Jagat

A big question that is frequently asked of me is about where I get the authority to say things, i.e., about my sources of knowledge, or pramāṇa . This is what we call epistemology: How do we know what we know? Many devotees are appropriately very attached to the words of śāstra and their gurus. I have myself spent most of my life in a study of the Sanskrit and Bengali texts related to our school of thought out of a great respect for our acharyas, a respect that was instilled in me by Srila Prabhupada himself. As a result, I have long contemplated the value and meaning of these texts, along with my spiritual practices, and come to certain conclusions. In the article linked to above, I simply wrote that I had no pramāṇas for my spiritual path, but this of course is not entirely true. I still need to know that what "I know" is real knowledge. So I do have a position on pramāṇas , which is as follows: Pramāṇa is used in argumentation to verify one's position, to es...

I have received a few private remarks, including the complaint that I seem to be obsessed with sexuality. Do I have no other subject that interests me? Of course, there are plenty of things that interest me, but my principal subject is prema . And because of Rupa Goswami's emphasis on the madhura-rasa , I have expanded my areas of interest to include the sexual, the spiritual and Sahajiyaism, which I understand as the natural way to prema . One of the most often heard criticisms or comments is that I think that sex itself leads to prema . This is of course ridiculous. It is like saying that the reason kirtan is effective is only because of the music. If that were the case, every musician would be enlightened, which is certainly not the case. It is music when used in the service of the Holy Name, like clothes and decorations on the Deity, that it becomes spiritual. In the same way, in a mind that has been properly prepared, sahaja-sādhanā helps propel one into the realm of prem...

Probing the pramans with Prem Prayojan Prabhu, one of the brightest lights on the Gaudiya Vaishnava horizon.   A short time ago, I met Prema Prayojan Prabhuji in the MVT restaurant. We have met several times before, and he even honored me with an invitation to address his congregation at Ananda Dham in Vrindavan last year. The ostensible purpose for the meeting was to discuss certain aspects of shastra. Prema Prayojan has been following a train of thought about manjari-bhava and was asking some questions about the Mañjarī-svarūpa-nirūpaṇa of Kunja Bihari Dasji, which I translated way back in 1983 and copies of which are still floating about despite the fact that it has never been officially published. Prema Prayojan thinks that Kunja Bihari Dasji, probably based on Haridas Das's translation of the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu , promoted the widespread and (he believes) erroneous interpretation of bhāvollāsā rati as being equivalent to mañjarī-bhāva as well as an independent ...

Here is the formula for Sahaja Bhajan. upāsya-rūpaṁ yugalātmakaṁ vai upāsakatvaṁ yugala-svarūpe | upāsanā śrī-yugalābhidheyaṁ tathopadeṣṭṛ-yugalena prāptam || The worshipable object is the Divine Couple. The ideal worshiper of the Divine Couple is the sadhaka couple. The worship of the Divine Couple is based in the chanting of their Names. The Guru Tattva for this worship also takes the form of a Divine Couple. This formula condenses most of the points that are made on this blog. 1. The worshipable object is the Divine Couple, Radha and Krishna. Needless to say, this is repeated again and again here, most recently in the article Do Radha and Krishna really have nothing to do with human love? Radha and Krishna are the worshipable object of all the rasika sampradayas of Vrindavan, but little thought is given to the implications of the distinction that is made between the Dual form of God as represented by the Divine Couple and any other form of God in either ...