Jagat

I am pleased to say that on Guru Purnima, I finally completed the Yoga Tarangini project and handed camera ready copy to Swami Veda Bharati to be sent for publication. Jai Guru. I have been told that the book will be printed as a combined AHYMSIN and Motilal Banarsidass production. All this commuting back and forth from Vrindavan to RIshikesh has been very revealing. And I can tell you, of the two I am definitely a Vrindavan person. There is just a little bit of yogi lurking in there that still cries out for attention, but my impression is that the clock is running out on that. What is yoga has pretty much been assimilated and we move on in the direction of primarily bhakti, as always. On returning to Vrindavan, I have been rushing around trying to get the Vrindavan Today project working again, and I have been singing , a lot. kathā gānaṁ nṛtyaṁ gamanam api . Yoga Tarangini was a great project. Swami Veda asked me to do it, he hired me. I took it seriously and tried hard to do a ...

I was recently added to a group on Facebook called Devotional Poetry , where a few devotees have been sharing their compositions and their love of language (English only, of course). I am not a compulsive poet, nor a regular practitioner of the craft. If I am a poet at all, it is more of an impulsive one, who occasionally is driven by some inspiration or emotional turbulence to express myself. So I haven't written a great deal, and when I do, it admittedly tends to the maudlin because of the excessive charge of immediate, unprocessed feelings. But without the charge of personal feeling, if a poem is only repetition of another's thoughts, or didactic/intellectual alone, then it loses its edge or capacity to produce rasa . In these cases, what we get is bhāva , not rasa . The thing about writing, poetry or any kind of literature or artistic production, according to rasa theory, is that it takes emotions ( bhāva ) out of the realm of the purely personal. Personal experie...

I am racing along trying to do a quick first edit of the translation and commentary to Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha . My thought for the day: I would say that by any objective measure, the six Sandarbhas are a chef d'oeuvre. It is said dhanaṁjaye hāṭaka-samparīkṣā mahāraṇe śastrabhṛtāṁ parīkṣā| vipatti-kāle gṛhiṇī-parīkṣā vidyāvatāṁ bhāgavate parīkṣā|| One tests gold in the fire, the wielder of weapons in battle, the wife in times of difficulty, but the test of the learned is in their mastery of the Bhagavatam. What a book the Bhāgavatam is, and what mastery to make sense of it all! First he argues, boldly, that this is the ultimate authority. Then he says, Now this is what the Bhagavatam says. There are many, many things in the Bhagavatam, but what is the consistent and fundamental teaching, and how do we deal with apparent contradictions? And how can you defend your position? When you chop up the Bhāgavatam in this way, distilling the important elements, rejecting those port...