Jagat

Just imagine if you were brought up speaking Sanskrit. Do you think that you would have a different sort of brain? I have spent a lot of time thinking about the psychology of language and identity. Identity is central to raganuga bhakti, both on the level of the sadhaka deha and the siddha deha. I was thinking about this earlier (since in class I had mentioned that you more or less have to be crazy to want to learn Sanskrit). We were discussing this verse as an illustration of different classes of athematic verbs being used in the same sentence, all in the third person singular. The following verse has six verbs, each from a different class: ददाति प्रतिगृह्णाति गुह्यमाख्याति पृच्छति । भुङ्क्ते भोजायते चैव षड्विधं प्रीतिलक्षणम् ॥ One gives and accepts [one another’s gifts], one tells and inquires about one another’s private matters, one eats what the other offers and one invites the other to eat. These are the six kinds of signs of love. ( Upadeśāmṛta 4) Here √दा, ददाति (3P), √ग्रह्, गृ...

I came across my original recording of "Chanting Sanskrit mantras." So I posted them to my Soundcloud page ( https://soundcloud.com/jagadananda-das-168494194 ).  Chanting Sanskrit verses (recording) . The written document can be found on this blog: Chanting Sanskrit verses (text) . It is old now and it could no doubt have been done better, more professionally. But this is what is out there. This recording was made in about 2000 if I remember correctly, in Ste-Adele at Mahavirya Das 's studio.

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 ,...