A change in direction now that Karttik is coming upon us

The roof at Parananda Sukhada Kunj. There is some painting work to be don. I am thinking to have some shlokas painted on the walls, either from VMA or RRSN or maybe Dhruvadas.

yad rādhā-pada-kiṅkarī-kṛta-hṛdā samyag bhaved gocaraṁ
dhyeyaṁ naiva kadāpi yad dhṛdi vinā tasyāḥ kṛpā-sparśataḥ |
yat premāmṛta-sindhu-sāra-rasadaṁ pāpaika-bhājām api
tad vṛndāvana-duṣpraveśa-mahimāścaryaṁ hṛdi sphūrjatu ||

May the wondrous glories of Vrindavan,
the understanding of which is so difficult to reach,
which are only completely accessible to the heart
that has become absorbed in service to Radha's lotus feet,
which can never be meditated upon without the touch of Radha's mercy,
and which bestows the flavors of the essence of the ocean of nectar of Prema,
be manifest even to those who are devoted to a sinful life, like me.

(RRSN 266)

Madness is best reserved for the silence of the night
when one's alone, without reservations, and out of sight.

I probably have never become more deeply involved with a project as I currently am with Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta. Especially while in Canada, I found it necessary to keep contact with the Dham through these meditations.

Since I have spent a lot of my life working on other people's translations and original writing, editing and correcting, I am now in the habit of prefering to start from a previous translation and then keep refining it until I am satisfied. In this particular case I have been using Kushakratha's translation as a starting point. On occasion, I am quite delighted with his rendering, at others I find it in radical need of transformation.

Kushakratha was definitely a brilliant man and he did a great ambitious work in attempting to translate literally everything that was in the corpus. Now Bhanu Swami is doing something similar but with a team of translators, so his work is much more reliable where the literal meaning is concerned. And of course, we have been doing the same thing at Jiva with the Sandarbhas.

Kushakratha unfortunately often sacrificed such accuracy for alacrity. No matter, he does as he probably well knew offer a starting point for reflection and inquiry. It goes without saying that the Bengali and Hindi translations are helpful also. But mostly I work with the original Sanskrit and then rework KK's translation and only refer back to the Bengali and Hindi when I encounter problems.

What prompted me to start writing this reflection was that my memory seems to retain very little. I have done a lot of work on the scriptures, some of which I have engaged with on a profound level. Many of these have not been published for various reasons, most of which are excuses that should have been dispensed with ages ago. But I find it more problematic that my retention is so low, not just for the shlokas themselves, which I wish would remain anchored in my brain after repeated study, but for general content.

I have now gone through these first two chapters several times now, but not the rest of the book, other than snippets here and there. In other words I cannot yet say that I have studied the entire book profoundly. But I still cannot say that I have discerned the patterns or profound subtleties of the work as yet. And that leads me to recognize that very little of anything that I have studied and worked on in my life is so strongly imprinted on my mind that I could do it justice when it came to explaining or describing it.

At the same time, there is a kind of new pleasure that comes from rereading a text that I worked on in depth and getting a feeling that I never saw this before. There is a frequently used phrase nava- navāyamānatvam. It is as if one sees something for the first time, even though it has been seen many times before. (nava-navatvaṁ muhur ananubhūta-pūrvatvam.) This is given as the principal characteristic of anurāga, which is discussed in the introduction to Dana-keli-kaumudé.

I heard that Kushakratha had such an appetite to go through the entire corpus of Gaudiya writings that once he had finished translating a verse to his satisfaction – and I assume that he set his bar sufficiently low that, if there was something he did not understand, it would not stop him from pushing on in order to get that first draft out there, presumably hoping that someone else would come along and fix it. Leaving his ucchiṣṭa, as it were. I have also been afflicted with the same ambitions: the business of writing and researching and becoming lost in the vast ocean of texts is a kind of luxury that imposes itself on my greedy mind. One of the reasons that so few of my books has been published is precisely because I always felt that they were not finished. Well, that has to end.

I have given attention to several books through my career. Mañjarī-svarūpa-nirūpaṇa was definitely a milestone in my bhajan life. I worked on it at Shringar Bat when I was still fresh and eager for rāgānugā bhajana in my newly obtained mañjarī-svarūpa. Ananta Das was nearby at the Keshi Ghat Thor, doing his translation and commentary on Rādhā-rasa-sudhā-nidhi . was also the place where I first started to get interested in Gopāla-campū aslo. Harinam Press had just come out with their edition and I was reading it and even got in an argument about it with the Gosai there, since he did not know how Jiva Goswami wrote that the real Krishna was born of Yashoda in Gokula and it was Vasudeva Krishna who was born in Kamsa's prison. At any rate, it is returning to these works that makes me realize how little I have retained. It is not imprinted on my memory in the way that I wished it was.

VMA has become more who I am than anything I ever did before. When I decided to post it on my blog and so started going over it for what is about the third time. The work has been interspersed with long periods of inactivity – the first draft for most of what I uploaded was written more than five years ago and was posted on Vrindavan Today. I only began to add newly composed commentaries while I was in Canada (where, incidentally, a lot of the first draft was written. On returning to Vrindavan, I was at VMA 2.56 which prompted me to give another look at Mañjarī-svarūpa-nirūpaṇa, and I ended up using bits of it in the commentaries up to 2.59. It is looking pretty good and it is a shame that no pakka printed edition has been made of it yet.

The text there was gone over rather nicely by Neal Delmonico (Nitai Das), who made numerous improvements simply in making the English a little more felicitous. Jīvera svarūpa o svadharma

, which I worked on in I think in around 1982, it was the first time that I had taken on a complete book as a project, but it was published by Gauraray Goswami without any further editing, as far as I know. I probably worked on MSN later in that same year. I did revise it once and so there are now several versions that have been made public.

At any rate it is time that the MSN came out in pakka printed form. With the work that Neal did on it, an index and nice formatting, it would make it a beautiful addition to any aspiring rāgānugā bhakta's library. Indeed, I would call it the indispensible rāgānugā textbook. It certainly will have the qualities of nava- navāyamānatvam, as I myself have been finding.

---

So I may as well take this opportunity to say that I will take volunteers
to finish the index and to do the layout.

I wanted to publish this as a real book before Ananta Das Pandit rejoined the eternal dust of Radha Kund to join the Divine Couple's midday pastimes. And I have more recently talked to Babaji about actually publishing it, as a show of homage to Pandit Maharaj.

And if anyone is willing to help pay for it, 
please step forth and be counted!!

[end of infomercial]

---

Sometimes I think that my ambition to post something every day, just for the discipline of it, is overly ambitious. I have just completed 2.60 and did so knowing that I will probably have stop for a while. It is approaching Karttik when we will be resuming the Jiva Tirtha courses and I will be busy with classes and also returning to other duties and leftover business that has been neglected too long. It is a bit of a bad point to do so, just as I was reconnecting with the MSN on my return to Vrindavan and feeling a surge of faith in rāgānugā bhakti. But I will need to move VMA a bit onto the back burner. As I have said, Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta was Prabodhananda Saraswatipada's life's end project, and Vrindavan residence is a life's end project. But my work in Vrindavan needs to reflect my relation with Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji and the mission that has been set for the Jiva Institute.

---