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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 10, 2021 17:14:48 GMT -6
Thanks, everyone for all your postings on Sridharasvamin. There is a lot to consider. It will be especially tough to separate fact from fiction. I don't believe that Sridharasvamin was ever the mahanta of the Govardhana Matha. The fellow (Aufrecht ?) who made that claim did not back it up with any evidence. Someone else found a Sridhara connected with the Govardhana Math, but his guru was Krsnananda, not Paramananda (whom Sridhara refers to as his guru). It is probably another Sridhara. Anyway, thanks to everybody for rallying.
জয় রাধে!
PS. I would like to see what the Bhaktamala actually says about Sridhara. I left my copy in Kirksville. Hindi or Bengali, either is fine.
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 10, 2021 17:55:46 GMT -6
Daniel Sheridan's essay is well worth reading, though I think he may be bending things somewhat, that is, assuming too much, in support his view that the Bhagavata teaches a non-dualistic theism. It is a habit many of us with theories sometimes give in to.
রাধে রাধে!
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jiva
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Post by jiva on Sept 10, 2021 18:12:23 GMT -6
Nitai ji mentioned it somewhere, and I agree, that CV is actually one of the branches of Sankara-sampradaya. By no means does Madhva-line and that connection really need to be well researched. Sridhara Svami is a key figure in that.
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jiva
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Post by jiva on Sept 10, 2021 18:15:38 GMT -6
Seems like Sridhara Svamin should have his own page on the Symposium somewhere, but where is the big question?! Totally
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 11, 2021 11:41:00 GMT -6
I highly recommend reading Elkman's trans. of the Tattvasandarbha along with the introductory materials. Thanks to Nilamadhavadasji for making it available here. One of his advisors in this work was Narayana Chand Goswami who was a learned modern member of our tradition. He specialized in Nyaya and Sankhya, but he was deeply learned in Caitanya Vaisnavism. I had the good fortune of meeting him when I was living in Kolkata. My Sanskrit teacher, Dr. Minati Kar, was one of his students and she brought me over to meet with him near the Gaudiahat Mod. I am sure that Elkman's work greatly benefited from Goswami's guidance and input. I picked up all of his books when I was there. He was educated in Bengares like Sri Jiva. Anyway, Elkman's book is a great treasure of 20th century research into CV.
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 11, 2021 18:08:23 GMT -6
Nitai ji mentioned it somewhere, and I agree, that CV is actually one of the branches of Sankara-sampradaya. By no means does Madhva-line and that connection really need to be well researched. Sridhara Svami is a key figure in that. Yes, it is my view that, if we are not an independent sampradaya founded by Mahaprabhu himself, we can be regarded as members of one of Sankaracarya's lineages. According to Sri Radhamohan Goswami (Advaita-vamsi, 18th cent.), within Sankara's lineages some disciples developed a greater appreciation for bhakti than others. Thus, the sampradaya split into two overarching types: the Bhagavatas and the Smartas. The Bhagavatas consider bhakti to be primary and the Smartas consider jnana to be primary. He claims Sridharasvamin was in the Bhagavata group. I think the same is true of the Puris (Visnupuri, Madhavendrapuri, Isvarapuri, etc) The idea that any of them converted to Madhva's tradition is absurd. That would be a step backward, not forward. The Madhva connection was dreamed up by Baladeva to defend the CV tradition from accusations of illegitimacy from other sampradayas who were threatening to take away the service of Sri Govindaji in Jayapur in the early 18th century.
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jiva
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Post by jiva on Sept 11, 2021 20:29:12 GMT -6
According to Sri Radhamohan Goswami (Advaita-vamsi, 18th cent.), within Sankara's lineages some disciples developed a greater appreciation for bhakti than others. Thus, the sampradaya split into two overarching types: the Bhagavatas and the Smartas. The Bhagavatas consider bhakti to be primary and the Smartas consider jnana to be primary. He claims Sridharasvamin was in the Bhagavata group. It is interesting to me that, recently mentioned Puri Shankaracarya, in invocations before his lectures regularly chant tṛṇād api sunīcena verse of Mahaprabhau. He says bhakti is (the highest) form of knowledge, also.
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 12, 2021 13:16:42 GMT -6
According to Sri Radhamohan Goswami (Advaita-vamsi, 18th cent.), within Sankara's lineages some disciples developed a greater appreciation for bhakti than others. Thus, the sampradaya split into two overarching types: the Bhagavatas and the Smartas. The Bhagavatas consider bhakti to be primary and the Smartas consider jnana to be primary. He claims Sridharasvamin was in the Bhagavata group. It is interesting to me that, recently mentioned Puri Shankaracarya, in invocations before his lectures regularly chant tṛṇād api sunīcena verse of Mahaprabhau. He says bhakti is (the highest) form of knowledge, also. Guess what? Sankara says the same thing in commentary on Gita 12.20: uttamAM paramArthajJAnalakSaNAM bhaktim, Bhakti is defined as the highest knowledge of the supreme truth (paramArtha). See my discussion of bhakti as knowledge in my introduction to the Gita (The Song Divine published by Blazing Sapphire Press).
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jiva
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Post by jiva on Sept 12, 2021 20:08:59 GMT -6
Guess what? Sankara says the same thing in commentary on Gita 12.20: uttamAM paramArthajJAnalakSaNAM bhaktim, Bhakti is defined as the highest knowledge of the supreme truth (paramArtha). See my discussion of bhakti as knowledge in my introduction to the Gita (The Song Divine published by Blazing Sapphire Press). Yes, I know.
I wanted to say that he, Nischalananda Saraswati, perhaps belongs to the Bhagavata-line, which mentions Sri Radhamohan Goswami ji.
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 15, 2021 12:06:25 GMT -6
Maybe he (Nischalananda Saraswati) is not such a bad dude after all. But he is not a Puri? Puris are the most likely representatives of the Bhagavata subdivision of the followers of Sankara. Not so much the Sarasvatis, though Madhusudana was a Sarasvati. Maybe the bhakti-infection spread to them, too. I don't think Sridharasvamin was a Puri, though some people think he was (Elkman). He never to my knowledge refers to himself as a Puri. It seems like it is unnecessary for followers of the Sankara tradition to belong to one of the ten sannyasa orders. But the fact that Sridharasvarmin never refers to himself as a Puri or is referred to as a Puri does not mean that he wasn't one, I suppose. Many of the great writers of the Sankara tradition don't identify themselves with a Dasanami name.
I've made some progress with the introduction, especially on Srinathacakravartin. Will post that soon, maybe even today. I did a quick search on JSTOR for articles on the Bhagavata and got 3479 results! Several of the articles were from a collection of articles by IGMers associated with Columbia. Has anyone read this book: The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Text and Living Tradition, Columbia University Press? It came out in 2013. Is it any good? Or, is it just IGM fuzziness, a little seeming critical thinking, a whole lot of wishful thinking?
Besides this collection there are a lot of other essays by real scholars that look interesting. In order to write about the Bhagavata itself apart from its commnetaries, I will need to get up to speed on these other essays. I don't want to have to waste my time on the IGMers unless some of them have learned to think. Any advice?
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jiva
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Post by jiva on Sept 15, 2021 19:32:21 GMT -6
Maybe he (Nischalananda Saraswati) is not such a bad dude after all. ... I've made some progress with the introduction, especially on Srinathacakravartin. Will post that soon, maybe even today. Maybe, who knows?
He says that his Ishta-deva is Rama ji, and that his guru is Surya (I do not quite understand this regarding Surya, because he was given the name Dhruvachaitanya by Swami Sri Naradananda Saraswati of Naimisharanya, and Swami Sri Karpatriji /Hariharananda Saraswati/ initiated him into the sannyasa order under the name Nischalananda Saraswati). Constantly quotes the Bhagavata Purana in his lectures, Tulsidas, sings Govinda Jaya Jaya before his lectures... If I understood him correctly, he even lived in Vrindavan for 25 years.
The great sannyasi Prakasananda from Varanasi is also Saraswati, and became devoted to Mahaprabhu, isn't?
I am glad that your Introduction is progressing!
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Post by Nitaidas on Sept 18, 2021 11:09:08 GMT -6
Greetings All!
राधे राधे!
The introduction is coming along. I am at the point where a lot more research needs to be done. I might ask for help. I need a bibliography of books on the Bhagavata Purana. There seem to be quite few of them. I was looking for more information on the critical edition of the Bhagavata done by the B. J. Institute of Learning and Research (Ahmedabad). I could not find it in any of the major university libraries I searched: U of Chicago, Library of Congress, Harvard. Why does no one but me know about this work or have this collection? Why does everyone continue to say that there is no critical edition of the Bhagavata? It is strange. I have all four volumes, but I left three in Kirksville. I figured I would only need the first volume out here is Crestone this summer. Anyway, in the process of searching I came across a huge number of books on various aspects of the Bhagavata. These are all books I should be familiar with if I am to do a reasonably good job of discussing the text in my introduction. It would be great if someone with a little extra time could create a list of them all with publishing data and such. That way I could acquire them, read or skim them, and use them in my account of the history, language, and unaltered meaning of the text. It will be useful for a bibliography to be included in the eventual publication. That would be greatly helpful.
I am starting to get daunted by the task ahead. This is the thing about introductions. They cannot be written of the top of one's head. They require careful and painstaking research and that takes time. But, if they are done well, they are well worth the effort.
जय् राधे!
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Post by Nitaidas on Oct 7, 2021 14:57:30 GMT -6
Greetings All!
It is an absolutely beautiful day here in Crestone.CO, perhaps one of our last this fall as it looks like next week will be much colder. We have already seen some snow up in the peaks above us. The aspen are in full glory on the slopes of Mount Crestone and I am busy working on my translation of the Bhagavata Purana with Sridhara's and Srinatha's commentaries. They are coming along, slowly but surely. Srimati Betsy is trying to decipher my English and make it more like English and less like Sanskrit. I tend to stick closely to the Sanskrit text and that makes for very awkward English. I will post what I have done so far once she has been over it and made it more comprehensible. This is a multiyear project and I doubt I will finish it, but it is worth the effort, a close and critical reading of the Bhagavata. Let us dispel some illusions about it and discover its real glories.
জয় রাধে! জয় রাধে!
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Post by madanmohandas on Oct 10, 2021 2:24:57 GMT -6
Great, Nitai, been waiting long to be able to read Sridhara's annotation, and Srinatha. I have a couple of the volumes of A Symphony of Commentaries, and find myself getting annoyed and chagrined at the diction and turn of phrase, probably the worst English prose I ever saw, for instance, 'kautuka' as 'fun'. No doubt my work would have that effect too, hehehe, and I must confess to finding Sanatana, Jiva and Visvanatha needlessly prolix, always professing adherence to Sridhara and then blatantly contradicting what he says. I really do like Swami Vireswara's translation of Subodhini tika, which is, as you will know, Sridhara's annotation on the Gita. We also had a glorious autumnal day hanging around the massive cathedral in Wells, Somerset, dating back to the 10th century. A big gap was made in the row of shops adjacent to the cathedral where wicked king Henry VIII had it knocked down that he might enjoy an unrestricted view from the other side. haha. There is a little road there called Love Lane, and the plaque informs you that it used to be called Grope Cu*t Lane. Shocking! But it says a lot about culture and morals of the time.
Jay Radhe Govinda
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Post by meeno8 on Oct 10, 2021 7:29:38 GMT -6
Does the plaque actually have Cu*t on it? That would be odd. We have no censorship here, and the word has an entirely different connotation here in the US from in the UK. At any rate we can use the word thingy here, because there is not censorship. If children are intelligent enough and motivate enough to participate in these topics here, then I see no need to shield them from any words considered taboo.
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