Jagat

There is a great deal of difference of flavors even within the madhura-rasa worship of Radha and Krishna. The idea that Radha is a symbol of the jiva and Krishna God, and that a direct erotic relationship with the Deity is being intended, is not a new one. That is in fact the symbolic situation that Mahaprabhu incarnates, but the one that Rupa Goswami stepped beyond. By seeing Mahaprabhu as the combination of Radha and Krishna, by placing Radha and Krishna on an equal footing and conceiving of God as a Dual, and then jiva as a servant of that Dual Supreme, Rupa Goswami was coming up with something original. When trying to understand a text according to the Vedantic hermeneutics, there are six things we take into account, one being apūrvatā , or the original something new. All the other relationships are there and are no doubt very nice and legitimate, but when we talk about Rupa Goswami and want to know what it is he is getting at, the anarpita-carī , then this certainly qualifie...

I am racing along trying to do a quick first edit of the translation and commentary to Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha . My thought for the day: I would say that by any objective measure, the six Sandarbhas are a chef d'oeuvre. It is said dhanaṁjaye hāṭaka-samparīkṣā mahāraṇe śastrabhṛtāṁ parīkṣā| vipatti-kāle gṛhiṇī-parīkṣā vidyāvatāṁ bhāgavate parīkṣā|| One tests gold in the fire, the wielder of weapons in battle, the wife in times of difficulty, but the test of the learned is in their mastery of the Bhagavatam. What a book the Bhāgavatam is, and what mastery to make sense of it all! First he argues, boldly, that this is the ultimate authority. Then he says, Now this is what the Bhagavatam says. There are many, many things in the Bhagavatam, but what is the consistent and fundamental teaching, and how do we deal with apparent contradictions? And how can you defend your position? When you chop up the Bhāgavatam in this way, distilling the important elements, rejecting those port...

A big question that is frequently asked of me is about where I get the authority to say things, i.e., about my sources of knowledge, or pramāṇa . This is what we call epistemology: How do we know what we know? Many devotees are appropriately very attached to the words of śāstra and their gurus. I have myself spent most of my life in a study of the Sanskrit and Bengali texts related to our school of thought out of a great respect for our acharyas, a respect that was instilled in me by Srila Prabhupada himself. As a result, I have long contemplated the value and meaning of these texts, along with my spiritual practices, and come to certain conclusions. In the article linked to above, I simply wrote that I had no pramāṇas for my spiritual path, but this of course is not entirely true. I still need to know that what "I know" is real knowledge. So I do have a position on pramāṇas , which is as follows: Pramāṇa is used in argumentation to verify one's position, to es...