Sri Sathya Sai Speaks

This Bhagavatha is a dialogue between a person under the sentence of death and a great saint, who prepared him to meet it. We’re all under a sentence of death; our hearts, like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave. Some reach it late, some soon. We require the counsel of a great saint to prepare us, too, for meeting Death and witness the horizon beyond.

The Bhagavatha is a Ganga, emerging from the Lord and merging in Him after a long journey through geographic descriptions, historic annals, philosophic disquisitions, hagiological narratives, epistemological enquiries, and after fertilising the vast valleys of human minds with the pure pellucid waters of Krishna episodes.

Bhagavan has come again as Sathya Sai for the revival of dharma among men. One important aspect of that revival is the reestablishment of reverence for the ancient spiritual texts, like the Bible, the Koran, the Zend Avestha, the Tripitaka, the Vedas, and the Bhagavatha. Reverence can spring at the present time only when the inner meanings of the statements and stories are explained in clear, simple, charming style, by the very Person who inspired the original scripture.

Here, in this book, we have His version of that voluminous textbook of devotion (bhakthi) that Vyasa composed at the suggestion of the sage Narada, so that he could win peace and equanimity.

This is not just a book, dear reader. It is a balm, a key, a mantra - to soften, solve, and save, to loosen the bonds, to liberate from grief and pain, thirst, and tutelage.

Open it with humility, read it with diligence, revere it with devotion, observe its lessons with steadfastness, and reach the Goal that Vyasa reached and Narada attained, that Suka taught and Parikshith learned. What greater recompense can man hope for?

- N. Kasturi

Prasanthi Nilayam

Guru Pournami

18 July 1970