Introductions to the sacred texts behind the eight buttons on the Love of God homepage. Each has its own full-length page with a link at the end to read the source text.
The Song of the Lord
The Bhagavad Gita is a 700-verse dialogue embedded within the sixth book of the Mahabharata, one of the two great epics of ancient India. It unfolds at a single, frozen moment: the two armies of the Pandavas and the Kauravas are arrayed…
Read full introduction →The Ripened Fruit of Vedic Wisdom
If the Bhagavad Gita is Krishna's spoken teaching, the Srimad Bhagavatam (also called the Bhagavata Purana) is the sprawling scripture that tells the story of Krishna himself, along with the stories of countless other incarnations, sages and kings, woven into a single…
Read full introduction →The Nectar of Chaitanya's Life
The Chaitanya Charitamrita is the definitive biography and theological summation of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the sixteenth-century saint of Bengal regarded by his followers as Krishna himself appearing in the mood of his own greatest devotee. Composed in Bengali, richly interwoven with Sanskrit…
Read full introduction →The Later Song
The Uttara Gita, whose name simply means "the later" or "subsequent" song, belongs to a small cluster of shorter Sanskrit texts that present themselves as further teaching from Krishna to Arjuna, given after the main events of the Mahabharata war have concluded.…
Read full introduction →The Subsequent Song of the Mahabharata
The Anu Gita — its name means, quite literally, "the Gita that comes after" — is a substantial teaching of some thirty-six chapters embedded within the Ashvamedhika Parva, the fourteenth of the eighteen books of the Mahabharata, the same epic that contains…
Read full introduction →Krishna's Farewell Teaching
The Uddhava Gita, sometimes also called the Hamsa Gita, is Krishna's final extended discourse before his departure from the world, delivered not to Arjuna on a battlefield but to his cousin, disciple and closest personal friend, Uddhava, in the quiet, sorrowful days…
Read full introduction →Eight Verses, One Complete Teaching
Of everything Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is remembered for teaching, only eight verses survive in his own hand. These eight Sanskrit stanzas, known as the Siksha-Ashtakam — from shiksha, "instruction," and ashtaka, "a set of eight" — are preserved not as an independent…
Read full introduction →The Land Behind the Scriptures
Vrindavan is not a book but a place — and yet, within the devotional world this site maps out, it functions almost as a ninth scripture: a living text that can be walked through, circumambulated, sung about and, for those who cannot…
Read full introduction →