Websites on teachings of acharyas

[malati]

To those who may not know the sites wherein they can read the GV teachings other than this forum, I listed them below.

I myself have somewhat a different approach to spiritual life, but I think if you really want to know the teachings of GVism these gurus are the best.

Love as in raganuga will grow if we are given some freedom; institutionalization is a poison to growth of love.


Commentaries and teachings of Sri Ananta das Babaji of Radhakunda.

kunjeshwari.com/sweettext.html


A forum where you can ask questions about the teachings of Sri Haridas Shastri of Vrindban

www.uttama-bhakti.org/forum/index.php


Sadhu Baba who I consider my guru and inspiration did not have much of his teachings recorded or written down but some of his teachings can be found in his biography.

madangopal.com/babajivan.pdf


Nityananda parivar site. You can contact them for any queries through this site.

www.nitaisundar.com/site/Main.html


As I am not sure exactly what system Nitaidas follows, those who are interested in GVism should ask him what system he has shaped himself. He is knowledgeable, obviously, but he has so much twists and turns that I don't where he is now.



I recently read that Sakicharan das (an american of the Nityananda parivar) who used to be active in this forum has acute leukemia. I don't know if he is in India or Thailand. He is kindly asking for some help, donation to help in his medical expenses. If you can, please help. This is his blog and there's a link to paypal where you can donate.

sriradhakund.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/please-help-sakhicharan-das-with-a-donation-to-help-with-my-cancer-expenses/#comment-825

Thank you. Krishna

[Nitaidas]

Thanks for these, malatidi, and for not putting links to any IGM sites. You know how I find their apasiddhanta so displeasing.

How about a link to Prabhupada Premgopal's site here.

And one to the sites of some of the Sri Radharaman temple Goswamis:

here.

here.

Let's find more of these sorts of links for this thread.

[vkaul1]

If we press on apasiddhanta, then CC has a lot of lies too right?
www.radha-krishnaism.org/2010/03/chaitanya-charitamrita/

Some good excepts from the book:
"Krish­nadas was not a his­to­rian. He often con­fuses sequences of events, and as the irrev­er­ent A. C. Sena points out, he puts quo­ta­tions from the Brahma Samhita into the mouth of Ramanand Rai dur­ing that worthy’s first meet­ing with Chai­tanya, before the lat­ter had gone on his south­ern pil­grim­age (2.8. sl.29, sl.39). Yet it does not bother Krish­nadas to inform us that Chai­tanya brought that text back with him from south­ern India, and that it was not known in the north until he did (2.1.111; 2.9.295–97; 2.11.127–29)."

Anyway CC uses an intimidatory tactic if you don't believe millions followed Chaitanya to Vrindavan, you will go to hell and so on and they don't seem to be that different from other religions. Stress is on "belief out of fear".

"Tony Stewart’s unpub­lished dis­ser­ta­tion “analy­ses the evo­lu­tion of the idea of Chaitanya’s divin­ity from its ori­gins in the ear­li­est text, Murari’s KCC, through the five inter­me­di­ate biogra­phies to Krish­nadas’ CC (78).” Jesus’ divin­ity in the four gospels evolved in a sim­i­lar man­ner. In Mark, the ear­li­est, Jesus is most human and in John, the last, most divine, like the CC."


The man­ner of Chaitanya’s death is a mys­tery.… Jayananda records the least ortho­dox, least accept­able, and prob­a­bly the most accu­rate, in this case, account: that near the end of the Car Fes­ti­val Chai­tanya injured his left foot while danc­ing, and after being in great pain for six days, died from an infec­tion of the wound (JCM 9.119–56) (22).

I am not sure it is historically accurate as it just draws the parallel with Krsna;s death by the arrow in his foot. What do you think?

"If we cut away like this all the sto­ries of Chaitanya’s life which are told to bol­ster the idea of Chaitanya’s iden­tity with Krishna, and all the mir­a­cles and all the hyper­bole, and all the lengthy argument and instruc­tion so lov­ingly pre­sented by Krish­nadas, we are left with really very lit­tle to tell us about Chai­tanya the man. It is clear that he was an ascetic and with­drawn indi­vid­ual, hav­ing at the same time an extra­or­di­nary per­sonal mag­net­ism. "

Jagat ji said, "History is _always_ colored by the biases of the culture, followers, perceivers, etc. With regards to Chaitanya I have also written somewhere that unless he takes on symbolic form, his characteristic as the "avatari" becomes impossible to maintain. "

So Nitai ji, we have to use a symbolic language and try to go into it in modern times like you said before. That has been the problem for me. Even when I go to traditional CV people they do believe in everything literally.

[Nitaidas]

Oh, and we must not forget our "Vaisnavacarya."

Here.

[Nitaidas]

Jan 28, 2012 17:14:50 GMT -6 vkaul1 said:

If we press on apasiddhanta, then CC has a lot of lies too right?
www.radha-krishnaism.org/2010/03/chaitanya-charitamrita/

Some good excepts from the book:
"Krish­nadas was not a his­to­rian. He often con­fuses sequences of events, and as the irrev­er­ent A. C. Sena points out, he puts quo­ta­tions from the Brahma Samhita into the mouth of Ramanand Rai dur­ing that worthy’s first meet­ing with Chai­tanya, before the lat­ter had gone on his south­ern pil­grim­age (2.8. sl.29, sl.39). Yet it does not bother Krish­nadas to inform us that Chai­tanya brought that text back with him from south­ern India, and that it was not known in the north until he did (2.1.111; 2.9.295–97; 2.11.127–29)."

Anyway CC uses an intimidatory tactic if you don't believe millions followed Chaitanya to Vrindavan, you will go to hell and so on and they don't seem to be that different from other religions. Stress is on "belief out of fear".

"Tony Stewart’s unpub­lished dis­ser­ta­tion “analy­ses the evo­lu­tion of the idea of Chaitanya’s divin­ity from its ori­gins in the ear­li­est text, Murari’s KCC, through the five inter­me­di­ate biogra­phies to Krish­nadas’ CC (78).” Jesus’ divin­ity in the four gospels evolved in a sim­i­lar man­ner. In Mark, the ear­li­est, Jesus is most human and in John, the last, most divine, like the CC."


The man­ner of Chaitanya’s death is a mys­tery.… Jayananda records the least ortho­dox, least accept­able, and prob­a­bly the most accu­rate, in this case, account: that near the end of the Car Fes­ti­val Chai­tanya injured his left foot while danc­ing, and after being in great pain for six days, died from an infec­tion of the wound (JCM 9.119–56) (22).

I am not sure it is historically accurate as it just draws the parallel with Krsna;s death by the arrow in his foot. What do you think?

"If we cut away like this all the sto­ries of Chaitanya’s life which are told to bol­ster the idea of Chaitanya’s iden­tity with Krishna, and all the mir­a­cles and all the hyper­bole, and all the lengthy argument and instruc­tion so lov­ingly pre­sented by Krish­nadas, we are left with really very lit­tle to tell us about Chai­tanya the man. It is clear that he was an ascetic and with­drawn indi­vid­ual, hav­ing at the same time an extra­or­di­nary per­sonal mag­net­ism. "

Jagat ji said, "History is _always_ colored by the biases of the culture, followers, perceivers, etc. With regards to Chaitanya I have also written somewhere that unless he takes on symbolic form, his characteristic as the "avatari" becomes impossible to maintain. "

So Nitai ji, we have to use a symbolic language and try to go into it in modern times like you said before. That has been the problem for me. Even when I go to traditional CV people they do believe in everything literally.

I would not equate apasiddhanta with lies, or, necessarily call many of the statements in the Cc lies. For something to be a lie it has to be the result of knowingly misleading. I don't think the KdK was guilty of that. The fact that he quotes books that were not written at the time they are being quoted and the case of the Brahma-samhita are not necessarily anachronisms. it is possible for a verse or two of a work to be known and quoted without the whole book being available. There are many lost books like that. I think KdK acted on good faith and did the best he could with the material he had. There are lots of fishy things about the Cc and I will be the first to admit it. But, the fact remains that the Cc has become the source of siddhanta for the CV tradition, eclipsing the works of the Gosvamins themselves. I disagree with much of what Dimock and Stewart have to say about the Cc. Neither of them has any really deep insights into the text. That is why I think the translation they did is such a disappointment. It really still needs to be done properly. I think if you read the Cc carefully and critically you will find Caitanya in it. It is not a matter of peeling away all the myths to try to discover the historical Caitanya. We should have learned by now that that never works, as it certainly never did with Jesus. The myths are there for a reason and the trick is discovering what the myths are trying to do for the image of Mahaprabhu. I think for instance you see the real Caitanya in his dealings with Rupa and Sanatana as presented in the Cc. Read those sections closely and you learn something about him maybe even something KdK might not have wanted you to know. Siddhanta means the accepted truths of a tradition. The Cc was influential in deriving these. The early movement might have gone many different ways, but it went the way it did largely because of the power of the Cc. Sure. It has its flaws, but it is also in many ways a masterpiece, well deserving of a place alongside the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-gita, the Bhagavata, the Dao De Jing, etc.

The twaddle taught by IGM is apasiddhanta. It teaches things about the CV tradition that are not accepted truths for the tradition. For example, sannyasa. Once we know the siddhanta we can easily recognize the apasiddhanta. The problem is no one knows the siddhanta well enough. But knowing the siddhanta doe not mean that we will agree with everything. There are likely to be aspects of the siddhanta that we simply can't accept today. The idea that the Bhagavata was written by Vyasa 5,000 years ago is part of accepted teaching. But, today because of our increased ability to critically study such texts we can tell that that is not true. The real authors of the Bhagavata are unknown and the age of the text goes back to 6th cent CE or later. We also know that various verses and indeed whole chapters were added at later times. Still, if we take away those chapters and exclude them, then we will not have the Bhagavata that was read and studied for so many generations by members of the Vaisnava communities. We will fail to understand the way they understood the meaning of the text.

For me the importance of knowing siddhanta is not so we can defend it against all comers, but so that we can discover what remains tenable and what has become untenable in the modern world. The foolish, self-aggrandizing innovations of IGM are useless to us in that regard.

[spiritualbhakti]

www.sadgurubijoykrishna.com/

[spiritualbhakti]

www.gosaiji.com/

[spiritualbhakti]

visakha's blog

uddharan.wordpress.com/

[vkaul1]

Jan 28, 2012 22:05:16 GMT -6 Nitaidas said:

Jan 28, 2012 17:14:50 GMT -6 vkaul1 said:

If we press on apasiddhanta, then CC has a lot of lies too right?
www.radha-krishnaism.org/2010/03/chaitanya-charitamrita/

Some good excepts from the book:
"Krish­nadas was not a his­to­rian. He often con­fuses sequences of events, and as the irrev­er­ent A. C. Sena points out, he puts quo­ta­tions from the Brahma Samhita into the mouth of Ramanand Rai dur­ing that worthy’s first meet­ing with Chai­tanya, before the lat­ter had gone on his south­ern pil­grim­age (2.8. sl.29, sl.39). Yet it does not bother Krish­nadas to inform us that Chai­tanya brought that text back with him from south­ern India, and that it was not known in the north until he did (2.1.111; 2.9.295–97; 2.11.127–29)."

Anyway CC uses an intimidatory tactic if you don't believe millions followed Chaitanya to Vrindavan, you will go to hell and so on and they don't seem to be that different from other religions. Stress is on "belief out of fear".

"Tony Stewart’s unpub­lished dis­ser­ta­tion “analy­ses the evo­lu­tion of the idea of Chaitanya’s divin­ity from its ori­gins in the ear­li­est text, Murari’s KCC, through the five inter­me­di­ate biogra­phies to Krish­nadas’ CC (78).” Jesus’ divin­ity in the four gospels evolved in a sim­i­lar man­ner. In Mark, the ear­li­est, Jesus is most human and in John, the last, most divine, like the CC."


The man­ner of Chaitanya’s death is a mys­tery.… Jayananda records the least ortho­dox, least accept­able, and prob­a­bly the most accu­rate, in this case, account: that near the end of the Car Fes­ti­val Chai­tanya injured his left foot while danc­ing, and after being in great pain for six days, died from an infec­tion of the wound (JCM 9.119–56) (22).

I am not sure it is historically accurate as it just draws the parallel with Krsna;s death by the arrow in his foot. What do you think?

"If we cut away like this all the sto­ries of Chaitanya’s life which are told to bol­ster the idea of Chaitanya’s iden­tity with Krishna, and all the mir­a­cles and all the hyper­bole, and all the lengthy argument and instruc­tion so lov­ingly pre­sented by Krish­nadas, we are left with really very lit­tle to tell us about Chai­tanya the man. It is clear that he was an ascetic and with­drawn indi­vid­ual, hav­ing at the same time an extra­or­di­nary per­sonal mag­net­ism. "

Jagat ji said, "History is _always_ colored by the biases of the culture, followers, perceivers, etc. With regards to Chaitanya I have also written somewhere that unless he takes on symbolic form, his characteristic as the "avatari" becomes impossible to maintain. "

So Nitai ji, we have to use a symbolic language and try to go into it in modern times like you said before. That has been the problem for me. Even when I go to traditional CV people they do believe in everything literally.

I would not equate apasiddhanta with lies, or, necessarily call many of the statements in the Cc lies. For something to be a lie it has to be the result of knowingly misleading. I don't think the KdK was guilty of that. The fact that he quotes books that were not written at the time they are being quoted and the case of the Brahma-samhita are not necessarily anachronisms. it is possible for a verse or two of a work to be known and quoted without the whole book being available. There are many lost books like that. I think KdK acted on good faith and did the best he could with the material he had. There are lots of fishy things about the Cc and I will be the first to admit it. But, the fact remains that the Cc has become the source of siddhanta for the CV tradition, eclipsing the works of the Gosvamins themselves. I disagree with much of what Dimock and Stewart have to say about the Cc. Neither of them has any really deep insights into the text. That is why I think the translation they did is such a disappointment. It really still needs to be done properly. I think if you read the Cc carefully and critically you will find Caitanya in it. It is not a matter of peeling away all the myths to try to discover the historical Caitanya. We should have learned by now that that never works, as it certainly never did with Jesus. The myths are there for a reason and the trick is discovering what the myths are trying to do for the image of Mahaprabhu. I think for instance you see the real Caitanya in his dealings with Rupa and Sanatana as presented in the Cc. Read those sections closely and you learn something about him maybe even something KdK might not have wanted you to know. Siddhanta means the accepted truths of a tradition. The Cc was influential in deriving these. The early movement might have gone many different ways, but it went the way it did largely because of the power of the Cc. Sure. It has its flaws, but it is also in many ways a masterpiece, well deserving of a place alongside the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-gita, the Bhagavata, the Dao De Jing, etc.

The twaddle taught by IGM is apasiddhanta. It teaches things about the CV tradition that are not accepted truths for the tradition. For example, sannyasa. Once we know the siddhanta we can easily recognize the apasiddhanta. The problem is no one knows the siddhanta well enough. But knowing the siddhanta doe not mean that we will agree with everything. There are likely to be aspects of the siddhanta that we simply can't accept today. The idea that the Bhagavata was written by Vyasa 5,000 years ago is part of accepted teaching. But, today because of our increased ability to critically study such texts we can tell that that is not true. The real authors of the Bhagavata are unknown and the age of the text goes back to 6th cent CE or later. We also know that various verses and indeed whole chapters were added at later times. Still, if we take away those chapters and exclude them, then we will not have the Bhagavata that was read and studied for so many generations by members of the Vaisnava communities. We will fail to understand the way they understood the meaning of the text.

For me the importance of knowing siddhanta is not so we can defend it against all comers, but so that we can discover what remains tenable and what has become untenable in the modern world. The foolish, self-aggrandizing innovations of IGM are useless to us in that regard.

I agree. Just that Jagat ji had recommended this text. Anyway, the language of CC is pretty easy to understand and there is less ambiguity there. However, his story of Vallabha and the debate with the Buddhists or his rendering of the story of Prakashananda Saraswati are mere propaganda, don't you think? They were not knowingly misleading? When you try to convert people to your faith, fudging the incidents with other personalities and showing them in inferior light, is it really a good practice? I know everyone did that including madhva's biographer by painting Sankara as a demon. These things don't seem that great according to modern sensibilities at least. You cringe at BVT manufacturing the birth place of CM, but you do not feel that fudging incidents to put down other sects is repulsive? What about intimidation of not believing and going to hell if you don't believe in it. Yes I agree we cannot find the historical person through this exercise, but at least we have to take out the sectarian propaganda without fear of going to hell. The first time I read Sri Chaitanya's dealings with Sri Sanatana, I also cried. It was amazing. I am just saying that how does one deal with the historical propaganda that is over the top? Can we just read specific sections that appeal to us and ignore the others? Also the theology that KdK developed and codified as a rigid theology is a mix of so many theologies before. To say that there is "one" siddhanta would be simplistic, right?

On sanyasa, it is not the siddhanta for CV though CM himself took sanyasa for one. I agree it does not add to much, it does not seem unprecedented in the Indic scene. And to add to mix, I think that the siddhanta is that varna is birth-based. I find the idea of caste to be repulsive and don't even feel the IGM based reform on varna accomplishes anything. Varna based system seems racist to me. I am saying that given the priveleges of the brahmin by birth.

[kalki]

Jan 27, 2012 20:45:43 GMT -6 malati said:

A forum where you can ask questions about the teachings of Sri Haridas Shastri of Vrindban

www.uttama-bhakti.org/forum/index.php

I would like to get involved here, but a message appears in the registration option that they have been flooded with spam and they prefer people send them an email which is found in the "contacts" section of the front page.

But I went to the front page and found no such email address. So does anyone know how to get in touch with them and get me invovled? Malati, I saw your name in the threads on the first page, so perhaps can you get me an email of the admin or something?

[Nitaidas]

Thanks for these, Jai Nitai. We should try to make as complete a list as we can in this thread. If there are any others that you know of, please post them. But no IGM sites, please.

[Nitaidas]

Jan 29, 2012 12:07:50 GMT -6 vkaul1 said:

I agree. Just that Jagat ji had recommended this text.

Which text? The Cc by Dimock and Stewart? There is no doubt that it is better than Bhaktivedanta's, but it still leaves much to be desired.

Anyway, the language of CC is pretty easy to understand and there is less ambiguity there. However, his story of Vallabha and the debate with the Buddhists or his rendering of the story of Prakashananda Saraswati are mere propaganda, don't you think? They were not knowingly misleading? When you try to convert people to your faith, fudging the incidents with other personalities and showing them in inferior light, is it really a good practice?

What would you expect him to do? Yes, Mahaprabhu debated some Buddhists but he lost. Besides we are not sure that those stories are untrue. The debate with Vallabha might have actually taken place and it might have contained a criticism of Vallabha because he was not paying Sridhara his full due. That does not seem unlikely, to me. In cases like this I think we can see what KdK is doing and why. We should not take it too seriously.

I know everyone did that including madhva's biographer by painting Sankara as a demon. These things don't seem that great according to modern sensibilities at least.[./quote]

Right, but can we hold KdK or any 16th century writer to the standards we have today? Does that make them worthless? Certainly not. Shakespeare may have been anti-semitic. Should we therefore not read or perform the Mechant of Venice? I don't think so. We get much more out of the text if we register these unpleasant things and ask ourselves what the causes were. I suspect that competition had become intense for land and support in the last decades of the 16th cent. and first decades of the 17th cent. One had to make a strong case for one's own tradition and clearly distinguish it from all the others.

You cringe at BVT manufacturing the birth place of CM, but you do not feel that fudging incidents to put down other sects is repulsive?

How do we know that they were fudged? Maybe Mahaprabhu ran into some lame Buddhists who could not properly represent their tradition. Buddhism had long been dying out in India. Who knows what condition the tradition was in then? I suspect that KdK had sources for what he wrote about. Remember, he probably knew personally Sri Rupa and Sanatana, and he certainly knew Sri Raghunatha, Sri Jiva and Sri Raghunatha Bhatta. He knew Sri Gopala Bhatta too. Even if he missed Sri Rupa (mort 1555?) and Sri Sanatana (1554?) he had access to their closest companions. In other words, he had reliable sources. He did not make things up himself. Perhaps his sources were mistaken or misremembered or burnished things a bit. Still, I think that KdK was well meaning.

What about intimidation of not believing and going to hell if you don't believe in it. Yes I agree we cannot find the historical person through this exercise, but at least we have to take out the sectarian propaganda without fear of going to hell.

Religions have been doing this all through history: threatening people with hell if they do not believe. Even the Gita does that. The fact that a text intimidates is a good sign that its author has recognized a weakness in doctrine or a highly unlikely event and wants to hide it or avoid close scrutiny. When intimidations comes we should keep our eyes out for a coming weakness. We do not need to turn off our minds to be good readers of a text.

The first time I read Sri Chaitanya's dealings with Sri Sanatana, I also cried. It was amazing. I am just saying that how does one deal with the historical propaganda that is over the top?

Well, one does not take it too seriously for one thing. It is something we can learn something from, perhaps something that the author did not want us to learn. There are several places like that in the Cc. We simply have to keep our eyes open and read it critically.

Can we just read specific sections that appeal to us and ignore the others? Also the theology that KdK developed and codified as a rigid theology is a mix of so many theologies before.

Of course we can, but then we may miss something important. we do not have to take them in the way the author intended. We are free to look behind them and see why he may have said that or believed that. Yes, well, the members of the tradition needed something to believe. There were many choices back at the beginning. We still have many of them, the roads not taken. The Goswamins were sophisticated enough and educated enough that their approach won. I would argue that it won because of KdK. But in the process of being translated into simpler terms, the original set of ideas lost some of its flexibility. When you read Sanatana, say his commentary on the 10th Skandha or his commentary on his own Brhad-bhagavatamrta, you constantly find him saying things like iti dik. This means "this is one direction one might go in interpreting this verse, but there are others too." There is a tremendous openness and a sense of vastness in his works. This was lost as the theology became more clearly defined and more directed. This is the way we find it in Sri Jiva. And KdK really condenses it and makes it sound like the law.

To say that there is "one" siddhanta would be simplistic, right?

I think the tradition gradually came to define itself and that is what we mean by siddhanta. Sure. there were a lot of splinter groups and offshoots who saw things differently. Nevertheless they developed a sold core of siddhanta out of close reading of the Bhagavata and other bhakti scriptures and efforts to try to understand what was going on with Mahaprabhu. That we see Sanatana starting to formulate in his Brhadbhag. Rupa develops one aspect of it and Jiva another. KdK comes along and turns it all upside down by making it seem as if Mahaprabhu is the source of it all and he taught it to them. It seems pretty clear that that was not the case. Mahaprabhu needed them to help him put his ecstatic experiences into some sort of meaningful model or context. They did. They gave him the context upon which his life became supremely meaningful.

On sanyasa, it is not the siddhanta for CV though CM himself took sanyasa for one. I agree it does not add to much, it does not seem unprecedented in the Indic scene. And to add to mix, I think that the siddhanta is that varna is birth-based. I find the idea of caste to be repulsive and don't even feel the IGM based reform on varna accomplishes anything. Varna based system seems racist to me. I am saying that given the priveleges of the brahmin by birth.

He did not complete the process. He became a sannyasa brahmacari and never an actual sannyasi. Nor did he ever recommend or request anyone to become one. The true form of renunciation was that exemplified by the Goswamis. That is what eventually became known as bhek or becoming a babaji. Sannyasa was part of the very system Mahaprabhu and his followers were rejecting. Sannyasa is the fourth estate. It is not really outside the system, it is the culmination of the system, its highest goal. The goal of CV renunciation was to be beyond the pale, to renounce all claims to respect. Adoption of sannyasa was a step in exactly the opposite direction. Therefore, it is apasiddhanta.

[spiritualbhakti]

Jan 29, 2012 12:46:31 GMT -6 kalki said:

Jan 27, 2012 20:45:43 GMT -6 malati said:

A forum where you can ask questions about the teachings of Sri Haridas Shastri of Vrindban

www.uttama-bhakti.org/forum/index.php

I would like to get involved here, but a message appears in the registration option that they have been flooded with spam and they prefer people send them an email which is found in the "contacts" section of the front page.

But I went to the front page and found no such email address. So does anyone know how to get in touch with them and get me invovled? Malati, I saw your name in the threads on the first page, so perhaps can you get me an email of the admin or something?

contact braja bhusan das, i think the email is somewhere on the site.

[spiritualbhakti]

www.sriharidasniwas.org/main.php

another site for Sri Haridas Shastri

[vkaul1]

Jan 29, 2012 14:53:28 GMT -6 Nitaidas said:

Jan 29, 2012 12:07:50 GMT -6 vkaul1 said:

I agree. Just that Jagat ji had recommended this text.

Which text? The Cc by Dimock and Stewart? There is no doubt that it is better than Bhaktivedanta's, but it still leaves much to be desired.



What would you expect him to do? Yes, Mahaprabhu debated some Buddhists but he lost. Besides we are not sure that those stories are untrue. The debate with Vallabha might have actually taken place and it might have contained a criticism of Vallabha because he was not paying Sridhara his full due. That does not seem unlikely, to me. In cases like this I think we can see what KdK is doing and why. We should not take it too seriously.



How do we know that they were fudged? Maybe Mahaprabhu ran into some lame Buddhists who could not properly represent their tradition. Buddhism had long been dying out in India. Who knows what condition the tradition was in then? I suspect that KdK had sources for what he wrote about. Remember, he probably knew personally Sri Rupa and Sanatana, and he certainly knew Sri Raghunatha, Sri Jiva and Sri Raghunatha Bhatta. He knew Sri Gopala Bhatta too. Even if he missed Sri Rupa (mort 1555?) and Sri Sanatana (1554?) he had access to their closest companions. In other words, he had reliable sources. He did not make things up himself. Perhaps his sources were mistaken or misremembered or burnished things a bit. Still, I think that KdK was well meaning.



Religions have been doing this all through history: threatening people with hell if they do not believe. Even the Gita does that. The fact that a text intimidates is a good sign that its author has recognized a weakness in doctrine or a highly unlikely event and wants to hide it or avoid close scrutiny. When intimidations comes we should keep our eyes out for a coming weakness. We do not need to turn off our minds to be good readers of a text.



Well, one does not take it too seriously for one thing. It is something we can learn something from, perhaps something that the author did not want us to learn. There are several places like that in the Cc. We simply have to keep our eyes open and read it critically.



Of course we can, but then we may miss something important. we do not have to take them in the way the author intended. We are free to look behind them and see why he may have said that or believed that. Yes, well, the members of the tradition needed something to believe. There were many choices back at the beginning. We still have many of them, the roads not taken. The Goswamins were sophisticated enough and educated enough that their approach won. I would argue that it won because of KdK. But in the process of being translated into simpler terms, the original set of ideas lost some of its flexibility. When you read Sanatana, say his commentary on the 10th Skandha or his commentary on his own Brhad-bhagavatamrta, you constantly find him saying things like iti dik. This means "this is one direction one might go in interpreting this verse, but there are others too." There is a tremendous openness and a sense of vastness in his works. This was lost as the theology became more clearly defined and more directed. This is the way we find it in Sri Jiva. And KdK really condenses it and makes it sound like the law.




I think the tradition gradually came to define itself and that is what we mean by siddhanta. Sure. there were a lot of splinter groups and offshoots who saw things differently. Nevertheless they developed a sold core of siddhanta out of close reading of the Bhagavata and other bhakti scriptures and efforts to try to understand what was going on with Mahaprabhu. That we see Sanatana starting to formulate in his Brhadbhag. Rupa develops one aspect of it and Jiva another. KdK comes along and turns it all upside down by making it seem as if Mahaprabhu is the source of it all and he taught it to them. It seems pretty clear that that was not the case. Mahaprabhu needed them to help him put his ecstatic experiences into some sort of meaningful model or context. They did. They gave him the context upon which his life became supremely meaningful.

On sanyasa, it is not the siddhanta for CV though CM himself took sanyasa for one. I agree it does not add to much, it does not seem unprecedented in the Indic scene. And to add to mix, I think that the siddhanta is that varna is birth-based. I find the idea of caste to be repulsive and don't even feel the IGM based reform on varna accomplishes anything. Varna based system seems racist to me. I am saying that given the priveleges of the brahmin by birth.

He did not complete the process. He became a sannyasa brahmacari and never an actual sannyasi. Nor did he ever recommend or request anyone to become one. The true form of renunciation was that exemplified by the Goswamis. That is what eventually became known as bhek or becoming a babaji. Sannyasa was part of the very system Mahaprabhu and his followers were rejecting. Sannyasa is the fourth estate. It is not really outside the system, it is the culmination of the system, its highest goal. The goal of CV renunciation was to be beyond the pale, to renounce all claims to respect. Adoption of sannyasa was a step in exactly the opposite direction. Therefore, it is apasiddhanta.

Yes the text by Dimock. However, the story with Prakasananda Saraswati does not seem to be true as his work does not reflect his conversion. Another thing, Kdk says CM said never to hear any "mayavada" and at the same time accepts sridhara swami. So there also the contradiction is there to separate sridhara swami from the tradition of sankara. There is no specific argument given about debates with Buddhists and also with tattvavadis in Udippi. Again I thank for answering my questions.