Jagat

kiṁ brūmo'nyatra kuṇṭhī-kṛtaka-jana-pade dhāmny api śrī-vikuṇṭhe rādhā-mādhurya-vettā madhupatir atha tan-mādhurīṁ vetti rādhā | vṛndāraṇya-sthalīyaṁ parama-rasa-sudhā-mādhurīṇāṁ dhurīṇā tad-dvandva-svādanīyaṁ sakalam api dadau rādhikā-kiṅkarīṇām || In this land of Vrindavan, Krishna knows Radha's sweetness and Radha knows the sweetness of Krishna. But can we say the same of other places, even the Holy Dham of Vaikuntha, which renders insignificant the abodes of Brahma and other gods and men [where no one knows either of them]? This abode of Vrinda's forest is charged with all the varieties of sweetness of the ambrosia of the highest rasa and it has bestowed everything this Yugala relishes to Radha's dasis [alone]. (RRSN 175) Now there is a siddhānta . Prabodhananda is interesting in that he is one of the few personalities who seems to be accepted by all the Vrindavan sampradāyas, thought there may be some differences of detail. In this verse, however, his attit...

Today is Radhashtami.  The verse 10.82.49, quoted in the previous file, after his ambiguous instructions in the soul. Just thinking again, I was remembering that the Mahābhārata has an Anugīta , which is much more advaita in its philosophical orientation. Maybe this was a response. The verses Krishna spoke are as follows: gopyaś ca kṛṣṇam upalabhya cirād abhīṣṭaṁ yat-prekṣaṇe dṛśiṣu pakṣma-kṛtaṁ śapanti dṛgbhir hṛdīkṛtam alaṁ parirabhya sarvās tad-bhāvam āpur api nitya-yujāṁ durāpam The gopis saw their beloved Krishna [at Kurukshetra] after their long separation. They cursed the creator for creating eyelids that interfered with their vision, [and so] they secured him in their hearts through their eyes and embraced, and thus attained a depth of emotion so intense that not even those who are with him in eternal union can attain it. (10.82.40) So right away you can see this theme of separation being more powerful than union, and the mental more powerful than the phy...

Since I came to Canada, I have been keeping myself busy with the Vrindavan Today project. I have been posting a daily verse from Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta there, with commentaries of varying lengths. I am also working on Śrī-kṛṣṇa-sandarbha to the extent that I can. Some friends have told me they miss having anything new to read here, so I though I would share something from that work. Although the theme is familiar and I have gone through it many times, correcting the translation of Jiva Goswami's explanations has been having quite an effect on me. The subject under discussion is the mantropāsanā-mayī and svārasikī līlā , separation and union, and the prakaṭa and aprakaṭa prakāśas . It has been going on since Section 153, so it is rather a long and somewhat complex matter. Suffice it to say that the bulk of the discussion is around the instructions that Krishna gave his parents and then the gopis through Uddhava, instruction which to an uneducated eye look suspiciously like tea...

I am pleased to say that on Guru Purnima, I finally completed the Yoga Tarangini project and handed camera ready copy to Swami Veda Bharati to be sent for publication. Jai Guru. I have been told that the book will be printed as a combined AHYMSIN and Motilal Banarsidass production. All this commuting back and forth from Vrindavan to RIshikesh has been very revealing. And I can tell you, of the two I am definitely a Vrindavan person. There is just a little bit of yogi lurking in there that still cries out for attention, but my impression is that the clock is running out on that. What is yoga has pretty much been assimilated and we move on in the direction of primarily bhakti, as always. On returning to Vrindavan, I have been rushing around trying to get the Vrindavan Today project working again, and I have been singing , a lot. kathā gānaṁ nṛtyaṁ gamanam api . Yoga Tarangini was a great project. Swami Veda asked me to do it, he hired me. I took it seriously and tried hard to do a ...

I was recently added to a group on Facebook called Devotional Poetry , where a few devotees have been sharing their compositions and their love of language (English only, of course). I am not a compulsive poet, nor a regular practitioner of the craft. If I am a poet at all, it is more of an impulsive one, who occasionally is driven by some inspiration or emotional turbulence to express myself. So I haven't written a great deal, and when I do, it admittedly tends to the maudlin because of the excessive charge of immediate, unprocessed feelings. But without the charge of personal feeling, if a poem is only repetition of another's thoughts, or didactic/intellectual alone, then it loses its edge or capacity to produce rasa . In these cases, what we get is bhāva , not rasa . The thing about writing, poetry or any kind of literature or artistic production, according to rasa theory, is that it takes emotions ( bhāva ) out of the realm of the purely personal. Personal experie...

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...

If you don’t know your instrument, then how will you play any music? Knowing the body is knowing the instrument of spiritual perfection, the god-given gift, the human body. The gross body is the outermost layer. That is the one we identify with in the lowest stage of consciousness. That does not mean it is rejected. Indeed, our first encounter with the miraculous is to see this body with the mind. ṣaṭ-cakraṁ ṣoḍaśādhāraṁ tri-lakṣyaṁ vyoma-pañcakam | sva-dehe ye na jānanti kathaṁ siddhyanti yoginaḥ || eka-stambhaṁ nava-dvāraṁ gṛhaṁ pañcādhidaivatam | sva-dehe ye na jānanti kathaṁ siddhyanti yoginaḥ ||14|| 1.13 How can those yogis succeed who do not know the six wheels ( cakras ), the sixteen containers ( ādhāra ), the three targets ( lakṣya ) and the five skies ( vyoma ) in their own body? 1.14. How can those yogis who do not know the home, which has a single pillar, nine doors and five divinities ( adhidaivata ), which is present in their own body, ever attain success...

"So, you are 65 and you wasted your whole life being a Krishna devotee, and now here you are stuck with this stupid religion and you got nowhere to go. So now what to do?" Well, you came this far, you might as well just keep moving in the direction of Love. I see a lot of other people in this boat; maybe they are drawn to me because of what they perceive as a similar attitude of cynicism, but in fact I am not one to regret the past. We are finally puppets in the hands of Time, after all, and our lives are so conditioned that self-knowledge is something of a fool's errand. So I take responsibility for the pain I have caused others and the mistakes I have made, with regret and sadness for as long as I contemplate their suffering. And I do contemplate it, for it is only in understanding the suffering that one causes that one can eliminate the causes of suffering. I have tried to look at religion and Vaishnavism from both inside and out, just to try to make sense o...

I can't say I particularly care for watching myself on video. I get very squeamish. But anyway, Kryszna Kirtan has made these available. So, here are some more lectures on Radha-rasa-sudha-nidhi from last Karttik at Munger temple.

So in my last post, I spoke a little of my own experience on the Sahajiya path and how I found that the experiment as I had been conducting it had been deemed a failure. I was contemplating whether one should be pessimistic about my philosophical understanding, in view of the seeming rarity of success. In actual fact, what is happening, my friends, is that we are giving the juices time to ferment. I really do not know what the outcome of this experiment will be, because whatever happens, the repercussions of it will remain. In other words, very strong samskaras were created in the last ten years, and I really don't think it will be possible for me in the long run to accept the orthodox position, as expressed to me by a friend: This world is a shadow of the spiritual world and so resemblances exist in form....but not in substance. Male and female forms exist both here and there, so there is a slight resemblance of form. However the substance is entirely different. Visvanath Cakr...

Sorry, the internal links for footnotes don't work. III. Women saints in the modern era The primary source of information for women saints of the modern period is O.B.L. Kapoor's Hindi Braj ke bhakta (46) Altogether, there are only twelve woman saints described in Braj ke bhakta , of which only five can be considered Gaudiyas. Though these women are respected for their saintliness, only one (Sadhu Ma) is a leader in the sense of being an initiating guru. It is no coincidence that she was born into one of the great Gaudiya initiating families, that of Advaita Acharya. Otherwise, they were all also born in well-to-do families. Of the three who were Bengali, all were Brahmins. All twelve women whose biographies appear in Kapoor's book are renunciates, showing perhaps more the bias of what that author expected a "saint” to be like, and are thus not necessarily representative of true saintliness. Taken as a whole, the women of Braj ke bhakta show, as might be...

[ This is an article from a few years back. It feels like it is in need of some work. But since I may need it for reference, I am putting it back on line, as I don't think it is available anywhere. Sorry, the internal links for footnotes don't work. ] There are few traditional societies in which women have played a dominant historical role. In this respect, Gaudiya Vaishnavism is no different. The egalitarianism of bhakti movements, which stress the universality of devotion and deny any disqualifications based on birth, sex, or caste, seems to have had limited real effects on the actual social circumstances of any of these classes of people. There are some, including the eminent Bengali historian, Ramakanta Chakravarti, who feel that the status of women was improved in Chaitanya Vaishnavism, mainly due to the singular example of Jahnava Devi. (1) Indeed, it does appear that literacy rates among women (and men) in Vaishnava castes in Bengal were somewhat higher than in other, ...