Jagat

Today's memories are dominated by 2016 when I was more engaged in Vrindavan Today research and writing. It is too bad that the VT archives were lost and a ton of good stuff is no longer available, except perhaps on the internet archive. So in 2016 Satyanarayana Dasji took everyone from Jiva to Umrao, which is the village associated with the original Lokanath Goswami and his discovery of the Radha Kanta deities. It is just near Chhata on the way to Barsana. Ranbari, the site of Siddha Krishnadas, whose story is very famous, is just nearby. Most of these photos are available in my Facebook albums. At the same time, Hargovinda Sharma, one of the leading rasacharyas of the 20th century, who along with Hari Baba and Purushottam Goswami and others promoted Gaura Lila musical plays along with Radha Krishna lila, which I think was a very important development, but is a tradition that appears to be getting lost also. (FB Memories July 27)

Whiteboard from class on rasa. [Earlier articles on psychological models in the context of Radha Krishna can be found here  and here .] We have been studying Madhusudana's Bhakti-rasāyana and some other texts on rasa and I finally managed to diagram things in a way that seems to me to explain the idea as a kind of psychological model, and which can be used to include all the rasa theorists from Bharata to Rupa Goswami. Actually Madhusudana does not fit this model exactly, even though he provides an important element in the understanding of the interface of rasa and psychology. There are a number of posts that explain aspects of this model, others that are forthcoming and hopefully we will be able to tie them all in together eventually. The overall idea is based on the concept that the personality is formed by impressions that are the result of emotional experiences that leave imprints on the unconscious mind. There are, according to Bharata, eight rasas, with śān...

The capacity to recognize and empathize with another’s suffering. Though it is rather unexciting from the literary point of view, I will do some academic basics, like looking in the dictionary for clues about where to go with the research on the topic of compassion. After all this is a blog. And a blog is basically a diary notebook, so for my own edification and future reference, I will do a bit of academic legwork. I haven't been excercising my due-diligence muscles here for some time now. Let us start from Amara-kośa , the most basic and universally used Sanskrit lexicon. Sanskrit lexicons usually are more like thesauruses, in that they give lists of synonyms grouped together. The group in which we find karuṇā goes like this: snigdhas tu vatsalaḥ ghṛṇā | kṛpā dayānukampā kāruṇyaṁ karuṇā. Here are the relevant definitions taken from Monier-Williams (MMW). vatsala = child loving, tender, affectionate towards offspring, kind, loving. anukampā = sympathy, compassion anukr...

A Vaishnava guru is characterized by compassion: nigrahānugrahe śakto homa-mantra-parāyaṇaḥ | ūhāpoha-prakāra-jñaḥ śuddhātmā yaḥ kṛpālayaḥ | ity-ādi-lakṣaṇair yukto guruḥ syād garimā-nidhiḥ || The guru, the treasure-house of depth, has the following qualities: he is capable of both showing mercy and chastising, i.e., recognizing both the qualities and defaults of the disciple and either rewarding or punishing him; he is dedicated to ritual activity and mantra-japa; he knows the process of argumentation and establishing rightful conclusions. He is moreover a pure soul and the abode of compassion.(HBV 1.41) I suppose that depending on your world view, you will have a different concept of compassion. It starts with God or the state of perfection. In Vedanta, the state of perfection is bliss without any touch of illusion. Illusion means suffering. Therefore suffering is existentially not real. It is only subjective, due to ignorance, like the person who sees a rope and takes it for a s...