Secondary Works

[meeno8]

It would be beneficial if our community would produce some writings that are beyond just translations and hagiographies, or critical editions of primary works.  I envision a series of books within that overall framework, in the spirit of the late world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on some of his classes at University of Chicago Divinity School back in 1982-83.  Applying for grants for that might be a good approach, for those with academic credentials.  Erudite scholars like Jagat would be good for the task, and in his case a respected institute such as Oxford might publish some of those.  That would reach a wider audience than Blazing Sapphire Press.

Any ideas on this?

[Nitaidas]

Oct 3, 2021 11:09:44 GMT -6 meeno8 said:

It would be beneficial if our community would produce some writings that are beyond just translations and hagiographies, or critical editions of primary works.  I envision a series of books within that overall framework, in the spirit of the late world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade.  I was fortunate enough to sit in on some of his classes at University of Chicago Divinity School back in 1982-83.  Applying for grants for that might be a good approach, for those with academic credentials.  Erudite scholars like Jagat would be good for the task, and in his case a respected institute such as Oxford might publish some of those.  That would reach a wider audience than Blazing Sapphire Press.

Any ideas on this?

Tell us more, Baba. It is your vision. Eliade has fallen into some disfavor these days, actually for quite a while now. His sources were sketchy it seems and the conclusions drawn from them are doubtful. I still enjoy reading him, but mostly his literary works, The Forbidden Forest, for instance. But Night in Serampore (in Two Strange Tales) and Bengal Nights are great. Nevertheless, he was a giant and there is still some value to his insights.

What topics should this series take up? Give us some sample titles.

[meeno8]

Perhaps I should not be all that shocked and dismayed that his academic standing has been deprecated in recent years/decades. At any rate, the basic concept is secondary works that draw upon our entire body of literature, including the original and translated versions in our common medium of the English language. It is not so much that I think I need to come up with any specific topics, as those would be arising from the subject matter itself by default. One dream of mine is to get a screenplay produced either on stage or the big screen of the life and times of Sri Nityananda Prabhu, seeing as he is the founder of our own lineage. Would that need to be historically accurate? I don't think that is necessary. After all, that very popular Hollywood film The Ten Commandments depicts Ramses as the Pharaoh, when in fact it was much more likely Akhnaton on the throne of Egypt, who was the likely guru of Moses in his doctrine of monotheism. The so-called 'events' of the Bible are hardly actual history, despite being pawned off as factual on the 'faithful'. More importantly is maybe securing funding for any projects, and the qualified persons with recognized academic credentials (and no hidden agendas) getting involved. They should be able to come up with good topics sans any input from my end.

If I think of any other topics, I will share those on this newly created thread.

[Nitaidas]

Oct 8, 2021 8:49:39 GMT -6 meeno8 said:

Perhaps I should not be all that shocked and dismayed that his academic standing has been deprecated in recent years/decades. At any rate, the basic concept is secondary works that draw upon our entire body of literature, including the original and translated versions in our common medium of the English language. It is not so much that I think I need to come up with any specific topics, as those would be arising from the subject matter itself by default. One dream of mine is to get a screenplay produced either on stage or the big screen of the life and times of Sri Nityananda Prabhu, seeing as he is the founder of our own lineage. Would that need to be historically accurate? I don't think that is necessary. After all, that very popular Hollywood film The Ten Commandments depicts Ramses as the Pharaoh, when in fact it was much more likely Akhnaton on the throne of Egypt, who was the likely guru of Moses in his doctrine of monotheism. The so-called 'events' of the Bible are hardly actual history, despite being pawned off as factual on the 'faithful'. More importantly is maybe securing funding for any projects, and the qualified persons with recognized academic credentials (and no hidden agendas) getting involved. They should be able to come up with good topics sans any input from my end.

If I think of any other topics, I will share those on this newly created thread.

What!? You ridicule Christian movies and the Bible for not being historically correct and yet you want persons in our tradition who are academically credentialed to write historically inaccurate accounts of our tradition? Because they do it, we should do it? And you think we can get financial support to do this? You are cuckoo, my friend. That sounds like a scam to me. Convince people to give one money to produce sound works by accredited scholars and then produce a product that is flawed, historically inaccurate or just downright false. Not only is the Bible not history (there never was an exodus, for instance) it is brutal and immoral. God is represented there as a big bully. It is a good thing for us that the god of the Bible is fictitious. Who but a bunch of bullies would want a bully god? In the Bible he urges the Jews to commit the first known holocaust. Though it is just a myth, the idea of it has come back to bite the Jews on the butts over and over. They created the monster, like one of their golems, and it came back to attack them.

It might surprise you to find out that the events of the Mahabharata or the Bhagavata never happened either. There is no historical evidence for any of that stuff. They are just stories embodying the hopes and aspirations of the ancient Indic peoples. They are great stories, full of subtlety and wisdom, but it is unlikely that Krsna as represented in those texts ever walked the earth. They are myths. What does Eliade say about myths? Myths are powerful stories that give people their identities and meaning in life. Does that mean that Krsna is completely unreal? Not necessarily. There are plenty of unreal ideas like the idea of a United States of America that have real effects in the world. People die for some of those ideas. Similarly, it is equally possible for people really to fall in love with Krsna. The myth of Krsna gives us our identities and meaning. Before him and his sakti, Radhika, we are manjaris and the meaning of our lives comes from how deeply we learn to love them. Can one love someone who is unreal? I would say that love only deals with people who are unreal. The people we love are invested with qualities that we impose on them. When reality clashes with our imposed unreality we fall out of love with those we formerly loved. That can never happen with Krsna. He is the perfect lover! A life lived cultivating love for Krsna and Radhika is a beautiful life. Who cares what happens after death?

[Nitaidas]

Sorry if I was hard on you, baba. Perhaps I misunderstood you. But, in my view, any attempt to prove the historicity of Sri Krsna is bound to fail. The Krsna we know through the texts is the invention of poets whose poetic imaginations have changed over the centuries. Therefore, the Krsnas of the Mahabharata, of the Harivamsa, or the Visnu Purana, of the Bhagavata Purana, of the works of the Gosvamins and other latter-day Vaisnavas (of the Vallabha, Nimbarka, Radhavallabha, etc. traditions) are different. Unfortunately, there are no good or even decent poets today who have continued the tradition of imagining Krsna for a modern audience.Maybe that should be the focus of your idea for modern works on the Krsna tradition. Maybe such works should be focused on the really historical personalities of Mahaprabhu, Nityananda Prabhu, Advaita Prabhu, Gadadhara Pandit, Srivasa and others and then through them to the Krsna and Radha of the mind. That is, in a sense, what the gutikas tried to do. We always start with Sri Gauranga, Nityananda, and Advaita meditating on or visualizing or remembering the sports of R and K in Vraja.

Radha and Krsna are consciousness beings. That we are told over and over again, but in spite of that, it may be true. They live in the world of consciousness with consciousness bodies. They move from consciousness to consciousness and need have no contact with the material world. They don't have to. They occupy literary work after literary work which are expressions of the consciousnesses of their authors. They are communicated to the consciousnesses of readers of those works without having to dip a toe into the material world. They profoundly influence (brighten) the consciousnesses they enter into and enrich them with delight until those consciousnesses are infused with bhakti-rasa. It is bhakti-rasa that is the experience par excellence of Radha and Krsna. That is the goal that makes us forget all goals and become super-satisfied. Our definitions of reality as only referring to materiality are too limited. Matter and spirit were divided from each other in the west in the 16th century. But what if they have been one thing all along only artificially by divided proto-scientists? Then the events of consciousness would also profoundly affect the material side of our existences (astika-bhava) and our material events and acts would affect our consciousness lives. Can there be consciousness beings without materiality?

[meeno8]

As Andy Warhol once put it, "All art is a con..." There are very good reasons that The Ten Commandments has been one of the most popular films of all time (and aired on television during Easter and Passover season annually for decades), but all Hollywood productions are subject to riducule for any number of reasons. That, however, does not detract from their entertainment value. In fact, sometimes the more ridiculous the better! How about this: A musical (like Hamilton) for that stage production of "Nityanana the Tap-dancing Abadhoot"? I have not seen the play or the movie of Hamilton, so I really don't know if it was ripped from the pages of history. I remember you enjoyed what Hollywood film of the Mahabharata when we watched it together in that cinema house in Chicago way back when it was first released. One of your favorite lines was when Krishna said, "Sometimes you have to honor dharma by ignoring it!" All those paintings depict Krishna and Arjuna on Roman type chariots, when in fact the actual chariots were four wheeled horse drawn wagons like the ones in that movie.

At any rate...
I think you have just provided more than one potential topic for secondary works in your 2 posts.

[jiva]

Oct 9, 2021 12:35:43 GMT -6 Nitaidas said:

 Can there be consciousness beings without materiality?

Speaking of consciousness, In his paper entitled:Theological problems in A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s writings, Satyanarayana das Baba writes:

A. Sambandha jñāna: problems with jīva tattva

1. The jīva is sat-cit-ananda- full of knowledge, eternity and bliss

Sri Sridhar Swami writes in his commentary on the Visnu purana verse, hladinya-samvit-aslistah (see CC 18.114), that hladini (bliss) and samvit (knowledge) is present only in Bhagavan, and not in the jīvas. Agreeing with this, Sri Rupa Goswami in the Bhakti rasamrta sindhu explains that hladini and samvit descends at the bhāva stage (i.e. when sadhana is successful) into the jīva, and this mixture is called ‘bhāva’.
Knowledge and bliss inhere only in Bhagavan- they are his personal energies. The jīva does not have knowledge inherent in it. Rather, all its knowledge is acquired by and stored in the mind, which is external to the jīva. The jīva has no mechanism to store knowledge within itself as samvit is not its energy. Knowledge of śāstra and indeed anything else needs to be given to the jīva by the guru. This agrees with our everyday experience.
There is also the erroneous notion that the jīva is full of bliss. In actuality, the jīva’s nature is ‘absence of misery’ as experienced during deep sleep. Sri Jīva Goswami explains this at length. The bliss of the jīva is not the same as hladini śakti. In the material world, the jīva is full of misery actually, as again explained in the hladinya-samvit verse. When the jīva gets bhāva, then and only then can it experience bliss.

[meeno8]

Thanks for that, jiva.

That stuff about the musical was more tongue in cheek, in case that was not obvious. Then again perhaps this site needs a little levity these days with the trials and tribulations for many under the challenges of the global pandemic of COVID-19.

I wanted to point out the major difference between mystic Christianity and the vanilla brand we were raised with in most churches. The latter tends to be extremely naive and will also tend to be at odds with Vaishnava traditions. Should we be trying to reach the Judeo-Christian audience, or target mystics and those who study yoga and Eastern meditation techniques? I guess the universe of IGM adherents would be among those in our audience, and it is up to them to how open-minded they choose to be. Despite their misrepresentation of CV and hijacking it for their own financial gain, we still can choose between agressive confrontation and peaceful coexistence (maybe some type of philosophical cold war of ideologies pitting orthodoxy over heretical heterodoxy). They emphasize so-called 'preaching' over all else, whereas we do not have any mission to build lots of large mandirs all over the world and collect large sums of money for that purpose. After all, what is a 'Vedic planetarium', when we know in this day and age that descriptions provided in BP on cosmology are archaic and completely mythical rather than factual? We have actual planetariums where astronomers display the night sky with sophisticated projects on a domed ceiling (basically a theater with a lecture), which are the ones we used to visit on field trips in school growing up.

[Nityānanda dāsa]

Radhe Radhe!

I think a great example of 'secondary works' is Nitai's work on "Sane Vaishnavism" for one. Another is his work on rasa. I have notes on too many ideas I've wanted to write on, but they just remain ideas jotted down somewhere. One idea that lately has occupied my thoughts a little is to do a write up on the concept of sentiment. How it is necessary and yet how it is the lever of mass manipulation. For example way too many (See IGM) are influenced by sentiment as if it is one of the credentials one develops towards a factually great devotee. Sadly there are zero factual devotees in IGM. Yet sentimentality runs the gamut there, as we know. But I'm sure it is also applicable to all groups everywhere including the tradition of CV. Sentiment is a devil and an angel. Depends on how we understand and apply it or fail to do so and are simply its victim.

[meeno8]

I knew you would be chiming in eventually on this topic Nilaji. I think any well thought-out ideas are good to pursue. Music is an important art, if not the most important. I am thinking some operatic work written with English lyrics and an orchestra that is a mix of Western and Indian instruments. You can check this out for an example:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLF46JKkCNg

Yes, the songs of Narottama in Bengali and the Gita-Govindam in Sanskrit by the Oriya poet Jayadev are splendid.  I attended a stage production of Gita-Govindam in New Delhi in around 1977-78.  It was nothing short of spectacular.  If memory serves, the music was not live, nor the singing (recorded) - just the dancing.

However, those are centuries old now. There may not be any great poets nowadays, but that does not mean there are not any great composers.

[meeno8]

Songs set to music are generally poems. However, prose may be used in the operatic genres. It is just a story being told with actors that are the singers, and often a chorus as well that is comprised of multiple singers. Carmen, for example, is a very popular opera performed by just about all world class opera companies. It was made into a great movie some time ago.  If memory serves, being set in Spain (lyrics in French BTW), it includes some great Flamenco dancing.

[meeno8]

And don't forget the VR game I proposed for rasa-lilas. There is always a market for such games, although they tend to appeal to the audience that loves firearms, etc. Yep, war games.

A friend of mine is an expert with Unity, the games engine platform, and he teaches classes in it at Columbia in Chicago. We have had a few discussions about developing for the cutting edge VR glasses.

That is a multi media art form. I think it could attract venture capital, and another friend of mine has those connections via his hedge fund partners.

[jiva]

Oct 11, 2021 7:06:06 GMT -6 Nityānanda dāsa said:

Radhe Radhe!

I think a great example of 'secondary works' is Nitai's work on "Sane Vaishnavism" for one.

Yes, it would be great to develop that idea further. Or someone with a similar sensibility, knowledge and education.

[Nitaidas]

I think my introduction to the Bhagavata when it is done will cover most, if not all, of the same ground. The question of epistemology, the question of which sampradaya we are connected with, a more nuanced understanding of what it means to accept acintya-bhedAbheda, our connections to Sri Sankaracarya (who was not a mayavadi as he has been accused), our lack of connection to and agreement with the Madhva sampradaya, the claim that our sampradaya was founded by Mahaprabhu and is in no need of any link to any other sampradaya, in the competition of views from different sources on which most truly represents the view of Mahaprabhu, etc. etc. These can all be raised and discussed in the introduction of the Bhagavata Purana trans. It can be published separately as well.

Anyway, the results of any attempt to try to understand CV without prejudice, with rationality, and through examination and weighing of the available evidence will lead to Sane Vaisnavism.

My problem with this whole discussion is the unexamined presupposition that preaching is what we should all be doing. This is an idea that I think is fundamentally wrong. We are not capable of converting anyone or making anyone a bhakta. That is the lord's work. All of our efforts in that respect are bound to lead to ego enlargement and pride, mistakenly thinking that we have made someone a bhakta and not Krsna. You can see it in all kinds of examples. One that springs into my mind at the moment is Bhaktivedanta's remark about me when I left IGM. He said punar musiko bhava "Become a mouse again." He was referring to the Hitopadesa story about a mouse that was turned into a lion and then threatened to eat the one who so transformed him. In other words, Bhaktivedanta was thinking of himself as the one who made me a bhakta. What arrogance! He didn't make me. Krsna did (if indeed I became a bhakta when I was in ISKCON)! Instead, let's strive for our own advancement in CV and stop thinking of ourselves as world saviors, jagat-gurus, influencers. The truth is I have always been just a mouse. That lion business was just an illusion.

[jiva]

Oct 12, 2021 16:21:13 GMT -6 Nitaidas said:

I think my introduction to the Bhagavata when it is done will cover most, if not all, of the same ground. The question of epistemology, the question of which sampradaya we are connected with, a more nuanced understanding of what it means to accept acintya-bhedAbheda, our connections to Sri Sankaracarya (who was not a mayavadi as he has been accused), our lack of connection to and agreement with the Madhva sampradaya, the claim that our sampradaya was founded by Mahaprabhu and is in no need of any link to any other sampradaya, in the competition of views from different sources on which most truly represents the view of Mahaprabhu, etc. etc. These can all be raised and discussed in the introduction of the Bhagavata Purana trans. It can be published separately as well.

Anyway, the results of any attempt to try to understand CV without prejudice, with rationality, and through examination and weighing of the available evidence will lead to Sane Vaisnavism.

My problem with this whole discussion is the unexamined presupposition that preaching is what we should all be doing. This is an idea that I think is fundamentally wrong. We are not capable of converting anyone or making anyone a bhakta. That is the lord's work. All of our efforts in that respect are bound to lead to ego enlargement and pride, mistakenly thinking that we have made someone a bhakta and not Krsna. You can see it in all kinds of examples. One that springs into my mind at the moment is Bhaktivedanta's remark about me when I left IGM. He said punar musiko bhava "Become a mouse again." He was referring to the Hitopadesa story about a mouse that was turned into a lion and then threatened to eat the one who so transformed him. In other words, Bhaktivedanta was thinking of himself as the one who made me a bhakta. What arrogance! He didn't make me. Krsna did (if indeed I became a bhakta when I was in ISKCON)! Instead, let's strive for our own advancement in CV and stop thinking of ourselves as world saviors, jagat-gurus, influencers. The truth is I have always been just a mouse. That lion business was just an illusion.

It seems to me that it is good to have it as a separate publication as well.

In my opinion, people should be given food for thought, not necessarily make them devotees.