Jagat

Advaita recently posted the following on his blog . Pāyūpasthayoś ca tatra sākṣād ayogyatvāt ,which says one cannot use the genitals and the anus in Krishna's service, out of context. tatra means 'here', 'in this context', the context being Hari-bhakti-vilāsa 11.627-9, describing several ways in which the active- and knowledge-senses engage directly in Krishna's service, like the head in bowing down, the nose in smelling offered incense and Tulasi, etc., sākṣād means ' directly'. Sanatan Goswami states in the quoted tika that in this context the anus and genitals can not be directly engaged. My friend Brajabhushan personally wrote me last August:  "Now, regarding your quote from HBV: my understanding is that the ṭīkā-kāra says that 'when describing sādhanā bhakti, various activities related to our senses were mentioned, but those related to anus and genitals were not included as they are not directly ( sākṣād ) suitable for the service....

Rishikesh is dressed up for Diwali. All the shops in the downtown area have brightly colored awnings and tables of goods spread out in front. Especially popular are firecrackers, which every other shop is selling. Puja paraphernalia, muri and pera, and of course sweets are piled on high like harbingers of the Anna-kuta festival, which follows on the next day. Some of the side streets are cordoned off to car traffic, though a few scooters and motorcycles are still aggressively honking their way through the crowds. The mood is festive and Indian Christmassy. Colored and twinkling light garlands are draped on many houses, very elaborately in some cases. Unexpectedly quiet, too, with the exception of firecrackers. I would barely have registered that it was Diwali if I hadn't had to go to Madhuban on Sunday. And it turns out I did not really have to. Rupa Goswami Das text messaged to say that the devotees would all be busy preparing Govardhan Puja so the class was cancelled. I did...

I am skipping around the RRSN typing out the commentaries to the most popular or famous verses. No real sequence. I am simultaneously listening to Gopi Gita lectures by Kirit Bhaiji, a young speaker from the Vallabhi sampradaya. He is pretty good--a professional Bhagavata speaker. What do some people hate professional Bhagavata speakers so much? I am feeling the rasa. Though at the beginning he sings songs to Ganesh, etc., as part of the introduction, on the whole he is pretty good, with lots of Vallabhi siddhanta. quoting also Sridhar Swami, Rupa Goswami, Madhusudan Saraswati, and using modern examples. Anyway, I have great admiration for these Bhagavata saptaha people. They have a pretty gruelling schedule--reciting the verses all morning along with various rituals, and then usually a four-hour or even longer discourse in the afternoon. I saw one such performance at the Vrindavan Ashram a few months ago. A few busloads of devotees had been bussed in from Madhya Pradesh somewhere ...

Yesterday, Swami Veda gave a rather animated lecture about atheism. He likes to tell the story of how he wrote a book called simply "God" which he proudly showed to his guru, Swami Rama. Swami Rama apparently countered a few months later with his own book, based on the Mandukya Upanishad, called "Enlightenment without God." In this lecture, though, Swami was talking about imbuing life with the sacred. How the lack of awareness of the sacred element in life makess it dry and empty. He used the words astika and nastika several times in order to make his point. Since I have been working on Bhagavat-sandarbha , following a discussion on several verses from the Bhagavatam where the words neti neti are discussed, I wanted to ask what the relation between negation and assertion of Divine Truth were, in his vision. Of course, I think I know what he will say--pretty much the same thing that Osho says--"Being empty [of illusion] is the same as being full [of the divin...

Let's look at it a bit differently. I was reading a book A Spiritual Approach to Male/Female Relations  recently in which the following sentence popped out at me: "...life can become more meaningful by recognizing that this very personal attraction comes from an impersonal energy in the universe, which we sometimes glibly term 'love'. Aligning ourselves with this love, with its impersonal and palpable reality, can be a first step towards improving all our human relations." This is an interesting statement that has a certain intuitive cogency. The word anaṅga , which is a name for Kamadeva, means "bodiless." In one sense, love is shapeless. When people say, "God is love," they can mean various things. One is "Love is God," in the sense that this amorphous, all-pervading, underlying substratum of love can be tapped into and experienced. There are various ways to experience the underlying unity of all existence--one is simply by bein...

This could be a huge topic, but I am not going to get into it in detail. This is a followup to yesterday's post, Harilal Vyasa, a few observations . HLV (Harilal Vyasa) quotes the following verse from VMA ( Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛtam ), and there are many similar verses. I will probably add to this post in the course of time, and anyone who has noticed verses of the same genre can add a comment pointing me in that direction. Anyway, the comment about Radha-vallabha and Sphuṭa-vāṇī made in the previous post shows that PS (Prabodhananda Saraswati)/HHV (Hita Harivamsa), i.e., the author of Rādhā-rasa-sudhā-nidhi (RRSN), makes a distinction between Radha worship and worship of Krishna, Radha's lover. This point is made in VM as follows: dhanyo loke mumukṣur hari-bhajana-paro dhanya-dhanyas tato’sau dhanyo yaḥ kṛṣṇa-pādāmbuja-rati-paramo rukmiṇīśa-priyo’taḥ | yāśodeya-priyo’taḥ subala-suhṛd ato gopa-kāntā-priyo’taḥ śrīmad-vṛndāvaneśvary-atirasa-vivaśā- rādhakaḥ sarva-mūr...

The Rasa-kulyā commentary on RRSN is pretty interesting, which will gradually come out. As you may already know, there are several points of connection between Gaudiyas and Radha-vallabhis, not the least of which is Prabodhananda Saraswati's role in developing the theology of the school--even if we don't accept that he is the author of RRSN. Of course, since Prabodhananda was an independent spirit and became more of a Radha-vallabhi than a Gaudiya, there is no point in trying to interpret RRSN as a text following pure Gaudiya siddhanta. (One of the arguments by today's defenders of Harivamsa's authorship are based on the premise that if Prabodhananda wrote RRSN, why does it not follow Gaudiya siddhanta?) Nevertheless, it is clear that Harilal Vyas had a very thorough knowledge of Gaudiya literature. The reason I am writing this now is because I came across a reference to the Gopa Kumar story from Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta (to verse 96). So far I have come across numerou...

Autumn moon. Beautiful sharada chandra ; it seems to fill the whole sky, deep amber color, a few wispy clouds, lighting up the mountains. There was no one at Rādhā-rasa-sudhā-nidhi class today, so since Harilal Vyasa concludes his tika to verse 2 with it, I just read a commentary on a Bhagavata verse from the Bhramara-gita, api ca kripana-pakshe uttama-shloka-shabdah . "No woman alive anywhere in the three worlds can resist your charms--even Lakshmi Devi herself worships the dust of your feet, so who are we [to hope for your mercy]? And yet, you are glorified as being merciful to the least of creatures, so live up to the meaning of your name." It is really has the same basic idea as another verse that I tried to quote the other day and could not remember. That night, when I opened Ananta Das's RRSN, it fell open on a page with that very verse on it. Actually I had posted it on my blog some time ago. na premā śravaṇādi-bhaktir api vā yogo’thavā vaiṣṇavo jnānaṁ vā ś...

The second verse of Rādhā-rasa-sudhā-nidhi , with the commentary of Harilal Vyasa. Intro: tadevaṁ sarvārādhyārādhanīyatoktavaty antar-durlabhatve  śaraṇāgatānām ādhunikānāṁ tat-pada-prāptau kim ālambanaṁ tatraiśvaryato'pi kṛpātirekeṇa mahimānaṁ namati-- After having thus established in the first verse that Radha is the supreme object of worship, as well as the extreme difficulty in attaining her, surrendered individuals today may wonder what is the means by which they can do so. In order to do so, the author bows down to her glories in which the power of mercy exceeds that of divine opulence--

There has been a lot of talk about symbolism of late. Seriously, though, despite the symbolism, which is important no doubt, the real rasa is where it always was—in the Transcendent Divine Couple. The symbolism points both ways: Life in this world is itself merely a symbol for the Divine Transcendent Truth. Whether the Goswamis and Prabodhananda Saraswati and the other rasika gurus of Vrindavan in the 16th century were aware of all the psychological subtleties that we are today is not a reasonable question to ask. I think that they were intuitively more aware than the moderns would give them credit for, but ultimately that does not really matter. My personal attitude is that I have faith in the way the Divine appeared to them. That is revelation, and revelation is a gift that keeps on giving. Its profundity is related to underlying eternal truths that by definition do not change. This is why we should be careful not to say that the Goswamis did not really understand what they were...