Jagat

Detail of painting of Gauranga by Gadadhar Pran Das. śrī-rādhā-muralī-manohara-padāmbhojaṁ sadā bhāvayan śrī-caitanya-mahāprabhoḥ pada-rajaḥsv ātmānam evārpayan | śrīmad-bhāgavatottamān guṇa-nidhīn atyādarād ānaman śrī-vṛndāvana-divya-vaibhavam ahaṁ stotuṁ mudā prārabhe ||1.1|| Thinking constantly of the lotus feet of Radha and Krishna, who plays his enchanting flute, offering my soul into the dust of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s lotus feet, and most respectfully bowing down to the great and virtuous devotees of the Lord, I joyfully take up the composition of this hymn in praise of the transcendental glories of Sri Vrindavan. (1.1) [ Sonehow I broke the order of posting verses from VMA and started with 1.70 . Now that I have finished the first  śataka , I decided it would be best to go back to the beginning. Once those first 69 verses have been revised and posted, I will decide again how to proceed. ] Commentary Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta was written in the firs...

Gadadhar Pran's Gadadhar Pran. জয় শচীনন্দন, জয় গৌর হরি গদাধর প্রাণ নাথ, নদিয়া বিহারী নিতাই গদাইএর সঙ্গে গৌর জয় জয় যাঁহার কৃপা কটাক্ষে প্রেম ভক্তি হয়. Today is an auspicious day. Let us rejoice that by the grace of Sri Guru we have been able to live our lives in the adventure of following Gauranga Mahaprabhu's conception of reality, along its hundreds and thousands of streams and rivulets. Whereby our brains have been illuminated by contemplation of the the question of Divine Love in all its splendor, Whereby our hearts have been granted the hope to become servants of that Love. Whereby we have been initiated into the mysteries of the Hladini Shakti, whose rays of effulgence shone on the world through him. Whereby we have learned the ecstatic meaning of separation as bliss. Whereby we have learned that all words are a song when they are the Holy Name. And that all words _are_ the Holy Name. All sounds are the Holy Name. Whereby every movement becomes a dance, fo...

3. Mahaprabhu turns back from Kanai Nat Shala The third attempt Mahaprabhu made to go to Vrindavan was more serious, but here again there is a difference in the tone of the stories, with only CCN and CC giving primordial importance to Vrindavan, and CC making the meeting with Rupa and Sanatan the principal, though hidden, purpose of the trip. As we have noted elsewhere, the dates of the MGK are in some dispute and the unity of the composition has been challenged. The date on the manuscripts is given as 1513 AD, but this first trip to Vrindavan also took place in 1515, the successful trip accomplished later in the same year. So this fateful year marked not only the trip to Vrindavan but also the liberation of Rupa and Sanatan from their employ in Hussein Shah's court. Murari Gupta may himself have been the one who filled out the later portions of Mahaprabhu's biography as he heard it from other sources. The style of the later (post-1513) portions does not differ from th...

This article was published in Journal of Vaishnava Studies. Details not available. It was also on Gaudiya Discussions, but I did not have a copy on the blog. So here it is for the record. I have just recorded myself singing the Śikṣāṣṭakam and you can see it on YouTube . I have embedded the video at the end of this document. This article is fairly long for a blog, but I have not split it up. Notes are at the end, but there are no internal links.  No short account of Krishna Chaitanya’s life fails to note something like, “Chaitanya only left eight verses by which we can know his belief system.” But the authorship of even these verses has been cast into some doubt by scholars on the basis of statements by Karnapur and others, who declare unequivocally that Chaitanya wrote nothing at all. Over time, a number of a number of works have been attributed to Chaitanya, but few of these claims are credible. Even the most consistently attributed text, the Radha-prema-rasāyana-stotram ,...

Love and Truth were lovers. Love became the Love of Truth, and Truth became the Truth of Love, and together, they were True Love. Love should be looked at as a verb, not just a noun. Love is as love does. There is no place in love for abuse. Unless we uproot the untruth from our self knowledge, there is no possiblity of love. There are no magical beliefs that we can dress our ignorance in: not even the most noble-sounding of lies, can make us eligible of love. Krishna is a man. Like all men, he thinks he is God. And this is his problem. His lie. Until he gives it up and becomes a man, he is lost to love. This is our current working theory. And because Krishna is a man, having nara-līlā , we have to make the connection to our human lives and our human reality. Here is what Bell Hooks says in her book All About Love : "All my life I have thought of love as primarily a topic women contemplate with greater intensity and vigor than anybody else on this planet. I still hold t...

Bhaktivinoda Thakur's Gaur Gadadhar deities in Svananda Sukhada Kunj This article appeared in its original form in Nitai Das’s little publication, Gifts of Sacred Wonder  (Calcutta: Subarna Rekha, 1985), where it was given the title “The Role of Shakti in Gaura Lila.” This title was somewhat misleading as the article does not fully answer the questions implicit in it. This was my first real publication, and that book is quite a wonderful little collectors’ item, with two article by Nitai, one by Advaita Das, and another by Gadadhar Pran Das, with a lot of nectar in it, despite its many flaws. The follow article was meant to research the various Vaishnava texts for a more complete understanding of Gadadhar Pandit Goswami. The train of thought and the goal of the text were not always clear, so I thought that I would revise it and make it public again. That was done on Gaudiya Discussions in 2004, where the article is still being archived . I am posting it in view of rece...