A Korean Group comes to SRSG

The ashram where I am staying received an interesting visit from a group of about 25 Korean students from the department of Yoga Studies and Meditation, Wonkwang Digital University. They were accompanied by department head, Jongsoon Seo, Ph.D., Prof. Kamalakar Mishra, now retired professor at the Benares Hindu University, and by Raghavendra Adiga, their yoga asana teacher.

Kwak Seung Hyun (Hamsa), another teacher at Wonkwang, is a disciple of Swami Veda and a frequent resident here. He is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on “The Evolution of Pranayama in Yogic and Tantric Texts” at Gurukul Kangri University in Haridwar.

Prof. Jongsoon Seo is a student of Kamalakar Mishra and spent ten years in Benares, where she completed her doctorate on “The Theory of Sakti in Kashmir Saivism.” She speaks fluent Hindi, much to the delight of the Hindi-speaking residents of SRSG. Under her leadership, the Wonkwang Digital University yoga and meditation department now has an amazing 400 students.

Such trips to India are a part of the university department's regular agenda. Since it is an on-line university, the students get little opportunity to interact personally with the teachers and other students. (It is interesting how such things as yoga and meditation can be taught on-line. I will have to ask.) This group had just spent a two week retreat at the Kalyana Baba ashram in Almora, and were passing through here on the way back to have a certificate bestowal ceremony, etc., since those things are coming through the Association of Himalayan Yoga and Meditation Societies International (AHYMSIN), which is here.

Kamalakar Mishra, teacher of Kashmiri Shaivism at BHU, who calls himself an Indo-Korean professor due to his relationship with the Korean university, where he has been in residence, is a well-known scholar of the Kashmiri Saiva tradition, with numerous publications to his name, such as The Significance of The Tantric Tradition, Varanasi (1981) and Kashmir Saivism: The Central Philosophy of Tantrism. I don't know whether Kashmiri Shaivism is having a renaissance thanks to Muktananda Swami, but there is certainly quite a bit of interest in it these days, specially around here.

Prof. Mishra recounted some of his experiences with Swami Rama, whom he met for the first time 35 years ago in Rishikesh at the Sadhana Mandir. He spoke with vigor and ease, despite his 75 years. I present some of the things he said, for information purposes only.

He began his talk by saying that faith or sraddha is the essential ingredient in sadhana, and that such faith is only possible because there are highly evolved saints in the world who exemplify and personify the teachings and experiences of the Divine. “Swami Rama,” he said, “Was one such person.”

The chance to associate more extensively with Swami Rama came in 1985 when he was invited to Honesdale to the Himalayan Insitute to speak on Kashmiri Shaivism. Prof. Mishra said of Swami Rama that he possessed the two outstanding qualities that are found in all spiritual teachers: egolessness and love, or maitri bhavana. In fact, these qualities are related to one another.

Ego or selfishness, is like an obstruction. The Divine wants to flow through us all, but the ego blocks it. When one is beset by ego, then he things the individual me is the only me, and not that he is present in all others. The more the ego melts, the more the love naturally and spontaneously flows thrugh our hearts. With that, the sadhaka feels that all creatures are his own. This is what you call love, maitri-bhavana.

And the other way around, the more one practices maitri-bhavana, the more the ego melts away. For us, since it does not come naturally, we have to practice. When it is realized, then it flows naturally and spontaneously. This love is the very nature of the universe, and one who has come to this sense of identity with the divine, he gives this love freely; it is not given to a chosen few, but extended to all.

In this Prof. Mishra saw the qualities of Sahaja samadhi, in which there are no activities of consciousness. In Sahaja samadhi, one is seated in the Self, doing nothing, at the same time all activities overflow naturally from the seat of the Self. To use the term “relaxation,” a favoured term in the modern context, it is “totally relaxed activity.” One is resting in the sense of doing nothing. In this state, all activity is joyful. It is lila, sportive activity. Life becomes a play. Dr. Mishra said, “I saw Swami Rama in this kind of playful, joyful, spontaneous activity. All was joyful, lila.”

The evening then went on with the distribution of certificates and the singing of songs in Korean and Hindi, and concluded with the chanting of the evening prayers in Sanskrit.

Intrepid reporter Jagat taking notes. Photos by Choun Sun Hee

Radhika Priya

As I may have mentioned already, one of the features of staying in an ashram, really any ashram I guess, is that many interesting people tend to pass through. Even though this is now the slow season, as it is too hot for comfortable travel, it is still true. Another interesting feature here has been, I may add, meeting devotees who have somehow washed up on the shore of yoga and meditation, for whatever reason that may be.


Radhika Priya, in this picture with me and Vachanananda Swamiji, has been here for several weeks now, conducting her painting meditation workshops, about which I will say something below. She is from Budapest, Hungary, but escaped Communism in 1980, when she saw that any spiritual aspirations she might have would only be stifled in the "dialectically materialistic" world of Communist Hungary. Since she knew French, she went to Paris where she encountered Iskcon devotees on the day of her arrival and soon became a devotee herself.

Although she was already an artist, she was naturally coopted into book distribution and served in that respect until 1987. Her Iskcon name was Rasa-graha Dasi. When Bhagavan's star supernova'd, she left Iskcon and came to India and spent some time in Nabadwip with Sridhar Maharaj, where she received the Radhika Priya name. Her son Tibor also got initiated as Tirtheshwar Das. Somewhere in there she also did some work with Yogeshwar for his Iskcon children's publishing concern, Bala Books.

After this, Radhika went to pursue her artistic interests in Udaipur, which is the current center of Indian sacred or mystic art. She lived there for 10 years, taking initiation in the Vallabha sampradaya as a devotee of the nearby Nathdwar temple, where she studied traditional techniques as practiced there. Her art is in permanent exhibition in West Zone Cultural Center in Udaipur and some of her paintings are with the Indira Gandhi National Art Center collection in Delhi and the Maharaj of Kankroli in Baroda.

She has published several books of her art, of which possibly the most important is the Madhurashtakam, a meditation on each word of Vallabhacharya's famous poem. She also did a series of paintings on the Ramayana, based on the seven chapters of Tulsi Das's Ram Charit Manas, which has been published in Hungary.

A recent book of Hungarian folk legends has been illuminated by her paintings, and it is really this newer work, which is a mixture of Indian and European sentiments into a more nuanced and yet still fairy-like other-worldly quality, that I like best. Unfortunately, the book cover shown here gives only a bare hint of what is inside.

Over the past several years, Radhika has been having a great deal of success holding workshops in a kind of "Vedic Art," in which people come and color and decorate pre-prepared yantra designs of the seven chakras. This is accompanied by lessons on the Sanskrit alphabet, particularly the matrikas, which are generally used in tantrika meditation. This appears to be quite a popular activity--the students are encouraged to repeat the particular bija mantra associated with the chakra as they paint the yantra with the appropriate colors. It is called "guided meditative creativity." A check on the Internet shows that this has become a relatively popular yoga-related activity around Europe and America with several people conducting workshops of this type. She will giving workshops in Firenze (Italy), Lausanne (Switzerland), Paris (France) and Glastonbury (U.K.), over the coming months. [If anyone is interested, contact her at this address.]

Radhika's website is currently down, but I give the URL anyway and maybe it will be up soon and many of these paintings will be visible there. We are thinking of collaborating on some projects in the future, as I have a number of translations that are looking for illustrations. So, the Lord willing, this will move ahead in the coming year.

She is good friends with Baijnath Aryan, curator of the Museum of Folk and Tribal Art in Gurgaon whom I met through her. She also visited Thailand, Singapore and Bali to learn other aspects of Asian art.

Ma Chetana Jyoti

While I was posting the rest of Nikunja-rahasya-stava, a concert was going on in the meditation hall in honor of Swami Ma Chetan Jyoti. She passed away last Sunday in her ashram here in Rishikesh. She had been suffering from cancer for some time.


I believe I may have mentioned her name before. She was a great kirtan afficionado and had dedicated her latter life to serving Indian classical music. In particular, she was a lover of dhrupada music and regularly attended the annual Dhrupada festival at Jai Singh Ghera. Her ashram is called Sri Krishna Kripa Ashram and its outside wall is decorated with a huge picture of Krishna and Arjuna.

I told Shrivatsa Goswami about her passing on and he wrote me: "Grateful for informing about the passage Ma CJ. Hope it was peaceful and she is the service of the Divine Couple. I do remember her from Dhrupada melas. My prayers are with her."

Well, kirtan is Radha Krishna. The concert tonight was full of Mira Bhai--ankhiyan shyam milan ke pyaasi. You cannot get away from it, because the truth is, that without Radha and Shyamasundar, there just is no madhura rasa. And madhura rasa is the taste for which we have been hankering since time immemorial. On Christmas, Ma Chetana Jyoti did some kirtan here, chanting Hare Krishna despite being already very ill. So I certainly thank her for having brought, more than once, a ray of Radha Krishna into this ashram.

So I echo Shrivatsa's words and I chanted the Nikunja-rahasya-stava during the intermission in her honor.

Jai Sri Radhe!

Swami Veda Leaves for the Summer

Swamiji left this morning. His departure coincided with the usual meditation time. There was no organized rousting of the ashram members to come and see him off. The contrast between the celebratory greetings of Srila Prabhupada we used to experience was stark.

The first time I saw Srila Prabhupada was in 1972 at the Detroit airport, and it was at that moment that I became directly aware of transcendence in the world of matter. The effulgent brilliance of the Detroit airport in the midst of the tear-soaked kirtan when Prabhupada appeared in our midst--and every time after that--is deeply imprinted on my memory. Iskcon knew the importance of greeting and saying goodbye to the Guru.

My relationship with Swamiji is not the same as that, of course. It has morphed into something rather sweet and affectionate, and he even said to me as he left, while holding my hand, that as I would be the only staff member here for much of the summer, would I please take care of his Gurukula students.

For beginners I found myself quite angry that so many of my own students were absent, even though most were in the meditation hall. I was fulminating, "Don't they know that their meditation depends on Guru kripa? That the blessings they get from the guru on a special occasion like this one is worth thousands of hours of meditation?"

That is the samskara you get from a bhakti tradition. The people who were present were mostly Westerners, who have a spontaneous feeling of affection for Swamiji. One Korean woman, a longtime disciple, was crying in a way that reminded me of the feelings that manifest at such times when Prabhupada would come or leave. No doubt everyone there was motivated by love for him. But what is intolerable, really, is that so many do not recognize the maryada of such moments. At the very least, you do it because it is common courtesy!

Anyway, you can bet I will give these fellows a piece of my mind during Sanskrit class today. I think I will make them write 50 times--

आयान्तमग्रतो गच्छेद् गच्छन्तं तमनुव्रजेत् ।
शिष्यस्तदनुकम्पेच्छुः प्रीत्या मर्यादया तु वा ॥

Whether one does it out love or out of good manners, the disciple who desires the guru's merciful glance should greet him when he arrives and say goodbye to him when he leaves.

That's a loose translation of an embellished verse (see HBV 1.97).

Shiva Ratri

It is starting to get warm in the days. It is downright hot further south, in Delhi, but we will catch up soon I dare say.

The ashram here is about 500 meters from the Birbhadra temple, which is where Shiva's expansion who messed up Daksha's sacrifice went and rested after his rampage. There is a steady stream of pilgrims going there today and of course, the mikes have been blaring since well before dawn this morning.


There is a mela with ferris wheels and other rides, and the street is lined with vendors of jilebis and pakkoras. The specialty here seems to be some kind of kazoo horn that everyone is tooting on. People are in their temple-going best. Numbers of people are wearing silver foil and colored tissue party hats. But the lineup for darshan at the temple was too long so I turned back to go to Swami Ram's Sadhan Mandir.

PICTURES FROM SWAMI ATMA

There are two Swami Ram ashrams here, about two kilometers apart. The original one is closer to the city. The Sadhaka Gram is where I am. It is newer and larger and was built by Swami Veda. There was an elaborate Shiva puja and abhisheka first at the older ashram and the other one is going on here now as I write. There are three or four brahmins living here in the ashram (someone told me there are about 70 paid workers on the staff here, many of whom are living on site).

These brahmins come into their own on special occasions like today and they seem to be quite good at what they do. They were accompanied by half-a-dozen others today. The chanting of mantras and hymns went on vigorously for almost three hours non-stop, with accompanying gestures and appropriate priestly roles played by different individuals. I was quite impressed overall.

I shall not stay up all night. Bhom Mahadeva.

Ganga-snana in Svarga Ashram

Making the walk through the park and Ganga snana a regular Sunday event. There was more traffic today as large number of pilgrims were making the trek from Rishikesh to Nilakanth, bringing a bottle of Ganga water to pour on the Bhola linga there. 25 km. there and back.

It was a bit like watching a Govardhan parikrama (at least in the old days), as the greater percentage of the participants appeared to be country folk, farmers, village people.

There is an International Yoga Conference going on at Paramarth Niketan, which is the biggest institution in Rishikesh, with the Swami Chidananda Saraswatiji Maharaj's picture on posters all around town. After my Ganga snana I went to have a bit of a quick look and listened to a Japanese "Shinto Yoga" teacher speak. He said, "Nowadays mostly young women are interested in yoga. 200 years ago, it was the Samurai."

True, there are lots of Western women in Rishikesh, today. Also lots of Yogi Bhajan types, wearing long flowing Sufi-type blue kurtas. The occasional expansive ochre-robed swami followed by a troop of disciples, like a flower surrounded by butterflies.

The Paramarth section of Rishikesh had a good atmosphere today, especially with that unusual combination of kheti kisans and svelte European yogis.

BTW, I notice that Swami Veda Bharati was supposed to attend this conference. He is not, he is tending to his own flock in some foreign land.

David Frawley: Sacred Fire, Sacred Elements

One of the features of staying here in this ashram has been meeting the numerous guests who pass through, many of whom are talented and accomplished individuals in their own right. The other day, we had the pleasure of hearing an accomplished classical Indian vehala player named Ashish Chatterjee, who gave a concert for the benefit of the ashram residents. Last night, it was an honor to greet David Frawley, whom I had not previously met. He is in Rishikesh for a conference on Yoga and Ayurveda. Since Frawley is also known as Vamadeva Shastri, I will use the title "Shastriji" to refer to him through this article.

The subject Shastriji spoke on was based on his latest book, called Yoga and the Sacred Fire. I must admit that I have never read anything by Shastriji and may even have been a little biased against him because of his controversial stand on the Aryan Invasion Theory, which he opposes along with the likes of Subhash Kak. The academic establishment holds on to the AIT as something of an axiomatic truth and to oppose it you run the risk of being branded as a Hindu nationalist or extremist, etc.

Nevertheless, Swamiji asked me to introduce Shastriji and so I perused a couple of his books in the library and found the ones I looked at to be good insightful popularizations of Ayurveda and so on. At any rate, it is always a pleasure to see and hear successful and reputed individuals for whatever insights one may derive from them. I will summarize in a most subjective way my impressions.

Frawley’s lecture was a meditation on Agni, or fire, which is where the Veda begins. Starting from the first hymn of the Rig Veda and tracing the various ways in which the element of fire has been understood in yoga and tantra, as well as in non-Indian traditions, especially the Zoroastrian, etc., he gave a steady, heady list of associations, real and metaphorical, including digestion, asceticism, purification, light, insight, realization, wisdom, life itself, transcendence. There were even forays into scientific thinking, with the caveat that he is not a scientist.

Since coming here I have noticed that speculations on the material elements (pancha maha-bhuta) are a central part of thinking here and in the yogic community in general. Part of this naturally has to do with Ayurveda, but more to do with Yoga’s traditional association with Sankhya. Recently we had staying here a woman sannyasi, Nityamuktananda Swami, who has also recently written a book on all five elements (The Big Five )
and lectured on it for three days in impressive fashion. When I recently went through Sarva-siddhanta-sangraha I was again mystified by the preoccupation with categorizing the elements that features in nearly all Indian philosophical systems. It does seem a bit beside the point for those of us who are conditioned by bhakti traditions.

At one point I started to wonder what the point of the exercise was, but Shastriji did not disappoint. As he started talking about the sense of the sacred that is missing in modern society and the insight of the Vedic seers into the presence of the divine in these elements, he succeeded in communicating that this kind of pantheistic awareness is in fact very profound. Shastriji also spoke about ritual, no doubt inspired by the Vedic fire sacrifice, and the need to be drawn back into a consciousness of the very basics of the universe and their sacred character.

He here mentioned the problem with “religion,” which is sectarianism, and I could appreciate his point. Fire is something that everyone has a visceral relationship with. A fire burns wild in California or even in the northern forests of Alberta and it becomes a threatening, dangerous thing, like storms and floods, a part of Nature that is still outside man's vain grasping for omnipotence. And yet, in its transformations, like electricity, it is an all-pervading necessity of modern life.

We can all relate to fire, or the other powers of material nature, whereas Jesus or Krishna or other historical personalities are often a matter of personal taste, or even controversy, at least when it comes to expressing devotion. That is the nature of personality: it is far more complex than the material elements. It seems easier to worship the latter, or at least, it would seem, in Shastriji’s thinking, that it is a more universal common denominator than the personality-based religions.

It was here, however, that my own little fire of prajna sparked into a slightly bigger flame. How much greater a phenomenon, divisive as it is, is personality. This is really the reason that the material elements were personified from the very beginnings of humanity, and this is the reason that the personal religions ultimately usurped the animistic or pantheistic ones. The miracle of human personality, with its ideal possibilities as divined in the persons of the saints and of the Gods, transcends even the miracles of material nature.

Since Shastriji had spoken of ritual, which is something I have been thinking about a great deal lately, I was curious as to whether he had any concrete ideas. Although his answer was meaningful on the platform of theory, the idea of reviving the Vedic sacrifice as a common human ritual (the closest he came to the concrete) did not ring plausible. Swamiji afterwards laughed and called him a “true Arya Samaji,” and said, “I could hear myself giving almost the same lecture 50 years ago, in my Arya Samaj days.”

Anyway, the idea of the sacred and the need for ritual is also an essential part of the Sahaja path. Only here, our sacred and essential, univerals element—I suppose we could also say the fire—is the Kamagni. When we metaphorize Radha and Krishna by saying that they represent Desire and Love and the conquest of the latter over the former, or any other variations of the metaphor, we are in effect universalizing the concepts and abstracting them away from the troublesome personal or mythological elements.

Nevertheless, as I keep saying, the mythological elements have their own separate sticking power. They stick to our psyches, and these speculations stick to them. Just as multiple associations have accumulated around the powerful image of fire, so too multiple associations have accumulated around sex, and in turn multiple associations have accumulated around Radha and Krishna. Some of these are compatible, some coincide, some do not. Sex is a powerful material force, Love is its transformation; it is the addition of the personal at the most profound level of being.

When sexuality and love are used metaphorically in relation to God, then here again we have the same duality: desire is the raw, powerful force that pushes us to seek Life, in whatever form. Love is the discovery of God as a Person.

The yogic, etc., preoccupation with the elements is of course not unique to it. Swamiji even mentioned afterwards how much he liked the Bhagavata’s account of Kapiladeva’s Sankhya in the third canto. And the avadhuta in the Eleventh Canto was specifically quoted by Nityamuktananda in the conclusion to her lectures on the elements, for the Avadhuta names each of them as the first five of his 24 gurus. Nevertheless, in the hierarchy of sacred manifestations, for all its ambivalence, the pinnacle is human personality: consciousness and its possibilities. And the element in human personality that burns strongest is the desire for absolute love. Although the need to sacralize our existence and our place within material nature includes the elements, our need to sacralize sexuality is the greatest necessity of all.