The Bhagavata is the most consequential Purana and the most carefully written — Sanskritists note that its language deliberately archaises toward Vedic style, staking a claim to authority. Its tenth book supplied north Indian devotion with its central material: the infant who eats dirt, the child who steals butter and is tied to a mortar, the youth whose flute empties the village of women at night. Vaishnava theology reads the gopis' abandonment of husbands and households as the model of devotion precisely because it is scandalous, and the tradition has had to defend the reading against outsiders and insiders continuously. The saptaha, a seven-day recitation of the whole text, is a standard rite performed for the benefit of the dead or to mark a vow, and professional expounders draw crowds in the tens of thousands. Vallabha's pushtimarga, the Gaudiya tradition and the Braj pilgrimage circuit all descend from it, and so, through Bhaktivedanta Swami, does ISKCON.