So Abhishek came by today. I know several Abhisheks, but this one is a young man in his mid to late twenties who has a good job in Delhi in a bank. He is from Vrindavan and a longtime friend of Jiva and I believe he took mantra from Maharaj, if I am not mistaken. At any rate, he is Babaji's disciple. An ambitious young man with a forward attitude, but prides himself in efficiency and good work. Babaji has put him on my case about the visa and citizenship process that are currently occupying an insufficient amount of space in my consciousness, as I have sunk into a marvelous sinkhole of rajas and tamas since my too pure for words beginning to the Purushottam vrata.
So he came by my room and afterwards I looked around at it and it showed the untidy state my mind has gotten to. Books are strewn, the bed is not made, Giridhari and his altar look forlorn and neglected.
Of course, Purushottama means he is the One-in-Charge, as we most certainly believe, and so I credit him with the complete reversal of my mood from the beginning of the month. Perhaps it has something to do with the rising moon, since Purushottam started from the Amavasya.
Whatever the case, I have been living in my zone for the past months, and that zone is, by virtue of the fact that I am at Jiva and in the association of some big devotional brains, I have not escaped the mood of the place. Especially since the pressure to take my responsibility for Prīti Sandarbha is always there.
Today I was notified that the final editor of the text, Nabadwip, is more than halfway through Bhakti Sandarbha. So this is a bit why I have been working like crazy on Brihad Bhagavatamrita and the manual. Now I have two students at different times, so a lot of the smaller problems with the manual are coming to light. It has almost doubled in length and I am afraid that may be a little excessive. For a student to get through the whole thing in a year might be too much to ask.
Anyway, my real objective if I can try to distill it, is to get the student prepared for a reading course like we are doing with Brihad Bhagavatamrita. So the two tasks went hand-in-hand. Sanatana Goswami is actually a very appealing author. This book really has to be read with the commentary, because that is where he quotes so much from the Bhagavatam and other Puranas in order to put in place a clear hierarchy of devotion in accordance with the Bhagavata, in particular placing the gopis, and Radha among them, as the topmost of all the models of devotion.
Friday Babaji finished going through the Rāga-vartma-candrikā, which resulted in many discussions on rāgānugā bhakti. Babaji was stressing throughout that the message of the book was not quite what most modern-day raganuga bhaktas, or so-called raganuga bhaktas think. Vishwanath Thakur trying to put a little bit of order into the sampradāya, it would seem, and as Babaji brought out in the course was the Radha Vallabhi sampradāya. This was of course in discussing the obligatory nature of following the Ekadashi fast. But it is perhaps not just there that Vishwanath is fretting about the Radha Vallabhis in other descriptions of erroneous ways of looking at rāgānugā sādhana.
And there he put the taking of a guru at the head of the line, because in Bhakti-rasāmr̥ta-sindhu that is a universal principle. One takes a guru who follows the raganuga path and you serve him and the mercy will be forthcoming. He repeatedly said that you cannot just get it from a book. Because it is sevā sādhaka rūpeṇa siddha-rūpeṇa cātra hi. And the essential part of sādhana is ultimately sat-saṅga, since everything else flows from the grace of the devotees and the guru.
It takes a lot of strength to be able to speak on the necessity of guru, but it was making a big impression on everyone. Not a bad vibe.
Let me say, if I had feelings of competitiveness with Babaji, they are almost entirely dissipated. He is very learned and it is a pleasure to go through these texts with him. I was observing that he has made far more progress in the last few years than I have. I think he has been spending time memorizing verses from his big verse book. He recites more verses than ever before, and seemingly from all the branches of his knowledge, and he always seems to find relevance for his knowledge of the six darshans and so on. He is quite insane to offer a course on Mimamsa to what is predominantly a Vaishnava audience, but he is also interested in exploring the knowledge universe of Sri Jiva Goswami. And, of course, living in the modern context, in whatever way we can make it relevant and meaningful to today's world.
If I want this Sanskrit course and the Brihad Bhagavatamrita to be a fundamental part of what Jiva Institute offers. To become, in a sense, indispensible. Not for my own positioning, but because it is necessary. I stated in the beginning that the Grantha Mandira was meant to represent the knowledge-universe of Jiva Goswami. Of course, a lot of things were added later from Vishwanath and so on, but for most of the time Jiva Goswami was set as the fulcrum point of the Gaudiya Vaishnava knoweldge-world.
The Grantha Mandir started out with me trying to race through the entire corpus of texts in order to have searchable texts to consult. I knew they were full of mistakes and I knew this also, that editing is really where you have to read a book more closely. Now even this work I just did on Brihad Bhagavatamrita, was a first reading really, since I never typed this one out myself. Vilasa has gotten some individuals to scan text and then use of Optical Character Recognition and convert it to transliterated form.
This has actually been great for us, and we even have a partner in South India who is also trying to do something similar, so this has meant an abundance of mostly unedited material. Now even the old stuff was in serious need of editing, as the readings in Rāga-vartma-candrikā revealed glaringly enough. Who knows where I got that text, but anyway it has been updated if you are interested.
Braj Mohan Dasji is the one who has been doing the scanning and converting of the text. He has been doing this for two years now, but his knowledge of Sanskrit is still not even at the beginners level. He is pretty accurate at reproducing exactly what was in the printed text he is using, but he gives it in a raw, undigested form. So I told him to come and start taking Sanskrit with me right away because there is no point in doing all that textual work without understanding anything of what is going on. And I need to train editors.
So basically this accounts for my insane kind of Silicon Valley mindset. Ha ha. Okay let me dial down a bit. I am not quite that bad, but I really have been overloading on tea and by staying off the internet I have managed to become quite concentrated, much more than has been the case for the last couple of years, like ever since I was a kid. A lifetime with attention deficit disorder, thankfully undiagnosed. Its results, as they manifest themselves in my own experience, is that one is overwhelmed with a mountain of unfinished projects, which are like ghosts that are constantly haunting me. And something else always seems to be a priority.
In this case of course, it is all a part of a global effort. I have to give priority to Priti Sandarbha because the project has been way to long in undergoing completion.
interruption for Babaji's Rāsa-līlā class, every Sunday for some time. Really amazing verses and the commentaries are so expansive and detailed, how the gopis are answering Krishna's instructions to go back home and to serve their husbands. How it is being explained from the point of view of the vivarta-vāda, or from mīmāṁsā or whatever other philosophical school.
I remember reading S.K. De's criticism of Rupa Goswami for having the gopis holding such lofty philosophical and theological sentences, spoken in the courtly Sanskrit of the classical poets. Where is the simple milkmaid in all this? {he cried}. But it seems to be a favorite among the learned poets from times long past, ever since the gopis sprang onto the cultural scene and became the language of poetic love.
It is a bit puzzling, but rasa is relished by different people in different ways. The word saṁskr̥ta means refined. It is a noble way of speech. But the ability to relish rasa, at least the literary kind, is to become trained in the ways of the courtly romantic speech. We have so much to joke about? Krishna being a hog in a previous incarnation, and all kinds of other strange behaviors in the different incarnations. This went on even in Krishna Kirtan by Chandidas, which I was writing about a few years ago [one of those unfinished projects I spoke of...], making fun of each other by reference to the mythological deeds of Vishnu in his various incarnations. And Krishna also makes use of it, "I am Narayan and you are Lakshmi, so we are eternally husband and wife. The present situation has nothing to do with it."
So Abhishek is going to help me with the visa and citizenship problem.
You know, I did not write about my 50th anniversary. Oct. 1, I celebrate it in my mind as the anniversary of my joining the temple in Toronto. That was in 1970. So a whole lifetime has gone by, a whole lifetime that I really gave over to Srila Prabhupada and to the goals that he gave me. To become Krishna conscious, bolo krishna, bhaja krishna, koro krishna siksha. Bhaktivinoda Thakur's words.
I feel that I have been fortunate in my life to be able to scratch the surface of Krishna bhakti. It was Srila Prabhupada who translated my teenage malaise into a fundamental reorientation in the way I looked at the world. The ever changing temporal world could never be the field of fulfilment, that had to be sought elsewhere, internally in the search for the Soul of the soul, and to live in the reality of that love, that exists between the part and the Whole.
And for everything there is a path for getting there. There may be different paths, but the path to Krishna is a unique one. There are general yamas and niyamas that everyone should follow, regardless of the particular path, but the inner practices are all organized around remembering one's siddha-svarupa engaged in service to Radha and Krishna in Vrindavan, in that world where all the features of the heavenly world set the scene for their extraordinary love adventures. Those are the particularities of our path, and when there are particularities there have to be specialists. Specialists in their own path, but also expert in the other practices that enhance the strength of character, that make one a hero on the spiritual path.
The path of raganuga bhakti truly does path through citizenship of India. I have been saying since who knows how long, that bhakti is a sadhana of identity, and really one has to struggle to understand the mentality of the rishis and great sadhakas and bhaktas. You have to pass through their world. And if you have an intellectual bent, then these books and commentaries are an ocean in which the dolphins play.
In Rāga-vartma-candrikā, as well as his commentaries to BRS, Vishwanath explains the necessity for taking birth in the prakaṭa-līlā manifestation, which is always going on somewhere. Because, he explains, if you just popped into the lila fully grown and so on, but had no history, no relation to the community, then the aspects of the ordinary human life that are a backdrop to all these pastimes would not be present. He thereby shows the importance of saṁskāra. Like Bhaktivinoda Thakur says, "vraja gopi bhava, hoibek svabhava, an bhava na rahibe." I will take birth in Gokula and be married and so on. That will be the vastu siddhi, when the identity itself becomes real.
Funnily enough, one of the arguments the gopis gave to Krishna in 10.29.32 was that Krishna was giving instructions, but he did not put his money where his mouth was. So, they said, if you want to tell us what to do, you first have to set the example. So you become a woman, like Ajita became Mohini, find yourself a husband and serve him. Then when you have become expert, you come back and tell us what to do."
So I said, "Mahaprabhu?" And Babaji said, "No Mahaprabhu had a male body and he even got married twice. But the gopis are saying you must take birth as women and experience it for real, not just experiencing some bhavas."
The main thing about Rāga-vartma-candrikā was that it was defining lobha. At the end of the series, someone asked again about lobha, saying how can one measure it in one's own sadhana? Or something like that. I said, "Better to think you have none." Babaji said, "Because it is actually the truth, no one does. So you take a rāgānugā guru and you serve and follow him. He is the bhajana-vijña and through his grace and guidance it will descend upon you."
Today's class, though, the rāsa-līlā really is where the commentators put the greatest effort in squeezing out every drop of every word in every verse, so that the many branches of the tree of the rasa-lila can sprout more leaves and flowers and fruits.
Jai Sri Radhe
