Jagat

Someone was chastising me the other day that in order to attain the siddhi of the gopis one had to give up the puruṣābhimāna and think of oneself as a beautiful gopi maiden expert in the arts and dressed in the remnants of Radharani’s own wardrobe, with flowers in her hair, and so on. He is pleased by our prema for Him in one of the five rasas. But it requires a change in identity, from thinking you are this material body, to knowing that you are His lover, young friend, servant or parent. If you want to be His lover, you have to identify as a young and very attractive woman, expert in all the arts, witty, expert in word jugglery and thus equipped in all ways to bring Him pleasure. You cannot approach him, thinking you are an old man, and that the material illusory form of your partner is Radha. You cannot enter madhurya at all with a male form or identity. A beautiful picture indeed. And it seems so easy. Just like that, puruṣābhimāna disappears. Now what makes anyone  think that

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

I am realizing more and more that I am not and never really was a scholar, not in the sense that academics are, gathering interesting facts in enormous detail. Nor am I a journalist, nor an activist. Nor a preacher. I only aspire in some lifetime to become a lover of God. I would just like to be like this description of a Vaishnava by my parama guru, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur: vaiṣṇava dehete thāke śrī-kṛṣṇera śakti | sei deha sparśe anye haya kṛṣṇa-bhakti ||52|| Krishna’s potencies take up residence in the Vaishnava’s body so that by merely touching him, one develops devotion to Krishna. vaiṣṇava adharāmṛta āra pada jala | vaiṣṇavera pada-rajaḥ tina mahā-bala ||53|| The remnants of the Vaishnava’s food, water that has washed his feet, dust from his lotus feet—these are three powerful spiritual substances. vaiṣṇava-nikaṭe yadi baise kata-kṣaṇa | deha haite haya kṛṣṇa-śakti niḥsaraṇa ||54|| If one should sit near a Vaishnava for a few moments, he will feel the

This is a post that has been somewhat long in coming, but I think that it needs to be done and said publicly. A few weeks ago I posted on this blog an article about Vishwananda Swami , the founder and acharya of Bhakti Marg . I had my doubts about posting it and knew almost immediately that I was headed for trouble. When I talked to Satyanarayana Dasaji, shortly after which I removed the article, he said to me in an exasperated tone, प्रयोजनमनुद्दिश्य मन्दोऽपि न प्रवर्तते prayojanam anuddiśya mando'pi na pravartate Even a fool does not undertake an action without having some purpose to fulfill. So what was my purpose in writing such an article? Well, I have to admit, that I had not really thought it out carefully. For one thing, I just wanted to write something. I was going through a somewhat dry period and I felt that I really should write anything at all.And since Swami Vishwananda had been around, I decided to write about what I had seen and thought and heard. But

proktena bhakti-yogena bhajato māsakṛn muneḥ | kāmā hṛdayyā naśyanti sarve mayi hṛdi sthite || All material desires in the heart of the wise person who constantly worships me through the process of bhakti-yoga as it has been described [here] are destroyed, for I am situated there in his heart. (11.20.29) Comment by Madhusudan Saraswati in Bhakti-rasāyana, 1.1: By following statements like this by the Lord and having firm faith in the practices by which one attains bhakti, one sends the entirety of the love one has for his objects [of love] and [thus] his mind becomes indifferent to the sense objects. The mental modifications ( mano-vṛtti ) of such a greatly fortunate person, whoever he is, are imbued with the form of the Lord upon being melted by hearing works of literature that gather together the profound glories of the Lord, and this taking of the Lord’s shape is the goal of all sādhana [whether bhakti or yoga, etc.].  This taking on of the Lord’s shape is known as t

We are talking about rasa a lot, and an understanding of the terms is important. As one progresses in knowledge and experience, such understanding is likely to undergo refinement. I was just asked to clarify some terms, so here is a short article doing so. āgamenānumānena dhyānābhyāsa-rasena ca | tridhā prakalpayan prajñāṁ labhate yogam uttamam || There are three roads to wisdom: hearing from the wise, sharpening one's reasoning skills, and relishing the taste of repeated practice of meditation. One who cultivates this threefold wisdom attains the ultimate yoga. The jñāna-mārga (the path of philosophical knowledge) has three divisions to its practice: śravaṇam (hearing from a knowledgeable source), mananam (contemplating what one has heard), and nididhyāsanam (intense meditation on the conclusion of one's intellectual processes). There is rasa in the practice of meditation, which is called  śānta-rasa , about which an article is following shortly.  The experience

Love is the sthāyi-bhāva . Prema is its rasāvasthā . According to Madhusudana Saraswati, God himself is the  sthāyi-bhāva  of love. When certain emotional upsurges heat the heart and allow him to be imprinted there. He is both the vibhāva and the sthāyi -bhāva . The first of these being the bimba , the latter the pratibimba , or reflection, related in exactly the same way as īśvara to the jīva . The same idea expressed in Vaishnava terms would be that it is the reflection of the  svarūpa-śakti. Only God is capable of melting the heart fully. Since He is all things, even the mundane nāyaka and nāyikā are nothing but He, but incapable of fully melting the heart, since they are He covered by Maya. Maya is God's own potency for self-covering. ============= Here is Rupa Goswami's definition of prema : samyaṅ-masṛṇita-svānto mamatvātiśayāṅkitaḥ | bhāvaḥ sa eva sāndrātmā budhaiḥ premā nigadyate || When that very same  bhāva  described in BRS 1.3.1 completely melts

Gītā catuḥ-ślokī 4 || 10.11 || तेषामेवानुकम्पार्थमहमज्ञानजं तमः। नाशयाम्यात्मभावस्थो ज्ञानदीपेन भास्वता॥ teṣām evānukampārtham aham ajñāna-jaṁ tamaḥ | nāśayāmy ātma-bhāva-stho jñāna-dīpena bhāsvatā || ahaṁ anukampārthaṁ teṣām ātma-bhāva-sthaḥ, (teṣām) ajñāna-jaṁ tamaḥ jñāna-dīpena bhāsvatā nāśayāmi. ·          anukampā = (f) mercy, compassion. dayā. ·          anukampārthaṁ = (adv.) add ārthaṁ in compound to another word and that shows the purpose. “for the sake of” dayā-hetoḥ. ·          ajñāna-jam = (adj.) “born of ignorance.” – ja is a suffix you can add to any word to make “arising from, born of.” ·          tam as = (n.) darkness. In sandhi, tamo . ·          nāśayāmi = “I destroy, I cause destruction.” (causative of √ naś, naśyati ) ·          ātma-bhāva-stha ḥ = lit. “situated in the love/being of the Self” For ātma-bhāva : Rāmānuja mano-vṛttau, Śaṅkara = antaḥkaraṇa , Śrīdharaḥ = buddhi-vṛttau; "in the mind or function

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