Jagat

Today was the conclusion of the third year of the Jiva Tirtha program. The audience was small as a number of the students had already trickled back to their homes elsewhere in the world before our final end-day ceremony. Swamini Radhika is also a widely known senior scholar, writer, poet and artist. She has been sharing her appreciation of the vernacular bhakti poets and shared her insights each week to a core group of dedicated listeners. Altogether there was a lot of mutual thanking going on. Babaji complimented the students: It is actually amazing that even this many students have been sufficiently inspired to come and spend six months at their own cost to hear the scriptures from Babaji and, in many cases, to learn Sanskrit. Babaji particularly noted how Manu had managed to convince his boss to have a six months leave every year and still be able to come back to his job in the spring. Many of the students offered testimonials to the transformative nature of hearing shastr...

I went to Delhi on Sunday night for a meeting at the IGNCA where Shrivatsaji was discussing a project for a 10-day program about Braj to be held at the IGNCA next March. He was discussing primarily with Molly Kaushal, who is the head of the Janapada Sampada (or folk arts) division. I sat in on the meeting, which only ran into a little controversy when Shrivatsa mentioned the difficulty he had in getting a certain pandit to come to San Francisco to participate in a conference. This man insisted that he be able to see the very cow that he would drink the milk from. This was of course impossible to arrange for someone staying in a hotel in the downtown of an American city, and so he refused. Ms. Mehtab, a joint secretary at the IGNCA, then said, well this is precisely the kind of person we should refuse to have... And let's have a session on whether this is actually good for anyone... and what about the widows of Braj? And how come 90% of them come from Bengal? After all, isn't t...

After many delays, I finally got to talk to Shrivatsa Goswami today and I am able to report some good news. It looks like the Grantha Mandir is going to get sponsoring directly from the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts . Through Shrivatsa, they have already been mirroring some of our texts, but not keeping up very well. This means that we will probably be able to hire a couple of typists here and in Rishikesh and also find someone who can learn the database program that Madhavananda developed for the site. Madhavananda will be coming to Rishikesh in July and I hope that we can make good progress on this and other counts while he is there. Shrivatsa has been working with IGNCA for a number of years and has published 10 books over that time through them. One of them is, of course, Haberman's fine translation of the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu. Otherwise, we covered a number of other topics. Shrivatsa was in form with his own historical obsession, the politics of 16th century Ch...

A couple of hopeful developments going down on the Gaudiya Grantha Mandir front. I am going to Vrindavan at the end of this month to discuss Bhagavat-sandarbha with Satya Narayan, but also to meet with him and Shrivatsa Goswami about whether there is any way that the GGM project can be pushed ahead. Both of them have recognized the importance of the project and expressed interest in doing something. Let us see whether a spirit of benevolence and cooperation can be established. I have also been asked to speak about the GGM on a video conference that will be held at the Universidad de Antioquia in Bolivia. Of course, what I say there will be more about hope than realities, because the truth is that the current situation at GGM is pretty pathetic. Madhavananda's abdication has left us with even less resources than before. From the time he went to Radha Kund he pretty much stopped keeping the site functioning. Actually, GGM was almost totally dependent on Madhava and his contrib...

I realized that Madhavananda is still with me, despite my having spoken of him twice in the past several days. There is a deep vexation in my mind, of which I need to speak. This feeling has several parts and is in some need of analysis. *** At the root of it is a deep sadness that he did not love Radha and Krishna like I do. That he did not love the devotees, even the most kanishtha among them, that he did not love Vrindavan, Govardhan and Radha Kund, despite the thick overlay of rajas and tamo-gunas that are such an obstacle to that love. That he did not love us enough to recognize that we loved him. Yes, it is all very well and good to talk siddhanta, but the real problem was, as he himself seems to have recognized, in the area of emotional fitness. But even there, I am still saddened by the fact that there was not enough love to keep him around. Ah well, enough said. Madhava is Radharani’s own dasi, and if he wants to avoid that truth for another lifetime or two, let him. Let him...

I have quite a bit of work to do before leaving for India. I am trying to juggle several tasks, and when that happens, I usually short-circuit and do the least urgent thing on my program. And that, for me, is the Grantha Mandir. Since I spent the whole weekend going through the first thirty pages of Satya Narayan Dasji's Bhagavat-sandarbha , which has quite a number of references to Sanskrit grammar texts, including Jiva's  Harināmāmṛtam , and since it seems I am going to be spending time teaching Sanskrit in India, I though I would try to do a bit of  Harināmāmṛta - vyākaraṇa . In Nabadwip, back in 1976 or thereabouts, I started studying HNV with Kunjabihari Brahmachari at the Devanananda Gaudiya Math. I did not last very long. I have already gone past the point that we reached after several lessons. I was memorizing the verses and sutras with him. But since my Bengali was not very good and the Brahmachari's English was worse, we did not make much progress. I can still r...

I have been busy with the Grantha Mandira of late, fixing up the Bhagavad-gītā section where I have now merged all the separate chapters into whole volumes for Ramanuja, Shankara and the four commentaries of Sridhara Swami, Madhusudana Saraswati, Vishwanath and Baladeva. Ironically, as I was working on this, I ran into this famous passage that someone quoted from one of Bhaktivedanta Swami's lectures: Sankirtan means you discuss Krishna's activities, that is also sankirtan. It is as pure… Otherwise, what interest we have got to read Bhagavad-gītā ?... Therefore, those who are sahajīyās, they simply go to the pastimes of Lord Krishna with the gopis…. That is, they differentiate the absolute activities of the Absolute. That is called sahajīyā. The sahajiyas will never read Bhagavad-gītā , because they have been elevated to the mellows of conjugal love. Therefore they have no interest in Bhagavad-gītā . So when you discuss Srimad Bhagavatam on the philosophical points, they...

Madhavanandaji has finally sprung back into action on the GGM, which has being lying without any input from me or anyone else in over a year. That has not stopped people from downloading texts to the tune of nearly 400,000, not including the archive. There are a large number of changes and updates that need to be made. I am looking forward to seeing this project get some life back into it.

Anybody who knows me will be aware of the Gaudiya Grantha Mandir . I haven't been able to do much on there lately, for many reasons. One being that the software that we use has been rendered inactive, making it impossible for me to upload documents or to edit the pages. A few months ago, I thought it might be possible to seek donations or grants to further the objectives of the site, but not much came of that. Now that it has become pretty much impossible for me to interact with the site itself, the question has become moot. Our webmaster, who is after all a volunteer himself, has not been able to find the time to take care of it. I personally should not have the time either. Not even my partners seem to see the importance of this project, which distresses me no end. Most of the texts that have been uploaded are in lamentable condition. I am constantly making corrections, but how much can one person do, especially when there are so many other things that need getting done? Most...