Jagat

It's funny how sometimes one makes a search for one thing and finds another... it's called serendipity, I believe, amazingly named after some dvipa (island), Srilanka, I think. A search for the Sarva-samvadini turned up an old thread on Gaudiya Repercussions where I was lambasted as follows: The personal attacks are meant to show that particularly Jagat, who swapped two sannyasa vows for a PhD, a non-devotee wife, and cannot even name his child after Krishna (even Ajamila managed that!), really is the last one to establish a new sampradaya, as he calls the foundational acharyas 'backwards.' It's not personal. I have known Jagat for 23 years, and apart from his intellectual arrogance, his ambitions to be a Jagad-guru and his diplomacy, he's a groovy guy. Hate the apostasy, not the apostate. It seems odd, after all this time and struggle, that I am still stuck in a time warp and have not really been able to move on from this spiritual zone of paralysis. As I wrot...

I spent all day at the university for the Sanskrit conference. Third annual. Sanjaya put me as the first speaker. तिक्तेन समारभ्यताम् ! In fact, I was very tired and my talk was not very well prepared. So I just talked off the cuff. Sanjay followed; he was well-prepared with a Power Point presentation about Bhishma's आश्रमधर्म . He is very eloquent and droll. Next speaker was Giribharatan, the Sanskrit Bharati missionary. Sanskrit Bharati has come out with a very nice book on scientific advances and found in the Sanskrit literature, which was the basis of his talk. Ajaya Rao, a young professor at the University of Toronto, spoke about making Sanskrit a living language. All of these speakers were followed by lively question periods and discussions, which was perhaps the best feature of this year's conference. Arvind Sharma said to me that it seems everyone is losing their inhibitions. An elderly engineering professor from India named Brij Kashyap read some Sanskrit poems he had ...

Kutichak Prabhu invited my wife and me to come to Ste-Agathe for a program with Bhaktivedanta Sadhu Maharaj. Kutichak kept repeating that Paramadvaiti Maharaj, Sadhu Maharaj's sannyasa guru, insisted that we meet. To tell you the truth, decent sadhu sanga is hard to come by in this part of the world, and I have long wanted to meet this Brajavasi of noble origins and get to know him better. There is an article about him on the old VNN site. (www.vnn.org/world/WD0304/WD10-7978.html) On arrival, I gave Maharaj my last copy of Madhurya Kadambini , which was left over after my course. I had never met Maharaj before, but after talking with him a little, I found out that he was never forced to give up his initiation in the Nityananda parivar. Radha Govinda Das Babaji was the first preacher of Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the Munger region, probably in the late 19th century. If I am not mistaken, this Baba is mentioned in Vrajake Bhakta by O.B.L. Kapoor, which will need to go back and check out...

A potentially useful article here from the Washington Post, On Faith . Various leaders from different religious groups, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, answer the following question: Can a Christian, Muslim or Jew embrace eastern spiritual practices -- yoga or Buddhist meditation, for example -- and remain true to the laws of the God of Abraham?

Oh mega ! Omega ! Oh Ma go ! Oh my! Mega was my ego. These days, I take the bus down Sauvé every day. Sauvé, how ironic in a synchronistic way-- What Frenchman was saved, from what and when? From death? From damnation? Now some latter next of kin has bequeathed his name... redeemed are those who walk this street! Today I walk; it’s sunny and spring, I feel brash; I bounce my mala before me like a proud panache-- my banner, my identity, my mark of salvation, my dance on this road of tenements housing Arab immigrants. Between two cages, work and home, the japa walk is sweet. Sauvé becomes Côte Vertu as it starts heading west; The names waken whimsy that appears like a guest-- Does scaling the hill of virtue lead to salvation, or does one climb that slippery slope after liberation? Am I headed in the right direction? Need I retreat? More ironies… just a hop across these cinder blocks lies another immigrant generation's white duplex. I often think of you, as I pass, you of the last Gre...

Risley's book on Bengali tribes and castes would have been required reading for anyone entering the British civil service, probably right to the end of the Raj. Unfortunately, the descriptions are sketchy and reflect strong biases of the missionaries and the civil servant sycophants. Here are a couple of quotes from that book, under the rubric "Boishtom." [This was a reading from the last section of my course.] Two endogamous classes are recognized--(1) Jati Baishnab, consisting of those whose conversion to Vaishnavism dates back beyond living memory, and (2) ordinary Baishnabs, called also Bhekdhari or "wearers of the garb", who are supposed to have adopted Vaishnavism at a recent date. The former are men of substance, who have conformed to ordinary Hinduism to such an extent that they are now Baishnabs in little more than name. In the matter of marriage they follow the usages of the Nabasakha; they burn their dead; mourn for thirty days; celebrate sraddh, an...

I have been a bit negligent in resuming the results of my teaching experience. I was rather hoping to start developing a text book that could be used in teaching such a course, using my interaction with the students as a source of inspiration. But I am a free molecule, being batted around in the atmosphere, and it seems that no one's will power is more at the mercy of events than mine. So Jiva Goswami and the Prema Vilasa bounced all these good intentions onto the back burner. A back burner that is so full of worthwhile endeavors that it seems the world will starve without them... At least Krishna on the altar will starve for lack of finished offerings. Today is the last course. My students will be taking a short vocabulary quiz. Then we will have to go over the post 16th century material in half the normal course time. Totally impossible. I will try to post the readings for the last three courses on line in a couple of days and add a few comments to illustrate the directions the d...

Here are a few more notes on Prema-vilāsa . I was hoping to finish reading the book, but there certainly is a lot to tell. As I keep saying, the book is more interesting than I was given reason to believe. In the last four chapters – more appendices to Caitanya-bhāgavata and Caitanya-caritāmṛta , both of which are mentioned by name. One of the main purposes seems to be to establish the Gaura-gaṇoddeśa-dīpikā identities, even though he does not mention this book by name. This seems to be one of the features of the Prema-vilāsa in general, as well as filling out some details about a lot of the individuals who played a role in Chaitanya lila, as already has been shown in the previous offerings on this blog. He often mentions the siddha name of a disciple, or the act of asking for or receiving the siddha name. I would say that this general mood is a confirmation of what I have written in my article about Khetari. Nityananda Das describes more than one Khetari festival. I jumped the...

Jesus said unto them, "Who do you say I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?"

I used those words in my previous post... "by curious coincidence." And as I rushed out of the office, I noticed on Deborah (professor of church history in Canada, with whom I share it)'s desk: There Are No Accidents , by Robert H. Hopcke. All about Jung's synchronicity theory. The theory is simple. Our lives are a story. "Coincidences" are meaningful connections that move the story along. Who knows what triggers will move us out of our sloth and lethargy? The wife burning a husband's clothes so he can look at an insect bite... the coded letter of a brother... the words of an old woman? It is not so much the event as the surge into consciousness that it produces. The same coincidence for a rushed and harried businessman passes by unnoticed. I pray for that trigger. Here I am, laughing, thinking maybe this is it, maybe this is the trigger. This collection of small, vairagya-related coincidences.

Those "suspicious chapters" are surprisingly full of new nectar. One reason may be that the last four chapters were not as frequently in circulation and the Bhakti-ratnākara , etc., became more popular. Whatever the reason, there is some historical information, some anecdotal nectar, which are completely new to me. I wish I had gone through it before. As I said already, I don't see why this work should be considered less authoritative than Bhakti-ratnākara , which was written a century later, when stories would have been even more embellished by time. Here is an example. There is a famous story in the BRK (5.1627-1670) about Vallabha coming to Vrindavan and criticising a verse in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu , namely the one that calls the desires for liberation and sense enjoyment "witches." Rupa defered to the senior acharya and agreed to excise the verse, or at least modify it. Jiva, who was newly arrived in Vraja, was irritated by Vallabha Bhatta’s criticis...