Text 6]
The Process of Creation
179
īśvaraḥ paramaḥ kṛṣṇaḥ sac-cid-ānanda-vigrahaḥ anādir ādir govindaḥ sarva-kāraṇa-kāraṇam  (Bs. 5.1)
Brahmājī admits Lord Kṛṣṇa to be the supreme cause of all causes. But persons with tiny brains within this petty planet earth think of the Lord as one of them. Thus when the Lord says in the  Bhagavad-gītā  that He (Lord Kṛṣṇa) is all in all, the speculative philosophers and the mundane wranglers deride Him, and the Lord regretfully says:
avajānanti māṁ mūḍhā mānuṣīṁ tanum āśritam paraṁ bhāvam ajānanto mama bhūta-maheśvaram.  (Bg. 9.11)
Brahmā and Śiva (and what to speak of other demigods) are  bhūtas  or created powerful demigods that manage universal affairs, much like ministers who are appointed by the king. The ministers may be  īśvaras  or controllers, but the Supreme Lord is  maheśvara  or the creator of the controllers. Persons with a poor fund of knowledge do not know this, and therefore they have the audacity to deride Him because He comes before us by His causeless mercy occasionally as a human being. The Lord is not like the human being. He is  sac-cid-ānanda-vigraha , or the Absolute Personality of Godhead, and there is no difference between His body and His soul. He is both the power and the powerful.
Mahārāja Parīkṣit did not ask his spiritual master, Śukadeva Gosvāmī, to narrate Lord Kṛṣṇa's pastimes in Vṛndāvana, but he wanted to hear first about the creation of the Lord. Śukadeva Gosvāmī did not say that the King should hear about the direct transcendental pastimes of the Lord. The time was very short, and naturally Śukadeva Gosvāmī could have gone directly to the Tenth Canto to make a shortcut of the whole thing, as it is generally done by the professional reciters. But neither the King nor the great speaker of  Śrīmad-Bhagavatam  jumped up like the organizers of  Bhagavatam , but both of them proceeded systematically, so that both future readers and hearers may take lessons from the example of the procedure of reciting  Śrīmad-Bhagavatam . Those who are in control of the external energy of the Lord, or in other words those who are in the material