Jagat

Yesterday I read Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s version of the Nala-Damayanti story. This is a rather famous story in the annals of Sanskrit literature originally found in the Mahābhārata , and I must surely have read it through before, but in this case I found that it was unfamiliar and new. And it still requires a bit of digestion, but on the whole it is a story of the glories of a woman’s love. Once she has picked her man, she remains faithful until death, no matter how lost her man becomes. Of course, by the intervention of the gods and the power of her devotion to her husband, all is well in the end. And she even becomes the power of compassion in her husband’s kingdom. The story is, briefly, as follows. Nala is the king of Nishadh. He has a half-brother Pushkar who has an unimportant role as a prince in the kingdom and he hates Nala for having received their father’s blessings. A swan acts as a go-between and brings Nala and Damayanti together at her svayamvara. Since the swan...

Viktor Frankl meaning article . Human beings make the mistake, you could call it the “romantic fallacy,” that there is something called love, which when one falls into, everything will be complete and one is spiritually fulfilled. That is precisely why it is called a puruṣārtha of kāma , because it carries with it this illusion of completion. In a film, one sees the lovers kiss in the train station, all obstacles have been removed, and they live happily ever after. That is clearly a fallacy. A similar fallacy exists in spiritual life: it is the liberation fallacy, it is the idea of any kind of perfection in stasis, whether called nirvana or mukti or prema. It doesn't matter what we call it, if we identify it as the absolute cessation of suffering, a stasis, then it is fundamentally a fallacy. It is not bhakti, it is not reality. That is why bhakti theologians object to it. Both kāma or mukti are dreams of a state of being that is complete plenitude. Similarly, the other pu...

Of late I have been doing most of my writing over on Vrindavan Today , where I have been attempting to post a daily verse with commentary on the Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta . The day before yesterday I commented on the following verse : rājyaṁ niṣkaṇṭakam api parityajya divyāś ca rāmāḥ kāmān sarvān api ca vihitāṁs tikta-tiktān vidantaḥ | hitvā vidyā-kula-dhana-janādyābhimānaṁ praviṣṭā ye śrī-vṛndā-vipinam apunar-nirgamāṁs tān namāmaḥ || To those who have entered Vrindavan never to leave, rejecting a kingdom without enemies, along with beautiful women and all desires and duties, thinking them to be most bitter, and who have renounced their learning, noble birth, wealth, and fame to do so, we offer our respectful obeisances. ( VMA 1.76 ) Anyone familiar with my blog is aware that I have spoken extensively about gender issues, in the firm belief that Radha and Krishna is a Truth that represents the supreme ideal of human love. In response to what I wrote on VT, a woman of a feminist pe...

[ This is a rump article. I started it some years back, but never finished it. It seems though that the time is right for some anti-romantic propaganda. ] A couple of years ago I published an article here about Tristan and Iseult based on a Bengali version of the medieval legend. The story has also been analyzed by the Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson , The Psychology of Romantic Love . Although I am not that familiar with the overall body of Johnson's work, he is the author of numerous books on various aspects of archetypal psychology and clearly a man of deeply spiritual inclinations, as are many Jungians. This is a particularly important work as it deals with the interface of cultural products like myth and legend and the effects with human psychology and in particular the influence it has on creating unrealistic expectations in people. For Johnson, romanticism means "an idealized attachment to something unattainable." When that kind of illusory sentiment b...