Numbers With Srimad Bhagavatam

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Dear Varnadi Prabhu,

 

Please, accept my respectful obeisances.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada.

 

In the last year this topic came up and Ekanath prabhu wrote the followings

about Gangasahaya's counting:

 

> The Bhagavatam does not contain 18,000 verses, even if one counts all of

> its syllables and divides by 32. One 19th century Bhagavatam commentator,

> Ganga-sahaya, counted all the syllables in the Bhagavatam a couple of

> times. When he could not get 18,000 verses, he used a trick to come up to

> that figure by rather dubious means: he counted all "uvacas," like

> "brahmovaca", that precede some of the verses in the Bhagvatam, as full

> 32-syllable slokas! "brahmovaca" is of course no sloka, it is only four

> syllables, and in some older editions there are far fewer uvacas than in

> more recent editions. But even by adding the uvacas Ganga-sahaya could not

> obtain 18,000 verses. So he also added what is known as the

> "adhyayasamapti" passages. Like the uvacas, these are not really part of

> the text. They also differ from recension to recension, and they differ in

> syllable count from chapter to chapter. These are the statements found at

> the end of each chapter, "iti srimad-bhagavate mahapurane...." etc.

> Ganga-sahaya just picked an adhyayasamapti string that had the syllable

> count that he needed, multiplied by 335 (since there are 335 chapters in

> the Bhagavatam, and declared that he found 18,000 verses in the

> Bhagavatam!

 

 

Few months ago I wanted to clarify this issue and as a practice of reciting

sanskrit I also counted the slokas as well as the syllables in the whole

Bhagavatam.

 

The result was

 

14100 slokas (adding those extra ones which were mentioned in

some purports, eg. in the 4th and the 10th Cantos)

 

16202 anustup (max. 4-6 slokas may come up, I am just verifying the

calculation in some Cantos again for the second time)

 

 

Even if you count all the uvacas and the other extra lines and add it to the

16202 slokas it will not give the remaining 1800 slokas.

 

 

Also is there any quotation that this is the system (count the verses in

anustup meter) to see the length of a book?

 

 

Your servant, Sacisuta das

 

 

>

> > They have completed the exercise and discovered that there are only

> > 14094 verses in the BBT published version of Srimad Bhagavatam.

>

> Did you count the verses in anustup meter, as appears to be the proper way

> to count?

>

> This is from an old COM text, quoting the Tattva Sandarbha:

>

> "According to the Matsya, Visnu and Skanda Puranas and the Narada Pan-

> caratra, Srimad Bhagavatam should have 18,000 verses. No one has any

> disagreement over this point. Gangasahaya, the writer of Anvitartha

> Prakasa counted all the words of Srimad Bhagavatam including the uvaca and

> chapter endings, added them up and divided it by 32 to convert the whole

> Srimad Bhagavatam into Anustup verses. This is the standard way to count

> the number of verses. He did this thrice and his calculation was short by

> one and half verses."

>

> The loss of the 1 1/2 verses is due to different editions of the SB.