WELCOME  Lord Krishna’s display of His universal form is for many people the most striking and memorable part of the Bhagavad-gita. Beholding that form, the awed and frightened Arjuna asks Him who He is. Robert Oppenheimer, on seeing the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, famously quoted Krishna’s reply: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” (Gita 11.32)

Krishna was proving that He is God, a truth that Arjuna already knew and had acknowledged in the previous chapter. He asked Krishna to show His universal form to convince others of His divinity. In this issue, Chaitanya Charana Dasa discusses how the Gita’s description of Krishna’s revelation helps us somewhat comprehend the incomprehensible.

Our book excerpt in this issue presents a subsequent chapter of the Gita – Chapter 15 – in poetic form by Kalakantha Dasa and Swarupa Krishna Dasa. It is based on Srila Prabhupada’s Gitar-gan, a Bengali versification of the Gita written in 1962.

As Srila Prabhupada and his spiritual predecessors have shown, every chapter of the Gita is meant to bring us to the conclusion that taking shelter of Lord Krishna is the only solution to all our problems. Vraja Vihari Dasa’s “Freedom from the Crocodile’s Jaws” presents a graphic example of that essential truth.

Hare Krishna. – Nagaraja Dasa, Editor

Departments

From the Editor

Q&A

Srila Prabhupada Speaks Out

Bhakti Wisdom