Jagat

atyāścaryā sarvato’smād vicitrā śrīmad-rādhā-kuñja-vāṭī cakāsti | ādyo bhāvo yo viśuddho’tipūrṇas tad-rūpā sā tādṛśonmādi sarvāḥ || There, in the kunja, glows Radha’s amazing beautiful flower grove cottage, more marvelous than all these others, for it embodies the original mood of love in its purest and most perfect form, by which all the Vraja gopis are inebriated. (1.9) Commentary In this and the next verse, Prabodhananda may be said to complete the vastu-nirde śa  portion of his introduction the the Mahim ām ṛta . Actual our beloved author and acharya of Braja-vasa-sadhana wants us to focus more and more clearly on the actual secret-most treasure of Braja Dham, which is the union of the Divine Couple in Radha's kunj. In the previous verse , Prabodhananda listed the hierarchy of dhams of the Lord and stated that they could all be found in Vrindavan. But now he makes it clear that Radha’s kunja is at the top of all these. “All the others” in the vers...

This article was published in Journal of Vaishnava Studies. Details not available. It was also on Gaudiya Discussions, but I did not have a copy on the blog. So here it is for the record. I have just recorded myself singing the Śikṣāṣṭakam and you can see it on YouTube . I have embedded the video at the end of this document. This article is fairly long for a blog, but I have not split it up. Notes are at the end, but there are no internal links.  No short account of Krishna Chaitanya’s life fails to note something like, “Chaitanya only left eight verses by which we can know his belief system.” But the authorship of even these verses has been cast into some doubt by scholars on the basis of statements by Karnapur and others, who declare unequivocally that Chaitanya wrote nothing at all. Over time, a number of a number of works have been attributed to Chaitanya, but few of these claims are credible. Even the most consistently attributed text, the Radha-prema-rasāyana-stotram ,...

While on the subject of Chandidas... The Chandidas mystery has troubled writers on Bengali literary history for over a century. It is pretty clear that Boru Chandidas, the writer of Sri Krishna Kirtan, was known to Mahaprabhu and the Goswamis, and that his stories of Radha and Krishna, were greatly influential, at least where certain pastimes and probably certain themes within those pastimes are concerned. But most of the scholars in Bengal were a little disturbed by the thought that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, with his elevated sentiments and pure devotional mood, could ever have spent much time listening to Sri Krishna Kirtan with Raya Ramananda and Svarupa Damodar. One thing is certainly true is that other than the one MS of SKK, very little of Boru Chandidas, at least what is recognizably this Boru Chandidas' work, was picked up and used by Lila-kirtan singers in the post-Chaitanya period. To the point that for all intents and purposes, his work was completely lost. It was surel...

I used the word sahajiya in the previous post, in reference to the idea of doing a Gita commentary from that particular point of view. But I think I need to say a word or two, once again, about the use of the word. First of all, let us remember the saying, "Give a dog a bad name and then hang him." The propaganda against sahajiyaism has been very successful, and though few people have any experience of or understanding of Vaishnava sahajiyaism, which in its pure form is a legitimate and powerful process of experiencing the Divine Truth in its personal form. Actually, I feel somewhat foolish now, thinking about it. It seems a little childish, using a word that presses so many buttons. Let's face it, Gaudiya Vaishnavas already called me a Sahajiya before I declared it myself, they will continue to do so from now to eternity. The only question is whether we can reclaim the term and make it meaningful and worthwhile. So as a deliberate act of self-definition, despite my ...