Typos in Śrīla Prabhupāda's books

Hare Kṛṣṇa Prabhus,

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda!

We have all heard the expression "Too many cooks spoil the broth". There was more than one editor who worked on Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is, Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and similar works with Devanagari, romanised Sanskrit, transliterations, translations, etc and I think it is safe to say that they have made mistakes, as we are all human. This is separate from any confusion caused by chronological differences.

At the risk of appearing impertinent, please may I quote from a previous blog of mine on editors' typos in Śrīla Prabhupāda's books:

"Oh My God Kṛṣṇa! The 5th Canto is a minefield of typos!

Personally I have no objection to the numerous typos in Śrīla Prabhupāda's books - and I am certainly not criticising Him. Not only do I not mind them, I value them - as they provide a valuable function! These typos serve to identify His Divine Grace's original books because they have since been removed from the edited, so-called 'corrected' and changed modern BBTi versions.

Besides, most of the typos are so glaringly obvious as mistakes that they generally don't cloud any meaning. Forr eximple, you moste probably hav no trouble undastanding wot this sentence meenz. Similarly with figures, when different numbers describe the same phenomena (such as 10,000 yojanas and 1,000,000 yojanas for the same distance) we can do the sums in our head and work out, with simple arithmetic, which one is correct.

Distances between planets in 5th Canto, Book Two, Chart Three differ not only from the texts - the texts differ from the purports. Even the heavenly bodies change names in some places!

It is no wonder Vedic Cosmology has devotees confused the world over. It definitely seems to have confused the editors, proof-readers and typsetters! I could not find a single Sanskrit reference to the distance between the Earth and the Sun anywhere in the texts (either in the Devanagari script, the Sanskrit, the transliterations, or nor the English translation of the Sanskrit). It appears in Chart Three as 100,000 yojanas; elsewhere in the purports as 93 million miles; yet not a single mention in the actual Sanskrit texts - at least not in the 5th canto which deals with our position in the material universe in detail. If it exists somewhere else in Sanskrit I would be very grateful if someone can show me where in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam it is (not in the English in the purports which is NASA's figure of 93 million miles).

I used the search tools built into Vedabase, Gitabase and Vanipedia, with the words 'Sun', 'Earth', 'distance', 'above' - even including the Boolean term AND between them to narrow down the results - and didn't find ANYTHING in the actual Sanskrit-to-English text. There are plenty of references everywhere else but they all use figures based on western astronomy, not Vedic. I guess this is why Śrīla Prabhupāda uses the 93,000,000 figure. As far as I could fathom the actual figure of 100,000 yojanas (or 800,000 miles) comes from the Viṣṇu Purana, not the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam.. but that still doesn't explain how 100,000 yojanas found its way into Chart Three mistakenly as double that figure.

So we have these unusual entries:

#SB 5.22.8, the is Moon listed as 100,000 yj above the Sun; whereas

#Chart Three it is drawn as 200,000 yj; and elsewhere

#SB 5.22.11, the bold Text says that the 28 Stars are 1,600,000 miles above the Moon; yet in the purport it reads "above the Sun";

#Not only that but the calculation for the distance of the 28 Stars above the Earth at 4 million miles only adds up using the distance of the Moon being 800,000 miles above the Sun instead of 1,600,000 suggesting again that the Text is correct and that Chart Three is wrong; and

#93,000,000 miles for Earth/Sun distance; oddly, always in miles, not yojanas - as used by NASA the mile is an imperial measurement, not Vedic). Nowhere in the body of the text EXCEPT THE PURPORTS is the height of the Sun above the Earth given;

#SB 5.24 chapter introduction states that below Rahu "by another 1,000,000 yojanas" whereas text 4 says 10,000 yj re: Siddhaloka etc.;

#Chapter 24 goes on to say that the seven Subterranean planets, each the same size as Earth, are 10,000 yj apart yet Chart Three shows them as not starting until 70,000 yj beneath the Earth which is about 1,000 diameter. How anyone can interpret subterranean as meaning 'inside hollow Earth' is obviously taking its meaning literally and disregarding the arithmetic. They can't all be the same size and yet fit inside it! Yes, 'subterranean' means 'below the earth's crust' as in underground - but certainly not 'below the Earth's plane! Perhaps an overzealous editor substituted or suggested the word not knowing the correct context.

These are just few typos that I found by double-checking a few chapters of just one book. My point is, the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam is wonderful, but regarding these minor discrepancies, anyone who takes EVERYTHING they read literally, especially the multitude of contradictions in the 5th Canto, is sure to be getting the wrong picture. Perhaps they spent a little too much time experimenting in Haight-Ashbury during the 60s? Maybe that explains how some people can accommodate both a Flat Earth and a Hollow Earth at the same time.

It's about this point that I remember something a little birdy told me that I'd forgotten (the 'something', not the person). She (who I won't name to respect her privacy) joined the movement as a teenager in the early 70s. I met her during 1988/89, soon after she'd come back to Australia to resume karmi life after a decade and a half in the movement, much of it overseas. Her former husband was responsible for outing one of the fallen ZAS "gurus".

Two things she said -

1/ whenever someone starts a spiel by saying "Prabhupada says.." ignore verbal quotes, ask to see it in writing, it could be made up (Iskcon was doing a lot then to cover up its tracks); and

2/ even in writing - the astronomy figures in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 5th Canto were fudged (by who?) on purpose (why?) - there can be a lot of confusion from conflicting passages.

Either way I never paid a great deal of attention to what the little birdy said and didn't understand the relevance as I was more interested in other things at the time.

Now.... whether or not any or all of that is true...

From what I have read, besides Giriraj who was very qualified and did most of the editing and proofing before anything was sent to the printers, others at various times may have 'helped' eg typed, copied manuscripts, doted the i's and crossed the t's etcetera to get the purports ready. We take it as a given that the Devanagari script, Sanskrit romanisation, word-for-word transliteration, and all the text translations were all done by highly qualified and experienced people. You will be hard-pressed to find any mistakes there. It is in the purports that we invariably find all the discrepancies, not just typographical errors, for in some places the information is partially scrambled or completely incorrect, rendering it confusing to the reader. This is where I suspect certain editors made human mistakes.

On the whole Śrīla Prabhupāda's "Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam" is a masterpiece. As I have said before, the typos that it does contain help identify it as the original because subsequent (edited and altered) editions don't contain many of them. Therefore they serve a valuable purpose rather than detract from the great body of work."

[end of quote]

No-one can deny that human error has crept into the editing of SP's books. The typos are proof of that.

Hare Kṛṣṇa
हरे कृष्ण