Jagat

I was reflecting on my Gopala Champu class for which I had not prepared myself properly and wrote: The sin of a translator, of which I am often guilty, is to start translating before becoming the original.   How do you become the original? Samadhi. By which I mean you should at least completely forget the language of arrival for as long as it takes to get to the end of the passage you are translating. In other words, not to translate. To get to the point of not translating. I don't particularly like the "mysterious" style. I am more of a verbose and boring explainer. So I began to examine what provoked those thoughts. In my class, I explain the passage word by word, so I am translating right from the very beginning. If I haven't understood the passage properly before I start that process, then in the public situation I will only produce an unclear sense, or one that deviates from the purpose of the passage. We were doing GC 1.1.17 and tomorrow we will have to...

Since I am currently working on Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha and have arrived at Anuccheda 174, which more or less summarizes the revised version of Krishna lila, which later becomes the basis for Jiva Goswami's magnum opus, Gopāla-campū . yan mayā kṛṣṇa-sandarbhe siddhāntāmṛtam ācitam| tad eva rasyate kāvya-kṛti-prajñā-rasajñayā|| so'haṁ kāvyasya lakṣyeṇa mano nirmāmi tādṛśam| tan mahānto yadīkṣeraṁs tadā hemni cito maṇiḥ|| The conclusions compiled by me in the Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha can here be savoured by the palate that is learned in the poetic art. Thus, I set my mind to write it with poetry as my goal. Should the great souls examine this work, it will be as if a jewel has been set in gold. When I did my dissertation on Gopāla-campū , then I foolishly thought that I could truly understand the last of the Six Goswamis, Sri Sri Jiva Prabhu, by going to his final work, but without fully understanding all the rest of what he had done. Understanding the mind of someone from as di...

Divine Madness The reference to mahā-bhāva made by Kaviraja Goswami is particularly worth noting (quoted in Part I ). The principal characteristic, I believe, is the idea of a particular eternal moment or snapshot, containing all these different conflicting reactions to one particularly confusing situation. In the mahā-bhāva , as described in UN 14, Radha experiences both the ecstasies of union and separation simultaneously. Here, something similar is happening. As we go through the sthāyi-bhāvas described in Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi , what becomes evident to the observer is that we are watching a progression of madness in love--a disorientation that progresses to the point of a complete loss of touch with reality: e.g., attributing properties to lifeless objects and even being angry and envious of them, hallucinations, seeing the beloved where he is not, etc. If, as the Gītā (2.69) says, the sage sees day where the materialistic person sees night, and vice versa, it follows that what is...