Jagat

Facebook memories from June 25:  A fairly heavy day with lots of comments: Many of the items are on the  blog.  The headline  article  is from Longfellow's poem that inspired Bhaktivinoda.  Another post from 2011 about a revised and educated faith that comes after a life of engaging with doubt.

Sunset on te banks of the Yamuna. PC Thinking Particle I have usually avoided talking about environmental issues on this blog. Vrindavan Today was really meant for that, and I am really happy that Jagannath Poddar is taking the environmental side of Vrindavan consciousness very seriously and is leading Vrindavan Today into a more activist direction.  Part of the Braj Vrindavan Heritage Alliance (BVHA) strategy that I participated in was to administer the Save Yamuna to Save Vrindavan FB page that was first started by Vaishnavacharya Chandan Goswami . It is now being jointly run by me and Katie Jo WalterShoemaker . Katie Jo, like many others, is driven to distraction by the state of the world environment, and like many people whose heart lies in Vrindavan, is trying to do something about it by focusing on the Yamuna and water issues.. The more I think about it, an active environmentalism should be an essential part of the Krishna conscious movement. It is someth...

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...

The story I began yesterday has a couple of months. This letter, composed to present our case to lawyers, will serve to provide you with the setting for events that will follow. One of my friends coined the term "Paundraka Vrindavan Today" and I found it useful and so have been using it. Paundraka is a lesser known character from the Krishna cycle in the Bhagavatam. He claimed to be the real Vasudeva, and much like the carpenter in Panchatantra  he attached wooden arms to his body to give the appearance of having four arms in order to fool the gullible. Here then is a summary of the events related to my Vrindavan Today project (All glories to Vrindavan Dham! All glories to the Brajavasis! All glories to the Vaishnavas!) as the drama has unfolded over the past couple of months. I earlier gave a briefer version over on VT itself . To whom it may concern: My name is Jagadananda Das (PhD in Sanskrit from London SOAS). I teach Sanskrit at the Jiva Institute in Vrindav...

Yesterday was Prabodhananda Saraswati’s tirobhava tithi. Jagannath and Tamal Prabhu organized a meeting of Vaishnavas at the samadhi in Kalidaha. I went at 5 when it was to begin and found several sannyasis from the Gaudiya Math, Gopananda Bon Maharaj and Bhaktivedanta Madhusudan Maharaj were sitting on in front of the samadhi temple. Prawal and I went to visit Siddha Jagadish Das Baba’s samadhi, which is just next door. We met Prem Das Shastri there and exchanged a few words. Amazingly enough, there has only been a celebration here for two years now. The ashram is a poor babaji ashram, and I suspect that there was no celebration of Prabodhananda's tithi, sampradaya-wide, for many, many years. Last year, for the first time, Jagannath Poddar and Tamal Krishna Brahmachari of Imli Tala decided that Prabodhananda Saraswati was too important a figure in the history of Vrindavan that a meeting to discuss his contribution was a necessity. The place is itself small and has been bro...