Swami Veda's antyeṣṭi and other Rishikesh memories
Many people will be posting photos and videos, so I decided just to take pictures of some of the people who came. Not everybody, just the ones I recognized. Here is my album from that day in 2015.
There are other Rishikesh-related memories. FB memories July 17.
One of my favorite songs. I heard this in the film Nīlācale Mahāprabhu, but the link has been lost. I did not post a translation the first time, so here it is.
ki rūpa herinu madhura mūrati pirīti rasera sāra|
hena laẏa mane e tina bhūbane tulanā nāhi go tāra||
2015
2013
As happens regularly on FB, I got added to a group, which is about removing Puranjan, Tim Lee, from Facebook, because of his great offenses. I went and looked and saw that the site is just a mirror image of good old offensive Puranjan. And there are conspiracy theorists and all manner of strange creatures purveying their wares. And so I extricated myself with a "God help us all!"
This is the level of discourse that such a large percentage of Hare Krishnas are mired in, it is really disheartening. As we say, a pox on all your houses.
2013 Rishikesh
I am slowly coming out of silence. I don't really know if I still am or not. The actual vrata was to stay in silence until I finished a particular project, which is still not finished. So it feels a bit like an incomplete vrata and I will probably have to plunge again. It has been and is being a very interesting experience overall.
I tried so many times to do a perfect vrata in my life, especially when I was younger. In ISKCON and as a babaji I started to do very strict Chaturmasyas on at least three occasions. Even eating plain kitcherie for weeks in yoga mudra and so on. But it never lasted to the fullest extent.
Once, when I was a babaji in Nabadwip, I did a vrata in Agrahayan, the Katyayani vrata. This was in around 1984. I tried to keep it simple. I went at 2 a.m. every night to Porama Tala (Paurnamasi Tala) and meditated for two hours, chanting japa. It was only to be for a month.
It was a very interesting experience, because Pora Ma is a very powerful Shakta and Tantric center. People forget that Nabadwip is also an important Shakti peeth, with Krishnananda Vagisha, one of the major Bengali tantrics of the 15th century, a contemporary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, living there. Going there in the middle of the night with no one at all around (though sometimes a Tantric would show up and do some midnight puja) was a new kind of experience for me.
But it was still not perfect. At the end, on Purnima, I went and begged in the market until my bag was full, and I went to see Jiva Goswami Prabhupada at Shrivas Angan and I gave him all that I had collected as guru dakshina, he being a respected member of the Nityananda vamsha.
I told him what I had done and asked for his blessing. He said, "Did you do it perfectly?" I had to admit that I hadn't. Then he said, "You won't get the results right away."
It is not that no results come. There is no loss or diminution. But we don't always get what we want, and we rarely get it directly. The most important thing that happens during a vrata is that your own desires are revealed to you. You begin with a purpose, a desire, and in your interiority, you focus on that desire in relation to your True Being. The result of the vrata is the interaction of those two things. The extent of the benefit is the result of the intensity of that interaction.
But it rarely takes an external form, though it can. Indeed, if it only takes an external form, it really shows that you did not get the mercy you were truly seeking. The gods see many levels deeper than you can even imagine. They know what you really want. Your vrata pushes your human adventure into unforeseen directions. Which is really what makes life interesting. And what makes the vrata worthwhile.
We have desires. As long as we do, we are captured in the drama of life. It can be fun, but it is totally unpredictable.
I have to finish this translation. I had a little partial sense of accomplishment by completing the Sanskrit critical text (i.e., where the different manuscripts are compared and the best reading for the text is established and the variant readings are catalogued). So I suppose that this milestone led to a softening of my resolve. But I still have to translate quite a bit.
The text is not all that difficult, but I always make things more difficult for myself. The Gorakṣa-śataka is a difficult text to pin down. But let us say that it is the "original" Hatha Yoga. Quite different from what we know as hatha yoga today. So you could say that the practices are the basic practices that led to the expansion of hatha yoga into the forms that we see today, but which have practically been pushed aside entirely for the sake of physical culture.
Goraksha precedes even the Haṭha-yoga-pradīpikā, which like many of the later Hatha Yoga texts tries to harmonize with Patanjali and Advaita-vāda. Nevertheless, the value of these practices has been more or less accepted on one level or another in the pan-Indian kaleidoscope of spirituality.
So my slow style of translating is based on realization. I cannot translate about Maha Mudra or Nadi Shodhana or any of these other practices without at least a fairly good idea of what they entail.
To some extent, because I have now been involved with this Himalayan Tradition through Swami Veda Bharati for nearly six years, staying altogether about four of them here in Rishikesh, I have gotten a little bit of an idea. It has taken a while, but I have assimilated most of the practices in Gorakṣa-śataka already... some even from before coming here. This ashram has given me the opportunity to be silent and to go deeply into meditational states.
Currently Swami Veda, who is now 80, is in complete silence. He has told me several times that he never wants to speak again. He carries a tablet with him and interacts through writing when it is necessary. So evening meditations at 5.45 are pretty intense. More so than they ever were before in all the previous years. Swamiji has stopped traveling, which also means that his intensity is accumulating in that way also.
So there has been great value in this experience, and it is still not finished. Just thought I would let my friends know.
Probably the hardest sacrifice was not writing my own ideas. But that has likely been the most deliberate and important part of this vrata. To take myself out of the "wisdom game" for a minute and reboot the computer a little, allow new, fresh ideas to enter and percolate in solitude... not perfect solitude, not perfect silence, but pretty intense overall.
We all have to do what we have to do. Everyone is on the path, whatever they do. I have given up thinking that I can be like anyone else nor that I can make anyone be like me. It is hard to be a "preacher" in those circumstances. The best we can do is share, in humility and honesty, our spiritual aspirations, the paths we have chosen, our successes and failures, our epiphanies as well as the dark nights of our souls, and find community with others through empathy and freedom from judgment.
2013 Rishikesh
Yoga and meditation are also positive and essential for the culture of a spiritually potent bhakti, which is what Sahajiyaism is all about. It is about para bhakti, the bhakti that comes after you are Brahman realized. The dual is only perfected in oneness. If you don't know what oneness is, then how can you experience twoness? Or twoness in oneness? Or oneness in twoness? And so on?
Srila Puri Maharaja said, "There is a wave of sahajiyaism coming to the Western world and you must preach against this misconception." What did he mean, "a wave of sahajiyaism is coming to the Western world?"
Because he was a Gaudiya Math acharya and GM acharyas are against Sahajiyaism. He was talking about Srila Narayan Maharaj principally because he felt, like many others in the GM, that BVN had crossed outside the normal permitted GM discourse by emphasizing madhura-rasa.
Since the GM dogma is that any such discussion when held in a public arena with unqualified persons (according to the GM standard of what constitutes qualification) that it would lead to Sahajiyaism, according to the rather broad strokes with which they paint it. All the way from people crying in kirtan and "gopi bhava clubs" to massive orgies of men and women dressed as Radha and Krishna (until they undress of course) boinking in harmony to some erotic Jayadeva song.
There are other people who misunderstand what I mean when I talk about Sahajiyaism. So maybe five people will read what I say if I say something to another person, even if that person is being deliberately difficult or offensive.
This is why I tolerated Kshamabuddhi and Mayesa for such a long time. But eventually they were harassing me so much I was obliged to block them. But so far, I haven't got that vibe from Sivananda.
My blog is there to help explain it. And of course it is connected to yoga. And to bhakti. If you want to call people names, I don't consider Sahajiya to be a bad name. Mahaprabhu called Ramananda Raya a "sahaja Vaishnava." Even Bhaktivinoda like that term. "A natural Vaishnava." Now isn't that what we would all like to be? Now what does it mean? Let us explore.
2011
ratna-cchāyā-cchurita-jaladhau mandire dvārakāyā
rukmiṇyāpi prabala-pulakodbhedam āliṅgitasya |
viśvaṁ pāyān masṛṇa-yamunā-tīra-vānīra-kuñje
rādhā-kelī-parimala-bhara-dhyāna-mūrcchā murāreḥ ||
In the Dvaraka palace standing
on the shores of the ocean, sprinkled with sparkling gems,
Krishna's body hairs stood on end
in Queen Rukmini's ecstatic embrace.
But suddenly recalling the fragrance
of dalliances joyfully exchanged with Radha
in the reeds by the banks of the black Yamuna waters,
he fainted. May that faint protect you always.
(SKM 1.61.1; UN 14.184; JIva and Vishwanath to BRS 2.4.178)
One of the great verses of Umapati Dhar, a contemporary of Jayadeva and one of Lakshman Sen's "Five Jewels". I wish we had more of his writings, as I think in many ways he was more insightful than even Jayadeva, and there are vestiges of his influence even from the few verses of his that we do have.
rādhā kāñcana-vallī
phullā kṛṣṇaḥ phulla-tāpiñchaḥ |
anayor saṅgama-lakṣmī
na sukhayati kaṁ sacetanaṁ lokam ||
Radha is a blossoming golden creeper, Krishna a blossoming tamal tree. What conscious being anywhere [in the universe] would not be pleased by seeing their glorious union? (GLA 11.18)
2017
One of my favorite songs. I heard this in the film Nīlācale Mahāprabhu, but the link has been lost. I did not post a translation the first time, so here it is.
ki rūpa herinu madhura mūrati pirīti rasera sāra|
hena laẏa mane e tina bhūbane tulanā nāhi go tāra||
What beauty have I beheld, a form of sweetness, the essence of the taste of love
It seems to me that this form has no equal anywhere in the three worlds.
baḏa binodiẏā cūḏāra ṭālani kapāle candana cāɱda|
jini bidhubara badana sundara bhubana mohana phāɱda||
So charming the crown perched on his head, the sandal moon on his forehead,
It seems to me that this form has no equal anywhere in the three worlds.
baḏa binodiẏā cūḏāra ṭālani kapāle candana cāɱda|
jini bidhubara badana sundara bhubana mohana phāɱda||
So charming the crown perched on his head, the sandal moon on his forehead,
His face is also a beautiful moon, a trap to enchant all the worlds.
naba jaladhara rase ḍhara ḍhara baraṇa cikana kālā|
aṅgera bhūṣaṇa rajata kāñcana mani muktāra mālā paridhāna||
His bodily hue is lustrous, a full new cloud ready to let loose a shower rasa;
naba jaladhara rase ḍhara ḍhara baraṇa cikana kālā|
aṅgera bhūṣaṇa rajata kāñcana mani muktāra mālā paridhāna||
His bodily hue is lustrous, a full new cloud ready to let loose a shower rasa;
Wearing a garland of pearls and precious stones, gold and silver ornaments.
joḏā bhūru yena kāmera kāmāna ke bā karila niramāna|
sarala naẏane terachā cāhani biṣama kusuma bāṇa||
His two eyebrows are like Cupid’s cannon, who could have created it?
And his clear eyes give a crooked glance, firing off dangerous flower arrows.
sundara adhare madhura muralī hāsiẏā kathāṭi kaẏa|
dbija bhīme kahe o rūpa nāgara dekhite parāṇa raẏa||
His beautiful lips hold the sweet flute, and laughing he speaks;
Dvija Bhima says, “Seeing the form of the beloved I remain alive.”
2016
Non stop rain for almost 24 hours, sometimes torrential, sometimes drizzle, mostly just a steady rainfall. I don't think I have ever seen it rain like this in Vrindavan. I am afraid to see what the situation is out in the streets, but I will bet there are plenty of neighborhoods where there is flooding. Along with that there has been no electricity for most of that time. My computer also was temperamental yesterday, I am rather surprised to find it working this morning. All in all, strange days here just before Guru Purnima. I have never seen Vrindavan looking so lush. They say global warming will bring extreme weather. After the hot season, which is pretty extreme here, it is rather nice to have a lot of rain. The greenery is so happy. I know from living in Bengal that three-four months of this can get pretty tedious, but so far so good.
joḏā bhūru yena kāmera kāmāna ke bā karila niramāna|
sarala naẏane terachā cāhani biṣama kusuma bāṇa||
His two eyebrows are like Cupid’s cannon, who could have created it?
And his clear eyes give a crooked glance, firing off dangerous flower arrows.
sundara adhare madhura muralī hāsiẏā kathāṭi kaẏa|
dbija bhīme kahe o rūpa nāgara dekhite parāṇa raẏa||
His beautiful lips hold the sweet flute, and laughing he speaks;
Dvija Bhima says, “Seeing the form of the beloved I remain alive.”
2016
Non stop rain for almost 24 hours, sometimes torrential, sometimes drizzle, mostly just a steady rainfall. I don't think I have ever seen it rain like this in Vrindavan. I am afraid to see what the situation is out in the streets, but I will bet there are plenty of neighborhoods where there is flooding. Along with that there has been no electricity for most of that time. My computer also was temperamental yesterday, I am rather surprised to find it working this morning. All in all, strange days here just before Guru Purnima. I have never seen Vrindavan looking so lush. They say global warming will bring extreme weather. After the hot season, which is pretty extreme here, it is rather nice to have a lot of rain. The greenery is so happy. I know from living in Bengal that three-four months of this can get pretty tedious, but so far so good.
2015
 |
| Another scene from SVB's antyeṣṭi. On the right is his son, Angiras Arya, who teaches at Princeton. |
2013
As happens regularly on FB, I got added to a group, which is about removing Puranjan, Tim Lee, from Facebook, because of his great offenses. I went and looked and saw that the site is just a mirror image of good old offensive Puranjan. And there are conspiracy theorists and all manner of strange creatures purveying their wares. And so I extricated myself with a "God help us all!"
This is the level of discourse that such a large percentage of Hare Krishnas are mired in, it is really disheartening. As we say, a pox on all your houses.
Today I got a letter from Tamohara Dasa, who is a moderator (I think) of the site (there are many Tamoharas, I don't know which one this is) who wrote, "You are an offensive bewildered fool."
Sigh.
[In some ways I find Puranjan Das an interesting figure. He has made it his life's duty to tar everyone in ISKCON with all the worst sins ever committed in that organization. He is a convinced Ritvik and has his own program in the San Francisco area. I think he has been rather successful in undermining all ISKCON's efforts in North America at least. His mantras are familiar ("pedophile, homosexual, etc."). The damage that these issues have had on ISKCON are incalculable.
On the whole, though, it is not an attractive mission: it seems to miss the real point of bhakti, the focus on which is Caitanya and Radha Krishna. It is hard for me to think that this is what Prabhupada would have wanted. Nevertheless I still occasionally visit his website.
Bhakti Vikasa Maharaj said recently that he saw no alternative to ISKCON for the fulfillment of Mahaprabhu's prediction of "every town and village" but in some places in the world like North America and Europe it seems to me that the field is open for anyone who can find a way. Is an "institution" the only way? Look at the spread of yoga, through a thousand different channels.]
2013 Rishikesh
I am slowly coming out of silence. I don't really know if I still am or not. The actual vrata was to stay in silence until I finished a particular project, which is still not finished. So it feels a bit like an incomplete vrata and I will probably have to plunge again. It has been and is being a very interesting experience overall.
I tried so many times to do a perfect vrata in my life, especially when I was younger. In ISKCON and as a babaji I started to do very strict Chaturmasyas on at least three occasions. Even eating plain kitcherie for weeks in yoga mudra and so on. But it never lasted to the fullest extent.
Once, when I was a babaji in Nabadwip, I did a vrata in Agrahayan, the Katyayani vrata. This was in around 1984. I tried to keep it simple. I went at 2 a.m. every night to Porama Tala (Paurnamasi Tala) and meditated for two hours, chanting japa. It was only to be for a month.
It was a very interesting experience, because Pora Ma is a very powerful Shakta and Tantric center. People forget that Nabadwip is also an important Shakti peeth, with Krishnananda Vagisha, one of the major Bengali tantrics of the 15th century, a contemporary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, living there. Going there in the middle of the night with no one at all around (though sometimes a Tantric would show up and do some midnight puja) was a new kind of experience for me.
But it was still not perfect. At the end, on Purnima, I went and begged in the market until my bag was full, and I went to see Jiva Goswami Prabhupada at Shrivas Angan and I gave him all that I had collected as guru dakshina, he being a respected member of the Nityananda vamsha.
I told him what I had done and asked for his blessing. He said, "Did you do it perfectly?" I had to admit that I hadn't. Then he said, "You won't get the results right away."
It is not that no results come. There is no loss or diminution. But we don't always get what we want, and we rarely get it directly. The most important thing that happens during a vrata is that your own desires are revealed to you. You begin with a purpose, a desire, and in your interiority, you focus on that desire in relation to your True Being. The result of the vrata is the interaction of those two things. The extent of the benefit is the result of the intensity of that interaction.
But it rarely takes an external form, though it can. Indeed, if it only takes an external form, it really shows that you did not get the mercy you were truly seeking. The gods see many levels deeper than you can even imagine. They know what you really want. Your vrata pushes your human adventure into unforeseen directions. Which is really what makes life interesting. And what makes the vrata worthwhile.
We have desires. As long as we do, we are captured in the drama of life. It can be fun, but it is totally unpredictable.
I have to finish this translation. I had a little partial sense of accomplishment by completing the Sanskrit critical text (i.e., where the different manuscripts are compared and the best reading for the text is established and the variant readings are catalogued). So I suppose that this milestone led to a softening of my resolve. But I still have to translate quite a bit.
The text is not all that difficult, but I always make things more difficult for myself. The Gorakṣa-śataka is a difficult text to pin down. But let us say that it is the "original" Hatha Yoga. Quite different from what we know as hatha yoga today. So you could say that the practices are the basic practices that led to the expansion of hatha yoga into the forms that we see today, but which have practically been pushed aside entirely for the sake of physical culture.
Goraksha precedes even the Haṭha-yoga-pradīpikā, which like many of the later Hatha Yoga texts tries to harmonize with Patanjali and Advaita-vāda. Nevertheless, the value of these practices has been more or less accepted on one level or another in the pan-Indian kaleidoscope of spirituality.
So my slow style of translating is based on realization. I cannot translate about Maha Mudra or Nadi Shodhana or any of these other practices without at least a fairly good idea of what they entail.
To some extent, because I have now been involved with this Himalayan Tradition through Swami Veda Bharati for nearly six years, staying altogether about four of them here in Rishikesh, I have gotten a little bit of an idea. It has taken a while, but I have assimilated most of the practices in Gorakṣa-śataka already... some even from before coming here. This ashram has given me the opportunity to be silent and to go deeply into meditational states.
Currently Swami Veda, who is now 80, is in complete silence. He has told me several times that he never wants to speak again. He carries a tablet with him and interacts through writing when it is necessary. So evening meditations at 5.45 are pretty intense. More so than they ever were before in all the previous years. Swamiji has stopped traveling, which also means that his intensity is accumulating in that way also.
So there has been great value in this experience, and it is still not finished. Just thought I would let my friends know.
Probably the hardest sacrifice was not writing my own ideas. But that has likely been the most deliberate and important part of this vrata. To take myself out of the "wisdom game" for a minute and reboot the computer a little, allow new, fresh ideas to enter and percolate in solitude... not perfect solitude, not perfect silence, but pretty intense overall.
We all have to do what we have to do. Everyone is on the path, whatever they do. I have given up thinking that I can be like anyone else nor that I can make anyone be like me. It is hard to be a "preacher" in those circumstances. The best we can do is share, in humility and honesty, our spiritual aspirations, the paths we have chosen, our successes and failures, our epiphanies as well as the dark nights of our souls, and find community with others through empathy and freedom from judgment.
2013 Rishikesh
Yoga and meditation are also positive and essential for the culture of a spiritually potent bhakti, which is what Sahajiyaism is all about. It is about para bhakti, the bhakti that comes after you are Brahman realized. The dual is only perfected in oneness. If you don't know what oneness is, then how can you experience twoness? Or twoness in oneness? Or oneness in twoness? And so on?
Srila Puri Maharaja said, "There is a wave of sahajiyaism coming to the Western world and you must preach against this misconception." What did he mean, "a wave of sahajiyaism is coming to the Western world?"
Because he was a Gaudiya Math acharya and GM acharyas are against Sahajiyaism. He was talking about Srila Narayan Maharaj principally because he felt, like many others in the GM, that BVN had crossed outside the normal permitted GM discourse by emphasizing madhura-rasa.
Since the GM dogma is that any such discussion when held in a public arena with unqualified persons (according to the GM standard of what constitutes qualification) that it would lead to Sahajiyaism, according to the rather broad strokes with which they paint it. All the way from people crying in kirtan and "gopi bhava clubs" to massive orgies of men and women dressed as Radha and Krishna (until they undress of course) boinking in harmony to some erotic Jayadeva song.
There are other people who misunderstand what I mean when I talk about Sahajiyaism. So maybe five people will read what I say if I say something to another person, even if that person is being deliberately difficult or offensive.
This is why I tolerated Kshamabuddhi and Mayesa for such a long time. But eventually they were harassing me so much I was obliged to block them. But so far, I haven't got that vibe from Sivananda.
My blog is there to help explain it. And of course it is connected to yoga. And to bhakti. If you want to call people names, I don't consider Sahajiya to be a bad name. Mahaprabhu called Ramananda Raya a "sahaja Vaishnava." Even Bhaktivinoda like that term. "A natural Vaishnava." Now isn't that what we would all like to be? Now what does it mean? Let us explore.
2011
ratna-cchāyā-cchurita-jaladhau mandire dvārakāyā
rukmiṇyāpi prabala-pulakodbhedam āliṅgitasya |
viśvaṁ pāyān masṛṇa-yamunā-tīra-vānīra-kuñje
rādhā-kelī-parimala-bhara-dhyāna-mūrcchā murāreḥ ||
In the Dvaraka palace standing
on the shores of the ocean, sprinkled with sparkling gems,
Krishna's body hairs stood on end
in Queen Rukmini's ecstatic embrace.
But suddenly recalling the fragrance
of dalliances joyfully exchanged with Radha
in the reeds by the banks of the black Yamuna waters,
he fainted. May that faint protect you always.
(SKM 1.61.1; UN 14.184; JIva and Vishwanath to BRS 2.4.178)
One of the great verses of Umapati Dhar, a contemporary of Jayadeva and one of Lakshman Sen's "Five Jewels". I wish we had more of his writings, as I think in many ways he was more insightful than even Jayadeva, and there are vestiges of his influence even from the few verses of his that we do have.
rādhā kāñcana-vallī
phullā kṛṣṇaḥ phulla-tāpiñchaḥ |
anayor saṅgama-lakṣmī
na sukhayati kaṁ sacetanaṁ lokam ||
Radha is a blossoming golden creeper, Krishna a blossoming tamal tree. What conscious being anywhere [in the universe] would not be pleased by seeing their glorious union? (GLA 11.18)
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