Iskcon always had a dark 'scam' side to it, but I'm surprised to see Satya Narayana as "dean" there.
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Anyway, I ran into an interesting book (D. Dennis Hudson,
The Body Of God, Oxford 2008, the entire book is also here:
www.scribd.com/doc/39118732/The-Body-of-God-an-Emperor-s-Palace-for-Krishna-in-Eighth-Ce ). It sheds a little light on the age of the
Bhagavata. Hudson is convinced that the panels and the religion of the
Bhagavatas of the Paramecchuravinnagaram Temple (now known as the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple) in Kanchipuram he researched are based on the
Bhagavata Purana,
Pancaratra and the poetry of the Alvars. The temple was built ca 770 A.D., so accepting some time for a text to become orthodox enough to be put into stone, the
Bhagavata has to be prior to 700 A.D. and have a South Indian origin.
The temple is built as a three-dimensional
mandala one enters and moves through.
In his own words:
Due to the groundbreaking scholarship of H. Daniel Smith, I have long
suspected that the liturgical basis for the worship of God as Krishna in
southern India is the
Pancharatra Agama, and that it underlies the poems of
the Alvars. The Emperor's Vishnu-house [Vaikuntha Perumal Temple] appeared to me to confirm this hypothesis.
...
The first sculpted figure met in the clockwise (
pradakshina) circumambulation
of the bottom sanctum, for example, is an enthroned Snake facing
north sitting casually in a state of mild inebriation. In the
Pancharatra system,
this Snake corresponds to the Plower (
samkarshana) formation (
vyuha), the
first of three God makes to transform himself into the universe and to act
within it. This single yet highly significant correlation of theology and sculpted
program at the sacred center of the
mandala confirmed other evidence I observed.
I therefore looked to the
Pancharatra Agama to find the liturgical basis
for the temple's design.
...
The panels that I did recognize, however, gave me a place to begin,
and so I turned to their narratives as found in the
Mahabharata and the
Ramayana,and in the collections of ‘‘ancient lore’’ (
purana) common to devotees
of Krishna.
Among the latter, I gave special attention to the
Shrimad Bhagavata Purana.
It is the most influential of these
puranas; and at the time most scholars
agreed that it appeared in southern India sometime between the eighth and
tenth centuries and is in some way connected to the poems of the Alvars. I also
studied the Alvar poems with the temple in mind, returning again with special
attention to those poems associated with Kanchipuram.
...
Sculpted texts and written texts were interpreting one another. At times the detailed correspondence
between
Bhagavata Purana narratives and prayers and their sculpted depictions
astonished me.
I began to see that the designers of the
vimana [the square central part of the temple] had used a specific episode
to encode an interpretation of the entire story, and that a story often begins and
ends in places I had never noted. Some of the stories refer to other stories, and
as I read those stories in the
Bhagavata Purana, some of them explained panels
on the
vimana I had previously found opaque. In some cases, the newly decoded
panels were nearby on the same wall, or were in a corresponding place
on an opposite wall. Their locations were pointing me toward a systematic
program of sculptures expressing the meanings of the
vimana’s four sides, and
a pattern of thought was beginning to emerge. I did not yet fully understand
this pattern, but the sculptural program obviously corresponded to the
Pancharatratheology of God’s four
vyuha formations.
This evidence finally persuaded me to formulate a working hypothesis: the
sculpted program of the
vimana and porch document a single yet complex
religious vision consistent with the
Bhagavad-gita, the
Bhagavata Purana, the
Pancharatra Agama, and the poems of the Alvars.
It became apparent to me that this west-facing three-story palace sponsored
by Nandivarman Pallavamalla about 770 was intended as an architectural
‘‘summa’’ of
Bhagavata Dharma developed by that time.