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Archive for July, 2018

Monday Morning Greetings 2018 #31 – Jumping to the Tenth Canto

July 30th, 2018

Śrīla Prabhupāda was once challenged about why at the beginning of his movement he jumped to publishing the Kṛṣṇa book, his summary study of the Tenth Canto of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, when one is supposed to first study the first nine cantos before focusing on Krishna’s pastimes.  He hadn’t even yet completed and published beyond the First Canto at the time. His tongue-in-cheek response: “Just like the Gujaratis, they serve the sweets first.”[1] In other words, just as it is out of the ordinary to serve sweets before a meal, though it can be done, offering the Tenth Canto at the beginning of one’s spiritual life can also be done. The question remains, why is what Śrīla Prabhupāda did generally not recommended and why did he do it anyway?

 

Prematurely hearing the Tenth Canto is not recommended because perception, in this case hearing, is not just based on the senses, but also the mind, which interprets and ascribes feelings to what we hear. Therefore, although we may hear the Tenth Canto, we will misunderstand it unless properly educated and the mind is relatively pure.

 

Let me use a very stark example that illustrates how understanding something properly is way beyond just hearing or seeing it: Trump. People hear and see the same things in terms of the President, but the country is divided on how they perceive him. Let’s quickly move to a less polarizing and more spiritual example.

 

Recently, I was doing harināma kīrtana in Vilnius, Lithuania with the monks of the Holy Name Monastery. The kīrtana had devotion and enthusiasm, and the effect was powerful. Some smiled and clapped. Some were, at best, indifferent. As I marched down the main road of the city it was just so apparent how much proper perception is dependent on one’s mindset.

 

In a similar way, the main caution to jumping to a study of the Tenth Canto is that those not properly spiritually educated will hear the pastimes of Krishna with a type of prejudice and prejudge them as mundane love, rather than selfless devotion. Now back to the core concern, why, considering these cautions, did Śrīla Prabhupāda jump over the beginning cantos[2] to translate the Tenth?

 

Śrīla Prabhupāda was practical and had a mission. Due to his advanced age, he feared that if he waited to progressively translate and complete the preceding cantos before publishing Krishna’s pastimes, his disciples and followers might never get these important teachings in an appropriate way from him. In fact, he actually never finished translating the Tenth Canto. We are left with the poignant scene of Śrīla Prabhupāda lying on his back in his last days, whispering his translation and commentary of the Tenth Canto into a recorder to complete as much as he could before he left. He finished only the first thirteen chapters. Foreseeing this fate years before, he clearly shared his concern:

 

“Following in the footsteps of Śrīla Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmī, I am trying to translate Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam as quickly as possible. However, knowing myself to be an old man and almost an invalid because of rheumatism, I have already translated the essence of all literatures, the Tenth Canto of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, as a summary study in English. I started the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement at the age of seventy. Now I am seventy-eight, and so my death is imminent. I am trying to finish the translation of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam as soon as possible, but before finishing it, I have given my readers the book Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, so that if I die before finishing the whole task, they may enjoy this book, which is the essence of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. (Cc. Antyalīlā 1.11, purport)

 

Śrīla Prabhupāda, however, wrote the Kṛṣṇa book very carefully to accommodate his audience by couching the stories of Krishna in an appropriate philosophical context, ensuring his immature audience would not miss the point and take the stories cheaply. He thus masterfully gave us both the stories of the Tenth Canto, including the description of the rāsa-līlā, and the proper frame of reference to understand them at the same time.

 

Conclusion: By Śrīla Prabhupāda’s mercy we have special access to Krishna’s līlā so that we can both relish and respect it at the same time. We should certainly take avail of his mercy. In fact, Śrīla Prabhupāda encouraged us:

 

“If you read the Kṛṣṇa book every day you will be happy.”[3]

 

 


[1] Usually in Indian fare the sweets are served last, but the Gujarati’s take them at the beginning of their meal.

[2] He had only translated and published the First Canto before writing his summary study of the Tenth Canto.

[3] This was an instruction given to my god-brother Visal Prabhu by Śrīla Prabhupāda, who personally related this exchange with Śrīla Prabhupāda to me.

 

 

Monday Morning Greetings 2018 #30 – It’s the Mind!

July 23rd, 2018

Everyone has their own set of irrational fears and anxieties according to their past experiences, this life or the previous, often embedded deep in the subconscious. Mine is travel. I wouldn’t say it is debilitating. I don’t lose sleep over it, but when I travel I worry unnecessarily. I have to be hours early for a flight. I can understand being reasonably cautious, but inevitably I arrive far beyond what is necessary. And as soon as my car pulls out of the driveway to leave for the airport, I nervously slap my pockets checking for my passport, ticket, and wallet, although I checked for these things numerous times before I left. Today after more than forty years traveling in the Hare Krishna movement, I think I finally came to my senses:

 

Why all this worry?  Am I really the controller? Whether I miss my plane or not is really not up to me. There are five factors of action and only one is our endeavor, so just do your duty and leave on time, not hours before. The rest is really up to Krishna. He has already decided whether you need to be to the next place on time or not. It is all so basic that it is almost embarrassing.

 

And when thinking this way, it clearly reaffirmed a realization. It’s the mind! In other words, all our problems are more how we see things than how they actually are.

 

A personal and classic example: Previously, when coming from the airport to Vṛndāvana, I would have my driver head directly to Keśi-ghāṭa on the bank of the Yamunā. My ritual was to take a holy bath for purification before daring to begin my undeserved stay in this most sacred of places. One year while descending the steps of the ghāṭa to bathe, I noticed a big black snake looming on the very bottom step. Whoa! Apprehensively, I moved thirty yards further down the river before quickly bathing, still harboring that very dangerous serpent in my mind. While walking back to my car, I looked down to the first step only to see that same black snake sitting in the exact same position. It hadn’t moved an inch! I was surprised. As I wasn’t wearing my glasses I began to squint to examine the situation more clearly. I began to chuckle. Oh, it was just a black tire! Just see, a snake posed a danger, but the problem existed only in my mind.

 

A deeper existential example: The greatest problem or fear is death because we lose everything including our present identity, but death itself is only the illusion of non-existence. How much unnecessary and unlimited worry do we have to endure due to the mind before we wake up!

 

Now back to my petty anxieties. I am in Sochi. My flight for Vilnius is 11:15 AM and the airport is 45 minutes away. My host says we will leave at 8:00 AM. I suggest leaving 15 minutes earlier, but my host assures me it is more than enough time. I naturally start to think “What if…” but I check my impulse.  Stop this silliness and depend on Krishna. I began to reflect that the anxiety I accrued over the years in the process of travel was so much worse than the worst-case scenario, — a rare missed flight — which may never even have happened. It is so clear. There may be serious challenges in life, but most of our worries are needless. How much time and energy we could save for a productive and peaceful life if we could only starve those irrational thoughts by neglect. It’s funny, but I suddenly think of one of the most famous quotes in American history:

 

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”[1]

 

 


[1] By Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States in his first inaugural address referring to the Great Depression the country was facing at that time.

Monday Morning Greetings 2018 #29 – The Marriage of Faith and Doubt

July 16th, 2018

Faith is good. Doubt is bad. Not so quick; they are not enemies. Both faith and doubt have a common goal—to help us understand things further.

 

First, faith. In his essay “The Will to Believe”, Williams James[1] gives a very practical example of how faith is essential for knowledge: If a man wants to know if a woman loves him, he first has to have the faith that she does. If he sat around waiting for her to express her love first, he may lose out on the opportunity to discover and understand the love that was there.

 

The general point he makes is that in many instances of practical importance without faith or initial trust we cannot fully realize what we suspect may be true. We must rely on individuals or traditions of thought that educate us about a world beyond our experience. This involves trust. Without such faith we are restricted in the expanse of our knowledge to our present and limited frame of reference. Almost by definition the knowledge we are seeking is beyond our present purview and requires faith in its pursuit, otherwise why would we need to learn something in the first place? If we think of anything we want to learn, from music and science to spiritual subjects, it should become obvious how much faith in an authority, a person who knows and sees what we don’t, accelerates our learning. In many ways, therefore, faith is a precursor of knowledge.

 

It is important to note that such faith doesn’t mean blind acceptance. Faith means trust by evidence. For example, it is very reasonable for a young man to faithfully accept his father’s words on trust if through the years that relationship has proven to be one of affection and wisdom, or to trust the directions of a doctor who has demonstrated himself as a medical authority by repeatedly curing his patients. It is likewise reasonable for a student to trust her professor’s claims about her field if the professor is a reputable authority in an established tradition. Faith thus means to reasonably accept something beyond our current state of knowledge.

 

It is commonplace in Indian thought that philosophical reflection begins with doubt. In fact, according to Lord Kapiladeva, doubt is one the five attributes of intelligence.[2] But how does doubt help us understand things given the role of trust in knowing as discussed above? The dichotomy is resolved when we clarify how the faculty of doubt is used. If it is used to reject a legitimate authority, it is then opposed to faith; but if it is used to find a genuine authority, or to clarify from him or her what we don’t understand, it is the partner of faith.

 

In fact, in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.2.12 Sūta Gosvāmī describes the necessity for this type of doubt specifically to explain the method to understand tattva, or truth. Two qualities are delineated: faithfulness and thoughtfulness (or doubt). If one is not faithful, then one’s knowledge is limited to one’s present understanding. And if one is not thoughtful, it is mired to one’s inadequate grasp of what one has faithfully heard. Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī quotes a relevant reference in his commentary on this verse to validate this claim:

 

“Lord Brahma heard the Vedas three times from Lord Krishna before he concluded that the essence of religion is devotional service.” (Bhag. 2.2.34)

 

In elaborating on this reference Śrī Jīva explains that the first time Lord Brahma heard the Vedas, which to a large degree promotes ritualistic activities, he heard the essence of the Vedas as karma, but doubted how that could be true. Krishna thus explained the Vedas a second time. He listened carefully again, this time noting the Upaniṣadic sections, and concluded that the essence of religion was jñāna, analytic knowledge and renunciation. He doubted once again that he had understood the text properly. Krishna therefore explained the Vedas a third time and he finally understood that the essence of the Vedas was bhakti.

 

Śrī Jīva comments in this regard that if a disciple is not similarly thoughtful and doesn’t raise his doubts to his spiritual master for clarification, he will surely mistake devotional service for either karma or jñāna. Almost all major Vaiṣṇava texts, like Bhagavad-gītā and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, are therefore recorded dialectics, or in other words discussions between teachers and students where the doubts of the students are cleared.

 

Faith is glorious, but doubt is not the enemy. Thoughtlessness is, whether it be fanatical faith or skeptical rejection of reasonable faith.

 

 


[1] Renowned American philosopher and psychologist (1842-1910), who wrote various classics including The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

[2] Bhag. 3.26.30

 

 

Monday Morning Greetings 2018 #28 – Songs of Devotion

July 9th, 2018

Surprisingly, my grandfather affectionately grabbed my grandmother’s hand. They had three children together when they were young, but almost no romance or affection after that. After their third child was born when they were in their mid-twenties, my grandfather became a bit distant. Although my grandmother suffered there was no question of divorce. She just tolerated her fate. My mother (their daughter) and father had brought them to the Imperial Theatre on Broadway for their fiftieth wedding anniversary to watch Fiddler on the Roof, a play about matchmaking and romance in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. The play powerfully moved them, especially as they had migrated to America from Odessa in the early 1900s, which was about the same time period in which the play was set.  When the theme song “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” broke out even my grandfather was moved. He affectionately clasped his wife’s hand. My grandmother was so excited, as related to me by my mother, that she turned to her daughter sitting to her right, smiled and discreetly pointed to my grandfather’s display of affection as if to say, “Look! Look!” Oh, the power of drama and song!

 

A good song, poetry, or drama goes beyond just communicating or explaining an emotion, it embodies the emotion and makes one feel it. That same power of song or poetics to nourish or incite emotion is integral to the development of the sentiment of bhakti. That was the example of Śrī Caitanya, especially in His twilight years (the antya-līlā).

 

Śrī Caitanya Mahaprabhu spent the last eighteen years of His life fulfilling His internal mission, which was to taste the love of Śrī Krishna’s topmost devotee Śrī Radha at the height of Her love. He passed his time in the Gambhīra, a small cave-like room near the Jagannath Mandir, where day and night he chanted the holy name in the mood of separation from Krishna seeking to attain this special devotion.

 

His practice or means for achieving His goal was absorption in the holy name. Every object has a śakti or potency and objects and acts of devotion have a bhakti śakti, an energy that draws out devotion from our hearts, ultimately in the form of rāsa, our mature relationship with Krishna. But how to achieve that full absorption?

 

To deepen His absorption in the holy name of Krishna, Śrī Caitanya interspersed His constant chanting with the songs and stories of Krishna, the person whose name He was chanting. These songs and stories, especially of Śrī Radha’s intense love for Śrī Krishna, were perfectly composed to imbue the particular devotion that Śrī Caitanya longed for. But there was one problem. Śrī Radha’s mood of separation was so deep and confidential there was a paucity of such compositions.

 

Understanding Śrī Caitanya’s quandary, poets and qualified followers eagerly began to try to write such compositions to be carefully screened by Svarūpa Dāmodara for use in Śrī Caitanya’s bhajan or practice.  In other words, properly composed poetics in the form of stories (drama), poetry, and song were absolutely essential for the bhajan of Śrī Caitanya to increase His absorption in the holy name and nourish His aspiration. But what does this have to do with us struggling practitioners? Well, everything.

 

Śrī Caitanya’s life was ācāry-līlā, a perfect example meant to teach us how to gradually awaken and nourish our own relationship with Krishna. As songs of devotion were essential to this practice, so are they to ours. To foster that mood, whether it is to develop a deeper disposition of humility and longing, or in a more advanced stage to develop affection for Krishna in a particular mellow, our ācāryas, especially Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura and Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura, have left a treasure of songs that encapsulate devotional moods and nurture whatever spark of worthy sentiment rests in our hearts. If my grandfather’s heart could be moved by a dynamic Broadway drama with songs embodying romance, why cannot our hearts melt with devotion by the bhakti laden poetics of our rich tradition? Learn them and hear them and deepen your absorption in the holy name!

 

Monday Morning Greetings 2018 #27 – The Yoga of Talking to Yourself

July 2nd, 2018

Listen to the sincerity of your chanting. Go deeper in your meditation. Other thoughts may come, but don’t follow them. As I guide people in japa meditation seminars, I have observed how effectively submitting to a comforting voice of authority helps one cross the mental blocks of distraction and seep into deeper states of awareness and concentration. From doing this I have also realized how much activating my own inner voice has helped guide my own chanting. More and more I find myself talking to myself during my morning meditation.

 

Talking to yourself? Isn’t that a distraction? Before continuing this discussion, I think it is necessary in general to consider the concept of “voice” in relation to chanting.

 

I heard a somewhat interesting example to illustrate this. Have you ever walked through the famous Loi Bazaar shopping area in Vṛndāvana when a shopkeeper in a squeaky voice calls out “Haribol, prabhu!”? What do you hear? Do you hear the holy name or someone asking for your money? What we say carries more than just syllables; it carries our heart. And more than anything that is what Krishna hears when we chant His holy name.

 

Another good example of “voice” in chanting is the phrase I used at the very beginning of the article: “Listen to the sincerity of your chanting.” This originally came from Śrīla Prabhupāda. What was he asking us to listen to in our chanting, if not our heart, or own voice, begging Krishna for service?

 

A bit surprisingly I also found a verse in the Yoga Sūtras that recommends activating the mind, at least in terms of mantra meditation. Patañjali says taj-japas tad-artha-bhāvanam, which means we should dwell on the meaning of the mantra when meditating on it.

 

I could go on and on with references and examples about the relationship between our inner voice and mantra meditation, but back to the original thesis of talking to yourself while chanting. Just as we have a natural voice in chanting that arises from the heart, I find it helpful, especially in the beginning of my chanting, to consciously activate the voice of my intelligence in order to tell my mind in as comforting and authoritatively voice as possible where to go, so to speak. Here are some of my favorite commands and what they mean.

 

Chant and hear every syllable. Perfect your mantra one mantra at a time. When we perfect a mantra by carefully chanting and hearing every syllable we get the fruit of that mantra. The Hare Krishna mantra is a yugala mantra, a divine love or devotion mantra, and when perfected brings devotion into the heart.

 

Vibrate the mantra in every pore of your body. Feel the mantra. Mantra means God is sound. Hearing and feeling the vibration of the Hare Krishna mantra is thus direct communion with God.

 

Listen to the sincerity of your chanting and go deeper into your meditation. The Hare Krishna mantra is also a prayer begging for the mood of service to Śrī Śrī Radha and Krishna.

 

Chant as sweetly as possible for Krishna hears our chanting and gets pleasure from it. The Śikṣāṣṭakam describes the holy name as having all śaktis. Energy comes from a source to please its source. Krishna’s śaktis, especially within the holy name, are thus pleasing to Him. Every syllable should be therefore offered as beautifully as possible as a direct personal offering, like the petal of a flower, at the lotus feet of Śrī Krishna.

 

Cry for Krishna. Śrīla Prabhupāda said we should chant as a child crying for his mother. Śrī Caitanya chanted deeply in the mood of separation, crying for Krishna.

 

Niyamitaḥ smaraṇe na kālaḥ. There are no hard and fast rules for chanting the holy name. These are some of the ways in which I amplify my heart and inner voice to direct my mind to the holy name. The best method is what personally helps you to hear and feel the holy name. Meditation doesn’t start at samādhi any more than you can start a car in fourth gear. These are just some of the ways I rev up my attention to achieve increased focus on the holy name.

 

One more thing: Offer your heart to Krishna and tell Him what you want. The language that Krishna understands is the mahā-mantra. The holy name is a thus a conversation with God.

 

And that is The Yoga of Talking to Yourself.