Jagat

I was reflecting on my Gopala Champu class for which I had not prepared myself properly and wrote: The sin of a translator, of which I am often guilty, is to start translating before becoming the original.   How do you become the original? Samadhi. By which I mean you should at least completely forget the language of arrival for as long as it takes to get to the end of the passage you are translating. In other words, not to translate. To get to the point of not translating. I don't particularly like the "mysterious" style. I am more of a verbose and boring explainer. So I began to examine what provoked those thoughts. In my class, I explain the passage word by word, so I am translating right from the very beginning. If I haven't understood the passage properly before I start that process, then in the public situation I will only produce an unclear sense, or one that deviates from the purpose of the passage. We were doing GC 1.1.17 and tomorrow we will have to...

    1.2 Bālya-vilāsa The second campū ( pūraṇas 3-14) contains the description of Krishna's birth and boyhood. Chapter 3: Krishna's birth, the fortune that fulfilled the desire of people of Vraja. In this chapter, the two brothers, Madhukantha and Snigdhakantha, begin their narration of Krishna's life. Madhukantha first takes the primary role of the recitation, while Snigdhakantha asks questions and provides asides and footnotes to his speech. Taking up a Vraja-centred approach which places the Vrindavan Krishna in a position of ontological superiority over the Krishna of Mathura, Jiva does not follow the familiar narrative sequence found in the Puranas, but rather gives an account of Nanda and Yashoda's family background, their desire for a son and the fulfilment of that desire. The chapter contains a number of scholastic arguments to support this contravention of the traditional view. [One can look here at Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha 174, etc., for further details.] Fi...

Divine Madness The reference to mahā-bhāva made by Kaviraja Goswami is particularly worth noting (quoted in Part I ). The principal characteristic, I believe, is the idea of a particular eternal moment or snapshot, containing all these different conflicting reactions to one particularly confusing situation. In the mahā-bhāva , as described in UN 14, Radha experiences both the ecstasies of union and separation simultaneously. Here, something similar is happening. As we go through the sthāyi-bhāvas described in Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi , what becomes evident to the observer is that we are watching a progression of madness in love--a disorientation that progresses to the point of a complete loss of touch with reality: e.g., attributing properties to lifeless objects and even being angry and envious of them, hallucinations, seeing the beloved where he is not, etc. If, as the Gītā (2.69) says, the sage sees day where the materialistic person sees night, and vice versa, it follows that what is...