Philosophy decided two thousand years ago that God cannot have a body. Every body is material, limited, reducible. If you want God to be eternal and unlimited, he cannot be bodied. The Bhagavatam's answer to that is a baby stealing butter and peeing in the house of a cowherd woman.

Canto 2, Chapter 8 is the hinge on which the entire Purana turns. Pariksit has seven days left and has already received his practical instructions: fix the mind on Vishnu, chant the name of Narayana. Now he asks the large questions: creation, the gunas, karma, embodiment. These are the questions, Dr. Edwin Bryant (Advaita Das) argues, that the Bhagavatam spends its first nine cantos answering. The God you will meet crawling in the dust of Vrindavan, stealing butter and peeing in the houses of the gopis, is the same God of the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Nyaya and the Sankhya. But that claim requires nine books to establish before it can land.

Dr. Edwin Bryant is Professor of Hindu Religion and Philosophy at Rutgers University and translator of the 10th Canto for Penguin Classics. His forthcoming book, In Defense of a God with Form, traces the idea that a bodied God is a philosophical impossibility back to Plato and Aristotle, who were working from empiricism alone: every observed body is material, limited, and reducible. That premise was absorbed into Christianity and traveled to India with the missionaries. It is also, Bryant notes, why Hindus should stop calling their own tradition ”Hindu mythology,” since a myth by definition is something not factually true. The Bhagavatam, he argues, is the counter-instance the Greek premise had never encountered, the black swan that overturns the inference. Krishna's body is made of a completely different category of stuff. A form that can morph into every cowherd boy in Vrindavan is not a limitation.

The conversation closes on a personal note. Dr. Edwin Bryant spent forty years in academe, translated thousands of pages, taught the Krishna Leela in universities and yoga studios, and recently gave away his collection of seven thousand books. What he plans to read in retirement: the Bhagavatam, daily, from the beginning. He also recalls the moment he stopped being hesitant about teaching the strange stories to students and simply let them encounter the text. What he found was that the stories needed no editing. They have, as he puts it, their own Shakti.

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The Bhagavata Podcast is produced by the Gaudiya Studies Research Programme at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Each episode brings together scholar-practitioners, trained in both Indology and lived Vaishnava devotion, to read this text closely and seriously.