Jagat

I may have mentioned before that I am working on Prīti Sandarbha where currently I have been doing the sections on the secondary rasas and the mixing of rasas and rasābhāsa . For that purpose I have been doing a lot of side work like editing the Muktā-phala with its commentaries and also the last section (Part 4 ) of the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu . All this background research will hopefully enrich the Prīti Sandarbha , a lot of it will have to wait for another occasion for its effects to be shown. Understanding rasa is for me the key to understanding bhakti as it is taught in our tradition and I believe the greatest contribution for a psychological approach to the study of religion and religious experience. Haridas Thakur's trial. I will try to share some of this eventually. Here is just one tidbit that I found interesting: Making a display of devotion is rasābhāsa , "a mere semblance of rasa," i,e,, not real rasa. There are three kinds of  rasābhāsa pertaining ...

As I went through the revision of Sva-likhita-jīvanī , I spent a lot of time putting in footnotes, since I recognized that many of the names would be unfamiliar to readers, especially his Bengali contemporaries. Of course, these notes are brief and in some cases entirely inadequate. Here is one, for instance, that simply could not have been included in full, so I thought I would put it here. When Bhaktivinoda Thakur's first wife died in 1861, he writes that this poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped him. "I endured this grief like a warrior according to the 'Psalm of Life'." No doubt it was Rev. Dall (also a New Englander) who introduced BVT to Longfellow). Somewhat ironically, it seems that it was the New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists who appealed the most to Bhaktivinoda rather than their British equivalents like Wordsworth. I think that Longfellow's lyrical style appealed to him more. I think that anyone reading this and knowing t...

 Yogiraj Prem Prakashji responded to a recent article addressing environmental concerns and I started to answer, but it spun out of control and became too long for a comment. And it was also becoming incoherent. So I decided to give it a little more thought and write it as a separate article. The environmental issue in Vrindavan is really a big deal. It is so everywhere in the world, but here we can feel it much more acutely. People in the "first world" can only imagine the kind of environmental degradation that is ongoing in India. Just think: India has four times as many people and only one-third the terrain of the US, what to speak of Canada. Many people are enthused by India's material progress and the rapid urbanization, but it is a bit harder for me to join the chorus. Every so-called step forward simply means more of the same haphazard construction of ugly buildings surrounded by heaps of refuse and open, garbage-filled drains emptying into what were once c...