The Heart of the Uddhava Gita

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The Heart of the Uddhava Gita is a concise abridgement of the final teachings which the noble avatar-king Sri Krishna shared with His dear friend Uddhava before departing from this Earth, and countless spiritual students down through the ages have found His communication of timeless universal wisdom capable of evoking profound awakenings in consciousness and transformations of perception which continued to evolve on an ongoing basis. This edition contains word-for-word transliteration, English translation, and notes on the Uddhava Gita, and presents the same in regard to other inspirational selections from the Srimad Bhagavata Purana as well as from the Gopala-tapani Upanishad..

Sajohn Daverly has been a student of the Eastern wisdom teachings for 45 years, assisting in the writing, editing, and proofreading of books and magazines presenting Eastern philosophy and culture since 1979. Previously ordained into one of the traditional branches of the Swami order during his three years living in India, he has been sharing his spiritual insights with groups and offering individual consultations since 1996. His translation with commentary on ancient India's well-known spiritual classic, the Bhagavad-Gita, was published by Zen Publications in 2012.

Just as the Bhagavad-Gita, the spiritual classic of ancient India, comprises one portion of the epic Mahabharata, so also does its more extensively nuanced sequel the Uddhava Gita constitute one section of the epic Srimad Bhagavata Purana ('glorious ancient stories in relation to the divine Lord') which is also known simply as the Bhagavatam. The Purana's authorship is attributed to the great sage Vyasa, and most of it is presented in the form of a discourse given by Vyasa's son Shukadeva, a young Self-realised renunciate, to a large assembly of sages headed by King Pariksit, the grandson of Arjuna. The satsang, a gathering of those who value the embodying of truth, continued for seven days at a place called Shukratal near the Ganges River about halfway between Haridwar and Delhi, and concluded with the king's becoming completely settled in meditation on his true identity as Brahman, pure Spirit, after which he was liberated from his mortal body.

The central character of the Bhagavatam is Sri Krishna, the celebrated 'attractively dark' avatar said to be Lord Vishnu ('the all-pervasive one') Himself descended from an infinitely higher dimension of Consciousness to fulfil the role of a most exemplary king and spiritual teacher upon the Earth. In Chapter Six of the Bhagavatam's eleventh book, we find the Creator Lord Brahma and other celestials visiting Krishna in His palace, lavishly extolling His glories, and requesting Him to return to His divine abode of Vaikuntha since His work upon the Earth had been completed, and Krishna responds to them saying that He will do so after the threat posed by His royal family has been ended. He explains that the Yadavas had become proud, arrogant, and excessive due to their physical strength, military prowess, and wealth. They had intentions of conquering and dominating other kingdoms, and so there was actually a risk of the whole world being destroyed by their aggressive advances. Thus the Yadava clan was cursed by the brahmin community to meet with destruction themselves before they could destroy the planet, and Krishna displayed the full measure of dharma-based impartiality by not mystically repelling that curse which was placed upon His own family members.

Upon Krishna's observing ominous portents of intense calamities collectively occurring in His kingdom of Dvaraka ('many-gated'), He convened a meeting of the Yadava dynasty's elders and urged them to leave that city at once and go to the holy pilgrimage place of Prabhasa without delay. After all others had departed from the palace meeting hall, Uddhava approached Krishna in His private quarters to speak with Him. Uddhava, 'one who is like a joyous festival personified', was not only a very dear friend and cousin to Krishna as was Arjuna, but he also served as one of Krishna's most valued counselors during the period when Krishna ruled as the king of Dvaraka in the state of Gujarat on the west coast of India. Such were the events leading up to the recitation of Krishna's second gita, His 'song to Uddhava.

Although while on Earth Krishna exhibited all of the loftiest and most endearing human qualities, readers of the Uddhava Gita will find that throughout most of the text He does not speak from the standpoint of being a temporarily manifest human expression of the Absolute, but rather from the depth of His timeless, unborn, neither-coming-nor-going nature as the Absolute Reality itself. He speaks not only from within the relative historical context of being Uddhava's dearest friend and spiritual teacher, but also from His fully embodied perception of being the same one animating Presence within all living beings, and in so many ways again and again He exhorts Uddhava and all of us to similarly see beyond our own time-framed human persona. Providing us with an abundance of resources for discovering our innermost being to be qualitatively of the same nature as His, Krishna further encourages us to utilise all available means in our Self-investigation so that we may come to clearly perceive, in the words of the insightful medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, that The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, ore seeing, one knowing, one love."

Book's Contents and Sample Pages