Study a Verse

• When the world is overburdened by unnecessary military arrangements and when various demoniac kings are the executive heads of state, this burden causes the appearance of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
• Human life is meant for attaining the highest perfection of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, but when people are godless and the presidents or kings are unnecessarily puffed up with military power, their business is to fight and increase the military strength of their different states.
• The real business of a chief executive is to see to the happiness of the mass of people by training them in Kṛṣṇa consciousness in different divisions of life.

Śrīla Prabhupāda's own sentences, chosen from the purport as its central points. Read the full purport on Vedabase to see them in place.

Each link is a verse the purport itself quotes, or a purport elsewhere that quotes this verse, shown with the purport's own words.

Terror → Wonder and relief. The threat of destruction yields to divine appearance.

Chapters 1–4 of Canto 10: Threat from Kaṁsa and Kṛṣṇa's birth. An editorial reading of the story's mood, not the text itself. See the emotional arc

Chapter 1: The Advent of Lord Kṛṣṇa: Introduction

From the chapter summary, the lines nearest this verse:

Once when the entire world was overburdened by the increasing military power of demons in the form of kings, mother earth assumed the shape of a cow and approached Lord Brahmā for relief. Sympathetic to mother earth’s lamentation, Brahmā, accompanied by Lord Śiva and other demigods, took the cow-shaped mother earth to the shore of the Milk Ocean, where he offered prayers to please Lord Viṣṇu, who lay there on an island in transcendental ecstasy.