Jagat

Just imagine if you were brought up speaking Sanskrit. Do you think that you would have a different sort of brain? I have spent a lot of time thinking about the psychology of language and identity. Identity is central to raganuga bhakti, both on the level of the sadhaka deha and the siddha deha. I was thinking about this earlier (since in class I had mentioned that you more or less have to be crazy to want to learn Sanskrit). We were discussing this verse as an illustration of different classes of athematic verbs being used in the same sentence, all in the third person singular. The following verse has six verbs, each from a different class: ददाति प्रतिगृह्णाति गुह्यमाख्याति पृच्छति । भुङ्क्ते भोजायते चैव षड्विधं प्रीतिलक्षणम् ॥ One gives and accepts [one another’s gifts], one tells and inquires about one another’s private matters, one eats what the other offers and one invites the other to eat. These are the six kinds of signs of love. ( Upadeśāmṛta 4) Here √दा, ददाति (3P), √ग्रह्, गृ...

I have been posting videos of my easy reading Sanskrit classes. There are many earlier ones too from Panchatantra. I will gradually be posting these.

I here post the post I made on Facebook on April 10, 2021 about my meeting with Paramadvaiti Swami nearly three years after the scandals that pretty much destroyed his society of disciples called VRINDA. This was picked up and posted elsewhere on the internet , where it was a source of some glee to the Schadenfreude crew. I likely would not have posted but was motivated by an encounter with a neighbor who was one of the leading advocates for the victims on line and elsewhere. This led me to post what was an objective  leaning to sympathetic assessment of my encounter with Paramadvaiti. I have a bit of a suppressed journalistic instinct that occasionally gets me into trouble.  In the beginning there were favorable comments to this post but the tide turned and those who advocated for the victims and for a hard line against all abuse took me to task for being too soft. This then resulted in a campaign of complaints against me that had unpleasant consequences for me.  I don't...

आख्याहि विश्वेश्वर विश्वमूर्ते त्वद्भक्तियोगं च महद्विमृग्यम् ।  "Tell me, O Lord of the Universe, O Form of the Universe, all about your bhakti-yoga , which is sought after by all the great souls." (11.19.8) I was just going through my Sanskrit manual over a lesson we completed not too long ago. I am trying as far as possible to find examples from our primary texts like Gītā and Bhāgavatam, but also from other sources as well if I find the grammatical lesson it teaches is particularly useful. This was given as an example of a second person imperative in athematic parasmaipada conjugations, ending in - hi . For some reason, I decided to track down all the -hi ending imperatives in the Bhāgavata and Gītā, and I can up with eight or ten that were frequent and also had easy examples to use, like this one. Now it is almost impossible to give good examples without going beyond what the students have already learned. Like here vim ṛ gyam , which is only going to come up i...

Ooof! I wanted to write something about Karttik and how it is starting. Since I got to Vrindavan I have been kind of holed up in Bhakti Sandarbha land. But I must say that I have been doing a little bhakti as well (he insisted). Well, that is actually one thing I really like about Braja Bhajan. It is that you can lie around and do pretty much nothing and still not feel you have to feel guilty because after all you are in Braj, where just lying around doing nothing is bhakti. Can't really do that anywhere else, you know. Well, there is always residue guilt for someone like me. I was talking with Madhavendra Puri on Ekadasi and discussing what we were doing for Karttik. Neither of us had ambitious plans, just kind of "I am going to get more into what I am already into." But I do feel that the old guilts need to be tended to. So I am truly getting serious about completing some 99%-complete projects that have been awaiting finishing touches for eternities. I am fee...

Well, it's about time I wrote something on the blog. I started a "what am I doing right now #2" more than a month ago, thinking that the particular side trip I was on would not last much longer. It did, and I really need to complete that thought... sometime. Trouble is that by now I have moved on to several other things and haven't been directly inspired to write on the blog. And that in itself is a subject worth blogging about... sometime. We have been having our "Christmas break" at Jiva, which is the time when we usually have a group of students from Rutgers University come and spend a couple of weeks taking introduction to Hinduism courses with Babaji. Something possessed me to write a Sanskrit play for my students. We have been working on it during the break and presented it on Jiva Goswami's disappearance day on Jan. 9. It was a lot of fun and I was overjoyed and honored that the students made such an enthusiastic effort. So for the record, ...

This has been a very good year for the Jiva Tirtha Sanskrit course and things are progressing quite nicely, though in the usually bumbling way. This is the second year we have been doing this course at Jiva and it is still a work in progress. One student Stuart Trusty pushed to have the manual published in a small number after the first year was over. This year we have been able to build on that work and at the end of this year we should have a second edition. Even so, I think it will take one more year before it will finally be publishable, as what I have learned this year will need to be better assimilated to the overall method. By an interesting coincidence, one of my students this year is Vinode Vani Dasi. She was in Dallas in 1973, the first full year that the original ISKCON Gurukula was in operation. Like many things in ISKCON, the early days were the headiest, filled with the most enthusiasm. We had a rather good reminiscence about it in yesterday's class. The...

This book is the first draft of a Sanskrit text book that was used in the 2016-2017 academic year at the Jiva Institute in Vrindavan. It is still in need of revision and refinement, which will be undertaken during the next academic year of the Jiva Tirtha course while being used for a second group of students. It will also be expanded as the first year students continue in their studies. Exercises and vocabulary are an important element in such a course and I have integrated many verses and texts that I prepared in an earlier publication, Sādhaka pāṭhyam, which was done on behalf of the Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama in Rishikesh. The Jiva Institute under the direction of Mahant Satya Narayan Das Babaji started the Jiva Tirtha program in the autumn of 2016 with 25 students from Europe and America. The Sanskrit course started with a couple of trial and error efforts using different texts, including Hari-nāmāmṛta-vyākaraṇam, the grammar text composed by Srila Jiva Goswami himself. Since he...

I came across my original recording of "Chanting Sanskrit mantras." So I posted them to my Soundcloud page ( https://soundcloud.com/jagadananda-das-168494194 ).  Chanting Sanskrit verses (recording) . The written document can be found on this blog: Chanting Sanskrit verses (text) . It is old now and it could no doubt have been done better, more professionally. But this is what is out there. This recording was made in about 2000 if I remember correctly, in Ste-Adele at Mahavirya Das 's studio.

Is bhakti a transcendent religion, or is it anchored in time and place? In other words, is it delimited by historical and cultural factors, which by definition would make it material? Recently I said that the purpose of Gaudiya Vaishnava sadhana appears to be "entering" the eternal pastimes of Radha and Krishna, and Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And that this required our identifying with the historical, linguistic and cultural circumstances into which their lilas transpired. One of my friends objected that this jeopardized Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s claims to universality and demonstrated a cultural chauvinism -- i.e., ahankara -- that diminished the transcendent glory of this religion. Indeed, for those in the West who on the whole find many defects in the Indian culture, past, present or future, it seems a travesty to be chained to a culture that, in the end, they do not admire all that much. I apologized to my friend that I had been unable to resolve the conundrum. And he...

Along with several other titles, Himalayan Yoga Publications Trust has published a book I did to facilitate Sanskrit teaching to the students of Swami Rama Sadhaka Gram. This publication was made to coincide with the first anniversary of Swami Veda Bharati's Mahasamadhi. This book contains first of all a guide to understanding the Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary of many of the essential materials used at SRSG, such as the morning and evening prayers, many of Swamiji's favorite verses from the Bhagavad Gita, and so on.  There is also a section of additional materials and exercises to help the Sanskrit student, such as sandhi rules, principal parts of verbs, as well as supplementary reading exercises. This handbook was originally conceived as a collection of supplementary reading exercises for students of Sanskrit at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. The primary goal was to help non-Indian students of yoga and Indian philosophy to acquire a working knowledge of textual Sanskrit as ...

1. Introduction Having looked through the secular accounts of adulterous love we have come to the following conclusion: though the paroḍhā woman was accepted by the poeticians as a legitimate category of leading woman or nāyikā , she was in fact held to be an inappropriate character for the play, as indeed she was in life. Where she was not exclusively devoted to a single man, she would be relegated to a farcical role, like that of the prostitute in one of the minor varieties of play such as the prahasana . The prostitute was acceptable as a character in a certain type of play, the prakaraṇa , if she was exclusively in love with the hero, such as is the case in the play Mṛcchakaṭikā . Though the paroḍhā might perhaps have been theoretically acceptable in similar circumstances, there are no examples of such characterisation in any extant literature. The accepted face of the parakīyā woman was the virgin, who became the primary vehicle for love in the romantic Sanskrit drama. On...