large the language of the puranas and 
itihasa is pretty simple for one who knows Sanskrit.  This genre avoids 
the rhetorical and stylistic gymnastics of e.g. the mahakavyas.  The 
Bhagavata is somewhat of an anomaly because it contains a few words not 
found anywhere else.  (Some historians suspect they are loan words from 
some Dravidian language.)  But even those are rare and any enterprising 
layman who wishes to try and has a dictionary and basic grasp of vyakarana 
should be able to follow 99% without any problems.  In fact when people 
ask me for advice about learning Sanskrit I advise them to try and 
translate from these works rather than say Kalidas.

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>