Jagat

What I have been trying to get at in the previous two posts ( Part I  and  Part II ) is that the way we look at the relation of the symbol to God can be compared to the way that any phenomenon is looked at in relation to God. In other words, where cause and effect relationships are debated, they are usually reduced to a kind of chicken-egg argument that can ultimately only be decided in favor of God. Though this analysis of cause and effect will always be challenged (and often with good cause) by doubters, what we are trying to get at is the essence of the symbol, which will reveal something about the Godhead itself. This understanding of the essence of the symbol, intuited by believers, must nevertheless be purified by the Upanishadic process of śravaṇam, mananam and nididhyāsanam . That is the path to darśanam , direct seeing and understanding,  sākṣātkāra . If one asks, does the symbol not show, as the psychologists argue, something about material phenomena, espe...

I am writing on my computer for the first time since arriving in India, which is now three days already. And with the long trip getting here, fraught with one misadventure, namely missing the connecting flight from Paris, was that makes six days since I have even thought of blogging. I got to do a lot of reading on the plane and in the waiting rooms—when I wasn’t traipsing up and down the interminable terminals at Charles-de-Gaulle, trying to negotiate Air France and Air Canada for the next step of my changing itinerary. There is a lot to say--six days of accumulated experiences and reading, but for now I will just copy what I wrote on my home computer, copying and pasting onto the blog. Hopefully better connections will be available in Rishikesh and the human-internet interface will be smoother. Sakhī-bhāva What follows here is a summary of Sharan Behari Goswami’s six points of difference between sakhī-bhāva and gopī-bhāva (pages 188-193 of the work already mentioned). I talked...

Continuing in the same volume by Sharan Bihari Goswami, there are a number of other quotes from 19th and 20th century scholars. Goswami mentions Growse with approval, but does not quote him. For those who do not know F.S. Growse, he wrote a Mathura: A District Memoir in which he describes the various Vaishnava sampradayas living in the region, which he compiled during his tour as collector between 1872 and 1885. Next on the list is J.N. Farquhar, whose Outline of the Religious Literature of India (Oxford University Press, 1920) was a noted authority in his time. Goswami picks a bone with him for identifying the Haridasis as related to the Gaudiya sampradaya, figuring that the confusion arose out of the similarity of names with Yavan Haridas. He also objects to the sentence "They [Radha-vallabhis] are Shaktas, placing Radha above Krishna." The main quote, though, relates to the Vallabhi sampradaya: Whether they be men or women, they look forward to becoming Gopis and sportin...

Since this blog is really a personal notebook, I thought I would copy some quotes that I found in the Hindi book, Kåñëa bhakti kāvya meà sakhī bhāva by Sharan Bihari Goswami (1966). In the introduction, he quotes three early European scholars opinions of sakhī bhāva . It is hard, out of context, to know what else these scholars said, or if they had any further information about those who practised devotion in the mood of the gopis, as it seems that the term sakhī bhāva is being confused with what we know as sakhī bhekhī . The author appears to think that the Haridāsī sect of Vrindavan, the principal subject of his book, is specifically being discussed. This might just be a confusion of names, as the Haridāsīs are known as the Sakhībhāvas. In A Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus (1862, page 177), Prof. H. H. Wilson wrote: Sakhī-bhāvas . This sect is another ramification of those which adopt Radha and Krishan for the objects of their worship and may be regarded as more pa...