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Post by madanmohandas on Oct 11, 2021 12:27:37 GMT -6
Well observed. You're right, the plaque just says 'Grope Lane', but on further investigation the 'C' word was actually there too. The earliest reference I know to its use in literature is Chaucer, 14th century, in his Canterbury Tales, a few times, at least once as an end rhyme, which emphasises it somewhat. Sorry if it was a bit indecorous, but it was funny after all. It is certainly deemed by far the most offensive word in English English. It is usually said very aggressively when someone has an outraged sense of propriety. My mother's most often expletive when she stubbed her toe or something was, 'F*ck the Pope!. hahahaha
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Post by meeno8 on Oct 11, 2021 13:29:42 GMT -6
Or burn his photograph on stage... Talk about making a strong point!
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Post by madanmohandas on Oct 11, 2021 22:49:27 GMT -6
Not really. Many people say, O damn it! but they don't mean it, same with above.
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Post by Nitaidas on Oct 12, 2021 14:55:31 GMT -6
Greetings All, We got our first snow of the season here in Crestone. It was really beautiful and in an hour or two, the sun will come out and melt it all. In spite of the high elevation here, the winters have been relatively mild. The deer have returned and I am mindful of the problem Jada Bharat faced in his previous life. They are beautiful creatures and easy to get attached to. The deer that visit us are awfully skinny. You can see their ribs as they walk and run. We feed them when we can. Looking for the best food for them, though we won't be here too much longer. We don't want to make them sick with our fare. So far we have found the apples work the best, but we are also giving them oats. Anyway, it is a delight to see them come peer in our window with their big, beautiful eyes and ears. Srimati Betsy has finished her reading of the Bhagavata translation and as usual held my feet to the fire. Hopefully, the work she has reviewed will be more readable and comprehensible than what I gave her to review. I am working on chapter 2 of the First Skandha. It is great reading it so closely again and registering some fresh insights and new discoveries. Or, perhaps those are old discoveries from long ago that I have managed to forget in the interim. Anyway, it is a delight. I will shortly post the Bhagavata as it now stands in another thread on this site. Please give it a good read and let me know about any mistakes or typos or whatever strikes you as odd or wrong. It you have suggestions about presentation of the text, please share them. Obviously, this is going to be a multiyear work. The introduction alone will possibly extend to a couple of hundred pages. I estimate if I continue as I am doing now it will have twelve volumes and each volume will be around a 1000 pages long. This is without indices and bibliography and glossary. Help!
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Post by Nitaidas on Oct 14, 2021 12:11:08 GMT -6
Well, as I predicted the sun came out the next day and almost all the snow is gone today. Sadly, yesterday we heard and saw helicopters in the air above the mountains. That generally means that someone, a hiker or climber, has been lost. The grapevine tells us that a young woman aged 29 was the one they were searching for. She was last seen at 13,000 feet, now almost three days ago. I don't know if they found her or her body. The day long search suggests not. It always saddens me to hear such things, but it seems that every year someone trying to climb Mount Crestone or Mount Kit Carson or one of the other fourteeners I see out my window falls and dies. I think this may be the second this year. They often clime alone, which is just insane. Anyway, I shouldn't speculate about the fate of this young lady. I hope she is alive and well. Srimati is going through the first chapter of the Brhad-bhagavatamita which is another of my projects. I did a partial translation some years ago and now I am revising it and adding parts of Sanatana Gosvami's commentary in footnotes. I decided that if anything I am more of a Sanatananugi than a Rupanugi. Rupa was brilliant and a great poet, but I think the roots of CV theology and aesthetics are in Sanatana's works. As I have said before, Sri Rupa and Sri Jiva have brilliantly expanded on the ideas and hints given by Sri Sanatana. And yet I have read so little of him. With this Bb project I want to read every word of his work, both main text and commentary. His earliest CV work, the Sri Krsna-lila-stava, which I translated long ago and will someday publish, is an even earlier snapshot of his thinking based on a close reading of the 10th Skandha of the Bhagavata. That book I regard as the seed of the vast and many-branched banyan tree of fully developed CV theology and aesthetics. It has to be the foundation of any modern presentation of CV thought. Anything else would be just idle ramblings of little worth. Now if I can only understand him. রাধে রাধে! PS. I will post a copy when it is done.
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Post by Nitaidas on Nov 3, 2021 12:58:14 GMT -6
Greetings Everyone,
জয় রাধে!
Just a quick note to bring you up to date on what I have been up to. But first let me welcome a new member to the forum. Jagannath Misra Dasji has joined recently. You may remember him in connection with his translation of the Lalita-madhava which I posted a little of here over the past year. He is a scholar of Odiya literature and is working on translations of the CV Odiya literature. I am hoping he will post some of his work here in that way Madanmohandasji is enlightening us with his delightful versified translations of the major and minor texts of the Sanskrit and Bengali works of the tradition. The field of Odiya CV literature is a largely unexplored area for most of us who have focused on the literature of Vraja or Bengal. We really should know more about it since that is where Vaisnavism has been a powerful influence since before the time of Mahaprabhu. Moreover that is where Mahaprabhu spent his last days on earth and took his departure from. Please welcome Jagannath Misra dasji to the sanga.
As for myself, I have been focusing on the Bhagavata translation with Sridhara's and Srinathacakravartin's commentaries. I am almost done with the second chapter of the first skandha. I figure if I can finish a chapter a month it will only take me 27 years or so (332/12 = 27.66666666 ...). It is an impossible task, but the thing about it is that I don't see it or experience it as a task at all. I have the feeling as I work on the text that I am beginning to understand the Bhagavata for the first time in my life. I wish I had taken this up thirty years ago. All the translations suck, some more some less, to be truthful, including my own. I think I am doing a reasonable job with my translations, but others can't seem to follow them. I think I know what a given verse means, thanks to helpful hints from Sridhara and Srinatha, but putting that into English in way that clearly conveys that meaning is difficult, if not impossible. There are several reasons for this, but I won't go into them here. All I can say is that I am glad that I have the opportunity to try to translate this text as far as I get and I hope that whatever scratchings I can muster up on the text will be useful to someone else trying to understand the text in the years to come.
জয় রাধে!
iti
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Post by madanmohandas on Nov 7, 2021 13:09:04 GMT -6
Yes, I second the welcome to my friend Jagannatha Misra dasji, whom I call Mishra mahashoy. His level of applied study and relish is remarkable, but I do not wish to embarrass him here, suffice it to say, as Nitai observed there is a virtually untapped spring of Odiya literature in the Chaitanya tradition which he is delving into. He reads the delightful navaksa chand Bhagavata of Ati bari Jagannatha dasa, and we compare it to the original. There is also the Bengali text called Sri Krishna Prema Tarangini which is a payar with occasional tripadi rendering of the Bhagavata. I'm waiting to get a copy in Bengali characters of Atibari's edition; when you can read it, it is virtually the same as Bengali.
Nitaijee, if you did a chapter per week, I think you can complete it. I'm wondering if I can complete the tenth book, and then continue on to 11 and 12, and then 1-9, in heroic couplets.
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Post by meeno8 on Nov 7, 2021 13:35:49 GMT -6
Welcome Misra das ji!
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Post by Nitaidas on Nov 8, 2021 12:18:13 GMT -6
Yes, I second the welcome to my friend Jagannatha Misra dasji, whom I call Mishra mahashoy. His level of applied study and relish is remarkable, but I do not wish to embarrass him here, suffice it to say, as Nitai observed there is a virtually untapped spring of Odiya literature in the Chaitanya tradition which he is delving into. He reads the delightful navaksa chand Bhagavata of Ati bari Jagannatha dasa, and we compare it to the original. There is also the Bengali text called Sri Krishna Prema Tarangini which is a payar with occasional tripadi rendering of the Bhagavata. I'm waiting to get a copy in Bengali characters of Atibari's edition; when you can read it, it is virtually the same as Bengali. Nitaijee, if you did a chapter per week, I think you can complete it. I'm wondering if I can complete the tenth book, and then continue on to 11 and 12, and then 1-9, in heroic couplets. I am looking forward to whatever Jagannath Misra Dasji shares with us. For a general and somewhat dated introduction to Caitanya Vaisnavism in Orissa there this account by Prabhat Mukherjee available on archive.org. It would be great though to have a peek at some of the seminal texts in translation. Are there other scholarly accounts of this history that I am unaware of? If so, please illuminate us. Madanmohandasji, I wish I could finish a chapter a week. I am not a brilliant composer of heroic couplets like you. Your output absolutely astounds me. I don't know how you do it. Anyway, I am more like Nietzsche's scholar cum beast of burden, plodding along at a labored and maddeningly slow pace. I just finished the second chapter of the first skandha. Two down and 330 chapters to go. l am going to run it by Srimati Betsy devi and then share it here for comments or suggestions from this august group. I must say I am astounded by the second chapter. There is so much packed into it that I missed in previous readings and translations. Many of the verses are patently non-dualist in intent, something that Sridhara points out and Srinatha interprets in alternative ways. Putting them side by side is a great thing to do. I am gaining so much by this close reading of the root text along with the Sridhara commentary countered by Srinatha's commentary. Since he refers to Sridhara's commentary in his opening verses, he no doubt knew the commentary, though there is little evidence of that in his own commentary. At least I am not clever enough to see it. Anyway, as we sometimes say in Sanskrit शनैः शनैः (slowly slowly).
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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 3, 2021 16:38:36 GMT -6
I would like to welcome Professor Dr. Gerald Carney to the forum. Dr. Carney did his dissertation on Kavikarnapura's Sri Caitanya-candrodaya (his discussion and translation of which I would love to publish as a Blazing Sapphire bilingual edition) and who, throughout his career, delved into many other areas of ground-breaking research related to Caitanya Vaisnavism. Some of his work on Premananda Bharati he kindly allowed me to publish as the introduction to Blazing Sapphire Press's edition of Bharati's Sri Krsna, the Lord of Love.
Any way, it is a pleasure to have him here. Everyone please greet him warmly and make him feel welcome. His symposium name is Jerry.
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Post by madanmohandas on Dec 5, 2021 2:29:25 GMT -6
That's great. Would like to read Kavikarnapura's play. I shy away from Kavikarnapura a bit because I find it to difficult to conceive his writing in English due to his extravagant use of double and more meanings and excessive puns which would never be allowable in English verse, however apposite it may be in the original. And as for alliteration, its obviously untranslatable. I have the Alankara Kaustubha translated by Matsya Avatara dasa and Gaurapada dasa, but found it very disappointing in translation. And much of the prosody only applies to Sanskrit. Well, as for that, welcome Jerry.
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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 13, 2021 11:15:36 GMT -6
Well, Christmas season is upon us, a gluttony of gift-giving (and receiving). Jesus is probably spinning in his grave! O wait! He got up and left and hasn't been back since! Probably knew what was coming. Anyway, whatever the meaning of this season for the members of this forum, I hope you are all well and somewhere in the neighborhood of happiness. I am well and healthy (more or less) and back in Kirksville for the season and the next several months.
I continue to work on my various projects in rotation. Today is the Tattva-sandarbha with its many commentaries. Also in hand is the Bhagavata translation with Sridhara's commentary. So far nothing too exciting to report. I am in the third chapter of the First Skandha, the chapter on the descents. Sridhara's comments are mostly short and not too brilliant or illuminating, but I expect those will come later. Srinathacakravartin's are in some ways more fun, but much more sectarian. I may have to revise my sense that Krsnadas Kaviraj introduced sectarianism into CV or at least expressed it so baldly (and in my view sometimes rather obnoxiously) in his Cc. Then, there is the Brhad-bhagavatamrta being redone with copious notes from Sri Sanatana's commentary. And finally, I am taking the advice offered by Srivatsa Goswami about re-engaging with the Ujjvala-nilamani of Sri Rupa Goswami. It is definitely one of the crowning jewels of the Caitanya tradition and I am honored and extremely lucky to be able, with the immense blessings of my Gurudev, to present it in English with its comms. in a multi-volume series. I thank Prabhupada Srivatsa Goswami for his encouragement and confidence in me. I often doubt that I have the abilities to do these beautiful works justice, but I also forget that it is the grace of Mahaprabhu and his bhaktas that keeps me afloat and will carry me through.
As I progress through these various delight-filled projects I will post my results when I reach significant milestones.
Wishing one and all a Radha-Krsna-aware end of year and beginning of a new year,
निताइदास जय राधे!
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Post by kirtaniya on Dec 14, 2021 10:39:44 GMT -6
He got up and left and hasn't been back since! His atoms are in each of us. And by atoms I mean the states of mind that are typical for all. There is one difficult-to-understand principle of consciousness: it is an impersonal phenomenon. All individual streams of consciousness are just a clinging to the past and the future. Good sadhana destroys the illusion of time and space. All innumerable beings are only one hundred dharmas. It is said that sentient beings are innumerable, and their origin cannot be found. I believe that this is also due to the fact that it is impossible to identify any phenomenon as the beginning of a particular stream of consciousness. That is, clinging (the upadana nidana) does not have an individual beginning, and the number of seeds sown for each individual stream is infinite. The Avatamsaka Sutra says that the entire universe should be regarded as a manifestation of the mind alone. But this does not at all mean someone's own mind. One may believe that in essence he is something special, and I believe that our essences - like sand in the desert, like water in the ocean - take any form and manifest in it, if the form provides some conditions. If mind is not separate, then what is mind?
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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 14, 2021 14:41:25 GMT -6
He got up and left and hasn't been back since! His atoms are in each of us. And by atoms I mean the states of mind that are typical for all. There is one difficult-to-understand principle of consciousness: it is an impersonal phenomenon. All individual streams of consciousness are just a clinging to the past and the future. Good sadhana destroys the illusion of time and space. All innumerable beings are only one hundred dharmas. It is said that sentient beings are innumerable, and their origin cannot be found. I believe that this is also due to the fact that it is impossible to identify any phenomenon as the beginning of a particular stream of consciousness. That is, clinging (the upadana nidana) does not have an individual beginning, and the number of seeds sown for each individual stream is infinite. The Avatamsaka Sutra says that the entire universe should be regarded as a manifestation of the mind alone. But this does not at all mean someone's own mind. One may believe that in essence he is something special, and I believe that our essences - like sand in the desert, like water in the ocean - take any form and manifest in it, if the form provides some conditions. If mind is not separate, then what is mind? Hi Kirtaniya, Good to see you on the forum again. Of course, I was only joking about Jesus. Our atoms were certainly with him, if there ever really was such a collection of atoms by that name, in the same sense that you mean. None of his states of mind were anything we don't have as well. Since time doesn't exist, he didn't really precede us. There is no reason call those atoms his. It is fun to play these thought games as long as we don't take them too seriously. It's all play after all, isn't it? Anyway, I am reading a lovely little Sanskrit play by Jayanta Bhatta called (in translation) Much Ado About Religion ( Agama-dambara). It's available in a nice little bilingual edition from the Clay Sanskrit Series folks. The Prelude features a Buddhist monk/teacher instructing a clever and inquisitive neophyte student. Here is a passage that I really like, response to a question by the disciple, that gets to the core of the Buddhist approach to the world. Your comment reminded me of it: 1.43: (smiling) My child, cessation, Nirvana, final beatitude or completion would be all the more impossible if there were a permanent self. For what is permanent cannot possibly cease. Therefore, this world is just consciousness contaminated by the various forms of joy, sorrow, etc., having a broad variety of aspects in accordance with the various latent impressions that have been operating in a beginningless continuum. When this path of the cultivation of there being no self, etc., has grounded this in pure consciousness alone, having removed its many kinds of defilements caused by the mass of various adventitious properties, then let it remain in a stream, or let the steam be cut off: this is indeed the fast track to Nirvana. This is a fascinating summary of the anatman doctrine and consciousness-only metaphysics. I highly recommend this book so far. I wish I had it when I was teaching religious studies. I'll add more to this conversation between disciple and teacher as time goes on.
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Post by Nitaidas on Dec 15, 2021 16:29:30 GMT -6
To continue this conversation between disciple and monk from Much Ado About Religion (Agama-dambara) translated by Csaba Deszo (Budapest) in the Clay Sanskrit Series.
Disciple: O Reverend, if there is no permanent self, who enjoys the fruit of his actions in the next world? And in the present, too, whose are these activities which are memory-based?
Monk: I'll skillfully make you understand.
Permanent entities cannot not have causal efficacy (artha-kriyA) either gradually or instantaneously; since they cannot have efficacy, they are not ultimately real.
For say the wise: "Only that which has causal efficacy can be ultimately real."
The pot whether perishable by nature or not, cannot be destroyed by a hammer or other cause. Such a cause would either be useless or incapable; or because this cause might not occur for an eaon, the pot might not perish.
Therefore, entities perish as soon as they come into existence, but they appear real because they are in the same continuum. Also, because they exist in a continuum. it is easy to account for the fabrication of effects, such as a stable agent who is also the enjoyer of the fruits of the deeds of that agent, and memory, etc.
More later.
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