Srimad Bhagavatam 04

The story of Chitanya Mahaparbhu is narrated in the introduction.. I wonder why such quaint words are used to describe divine people. It of course makes them different.

Lord Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, the great apostle of love of God and the father of the congregational chanting of the holy name of the Lord, advented Himself at Sridhama Mayapura ....in 1486 by the Christian Calendar.

It was 500 years ago, a comparatively recent times. He was the youngest and the tenth son of his parents. While all his sisters died at an early age he and his brother survived. He married early but his first wife died at an early age and he married again at the request of his mother. However he took Sanyas at the age of twenty-four and left behind his wife who was barely sixteen and moved to Puri.

He remained in Puri for the next twenty-four years and traveled for six  years preaching Srimad Bhagavatam ......  he deemed it as the spotless literature for understanding the Lord..

His childhood proved that he was no ordinary being.  As a crawling baby he played with a snake and confused a thief who tried to steal ornaments from him. He was a naughty boy and played pranks on orthodox brahmins and girls who were offering prayers to Siva in the hope of getting good husbands. He would tell them that  Lord Siva was his devotee and Parvati his maid servant and asked them worship him instead. ......

Soon after his marriage Caitanaya began to preach the congregational chanting of the Lord and the brahmanas became jealous of his popularity and complained to a Muslim magistrate and were stopped by the Kazi, but Caitanaya asked his followers to disobey . The magistrate then sent his constables to the place, who interrupted the chanting and broke a few of the mridangams. Not one to cowed down Caitanya organised a civil disobedience movement and took one hundred thousand men who chanted and beat drums all the way to the house of the Kazi, who worried ran upstairs. The crowd displayed a violent temper, but Caitanya calmed them down and the Kazi came down and addressed Caitanya as his nephew and they both had a long discussion on the Koran and the Hindu sastras. ... Caitanya then convinced the Kazi and was allowed continue with his sankirtana movement. 

An interesting story and as I  scanned the introduction this caught my eye......All yagnas are forbidden because they are useless attempts by foolish men. There is also a story about two brahmin brothers who were saved. They were not only drunkards, but also meat eaters, woman-hunters, dacoits and sinners... ninety percent of population of this age resembles these brothers, despite high birth........But Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu...followed the verdict of the sastras in the matter of one's swarupa or real identity.

When I began I felt I could follow the structure of the book, but the number of pages I need to read and specially its style made me rethink. The introduction deals with Caitanya's life in detail and while impressive it took me away from my intentions of blogging about Srimad Bhagavatam. The introduction discusses  the relative merits of 'Mayavada' vs 'Bhakti' which Caitanya propagated with lot of energy and simplicity. There are only eight slokas to his name!
There is also a mystery about his disappearance and there are many stories!

Srimad Bhagavatam 03

I quote from the preface: 'The ideals of spiritual communism, according to Srimad Bhagavatam, are based more or less on the oneness of the entire human society, nay,  of the entire energy of the living beings'.  An interesting combination! Wonder how it works?

Nice that the author has acknowledged that humans are now better off, but are still prone to large scale quarrels. He thinks that Bhagavatam will guide us towards peace, the respiritualisation of the entire human society and says that the ancient  King Prahlada advocated.that Bagavatam be taught to the very young (in schools and colleges!)  in order to change the demoniac face of society.

There is the usual dig at us humans and science. The disparity in human society is due to lack of principles in a godless civilization. There is God or the almighty One, from whom everything emanates....Material science has tried to find the ultimate source of creation very insufficiently....

 A recent study states 'You wouldn't believe it… but having no religious affiliation is now world's third biggest 'faith' after Christianity and Islam'. At 1.1 billion the numbers are significant,  'but overall, 84 per cent of the world's inhabitants, which it estimated at 6.9 billion, identify with a religion, according to the study entitled 'The Global Religious Landscape' issued by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life... The 'unaffiliated' category covers all those who profess no religion, from atheists and agnostics to people with spiritual beliefs but no link to any established faith.'

Certain findings in the study are significant:
 Many of the religiously unaffiliated do hold religious or spiritual beliefs, .......

'Belief in God or a higher power is shared by 7 percent of unaffiliated Chinese adults, 30 per cent of unaffiliated French adults and 68 percent of unaffiliated U.S. adults,' it said. 

'An age breakdown showed Muslims had the lowest median age at 23 years, compared to 28 for the whole world population. The median age highlights the population bulge at the point where half the population is above and half below that number.

'Muslims are going to grow as a share of the world's population and an important part of that is this young age structure,' Hackett said.

So we can say that it is not a godless civilization, but the multiplicity of faiths that is the problem. Faith seems to be the culprit. I go back to the preface, which speaks of an unlimited Supreme Lord ....such transcendental literature, even though irregularly, is heard, sung and accepted by purified men who are thoroughly honest.

We all know the flock in any religion are quite happy to believe, sing in praise and are normally peaceful. They are reasonably tolerant. So what is it that pushes humans towards large scale quarrels as the author terms it?  Hopefully this ancient purana has the answers!

And why is that most, say 9 out of 10, need to believe in god or higher power. I suppose it is much easier and we are built or evolved that way. 

Srimad Bhagavatam 02

Chandramouli had questions about my choice of word 'Sacred' to describe Bhagavata  and also answered them:

What are the names of these "sacred " books ? Who are the authors ?

Hindu tradition considers these three books alone as SHRUTI (= Eternal ). 

According to the three Acharya's( Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa and may be Vallabha) the following are to be considered " sacred "

1. Vedas- in particular the " Upanshads : "That which was heard "

2. Bhagavad Geeta- referred to as Panchama Veda- Krishna as reported by Vyaasa

3. Brahma Sutras of Badarayana

The above three are named as PRASTHANA THRAYA

The Epics are considered as SMRITI- " in memory "- both oral and written down.

Bhagavata Purana is one such Smriti. Both Ramayana and Mahabharata are Mahapuranas; Bhagavad Geeta excluded. There are 18 other Puranas as well. Then there are hundreds of Kshetra and Sthala Puranas..

I am glad  my choice of word  'Sacred'  helped to clarify!  In fact, I first heard the word 'Purana' in the form of a scolding! I was asked to stop this 'Kanthe Purana' (Bundle of silly excuses?) by a teacher. It is not unusual! 

The word 'Sacred' is taken very seriously and it is not something we mess with. It is claimed that our sacred  texts are in the original without any distortions. I remember asking a guru, how could we be so sure that Veda has not changed as it was recited only orally before Vyasa put it in writing. The guru was a bit offended that I had doubts. But he assured me that Veda was constructed in a such way that it could be memorized without distorting it. 

The volumes with me are Srimad Bhagavatam by  Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa  as explained by His Divine Grace A C  Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founder of  ISKON

As I scanned the book  I saw a condition that 'No part of the book may be reproduced or copied etc., ...Breach of this condition is liable for appropriate legal action.  Wonder how serious it could become as I have been blissfully quoting from books without any worries so far. Surprising that while Maharishi Vyasa's work is not protected by the copyright law, commenting on it is protected! 

The concept of Copyright is fairly  recent and is internationally applied. Its duration for a registered literary work in UK is seventy years.  I see that there is one exception: A notable exception: Peter Pan: The copyright for JM Barrie’s work Peter Pan, was due to expire in 1987 in the UK, but an amendment to the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (instigated by Lord Callaghan) was passed to allow the copyright to run indefinitely in the UK. Any royalties are to be paid to the trustees of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, for as long as the hospital exists. http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/

It is tempting to think, if we borrow this idea from the Brits, how money collected as Royalties could easily support many worthwhile causes.

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Anyway I picked up the first volume and even the dust jacket of the book itself was amazing! I learn about the existence of the original spiritual planet, called Golaka Vrindavana, the abode of Lord Krishna, the original personality of Godhead.

The golaka throws off brahmajyothi a spiritual ray of effulgence... Within this unlimited brahmajyothi there are unlimited numbers of spiritual planets as there are material planets...the inhabitants there are ever-liberated living beings. They are all four-handed. The lord there is known as Narayana, and the planets are known as Vaikunthas. 

In the jacket, the familiar scene of Maha -Vishnu and the lotus from his abdomen is also described......and on the lotus, the lord of the universe,  Brahma is born. Brahma creates all living beings.....and it is not just one universe......There are millions and billions of suns in all the millions and billions of universes within the mahat-tattva......Srimad-Bhagavatam helps us to reach the supreme planet, Golaka Vrndavana.

I am now all set to discover more about Maharishi Vyasa's vision of the Universe! I remember being thrilled by the Hubble telescope pictures and now to learn that Vyasa envisaged Billions of Universes such as ours is truly exciting! 

2 comments:

Prasad said...

Dear Srinidhi
Would it make any difference to Srimad Bhaghavata by classifying it as a Purana or otherwise. No doubt it is an
epic and sacred to those who believe
in it. Its greatness remains untarnished even if commentators are critical in parts or entirety.
Await your study and comments / synopsis of various legends in this epic.
Regards // Prasad, Malaysia

8 November 2014 at 14:33 

Raghunath said...

Discovered your blog in an obscure corner of the computer. We have discussed the subject in the meanwhile.
The present volume you are going through is biased towards the ISKON founder. Probably a more objective translation would be suitable.
Raghu

26 November 2014 at 22:05 

Srimad Bhagavatam 01

My friend Venkatachalam  gifts me set of sacred books, upwards of 15,000 pages in all, and here I am attempting to blog about them! I am reminded of R K Naryan's novel 'The Guide'.  Like Raju, the tour guide who was pushed to become a spiritual guide, I am being pulled by events. 

Srimad Bhagavatam 

To be honest I cannot recite even the basic chants from memory. As a kid I felt uncomfortable  with the caste marks my grandmother would paint on my forehead on some chosen days. I would rub it off as I ran to play to avoid friends making fun of me. Not because they were anti- anything. It was because they sported horizontal lines or stamps as against my vertical lines and were bigger than me. But we were open minded and after playing went to drink water from a tap at a nearby Hanuman temple . All of us accepted Hanuman without reservations and also the water there was the coolest.  

As we grew up, we lived in a fairly cosmopolitan middle class surroundings, these differences took a back seat, except when one of us went deep into his religion or caste and started to preach. But we learnt to cope depending how close we were as friends. My Religious practice, mostly token, was to please my parents and specially my grandmother. It was something I grew up with and knew how to balance it with other demands of life on us. Obviously the ugly aspects of human nature were always there and surfaced often but we were lucky not to face its brutalities directly. I vaguely remember ARP's shouting warnings to keep lights off during second world war and my total confusion when I heard of Mahatma's assassination! I was nine years old. 

I shall fast forward to my post retirement days when I chose to read Mahabharata and having nothing better to do, blogged about it sporadically. I was surprised when I was told that Mahabharata was not read as a sacred text not withstanding that Bhagvad Gita was in it. There was a belief that it would create discord in our homes if the epic was even kept at home! With a bit of internet research, I discovered that Mahabharata was a story which was  recited for may years before it was written down by Veda Vyasa. The epic grew with time and many more couplets were added later on.

There are also so many versions and interpretations that it is almost an industry. Getting to know this epic was  a fascinating journey and was surely thought provoking. The stories of mythical gods interacting with humans, living with them like mother Ganga did or bestowing Kunti with children or Draupadi coming out of the fire as fully grown woman are all fantasies that we lap up without batting an eyelid.It was also about human nature with all its frailties and ugliness. The story is heroic as it is tragic and complex. It is also a story of the victory of the good over the evil.To top it all it is a story full of violence.

For instance it was a shock to learn that in the eighteen days of the great war of Mahabharata, more died per day than in the second world war. It is difficult to comprehend that people killed per day in the 18 days of Mahabharata war was almost three times that of second world war and the proportion would be higher if civilian deaths are not considered! Civilians did not die in the Mahabharata war. Of course the second world war was on from 1939 to 1945 and 40-50 million deaths occured.

Courtsey Wikipedia

Clearly Vyasa narrated this story as a cautionary tale. We also learn that Krishna an avatar of Vishnu master minded the whole war to ensure the destruction of Kshatriya clan, the warriors.   in spite of such eforts we seem to be perpetually on the brink of all kinds of disasters notwithstanding the appearances of more and more saviors on earth since the advent of Mahabharata war. Even second world war was declared to be a war which would end all wars. 

I am told that Vyasa was so distraught after reciting this violent story that he chose to narrate the Srimad Bhagavatam to give humanity some hope. I promise I will plunge into it with a open mind and react as a typical rambler. But if you are looking for a worshipful narration of the stories that Vyasa chose to tell us, you will be disappointed.

Recently  I  also heard a series lectures on coursera  by Yuval Noah Harari of Hebrew university, an eye opener. He gives us a very different view of the world. It is the story of our evolution as a species, whether it was a divine decision or an intelligent design one can debate forever. However it is worth a visit. Some excerpts:

About the Course

About 2 million years ago our human ancestors were insignificant animals living in a corner of Africa. Their impact on the world was no greater than that of gorillas, zebras, or chickens. Today humans are spread all over the world, and they are the most important animal around. The very future of life on Earth depends on the ideas and behavior of our species.

This course will explain how we humans have conquered planet Earth, and how we have changed our environment, our societies, and our own bodies and minds. The aim of the course is to give students a brief but complete overview of history, from the Stone Age to the age of capitalism and genetic engineering. The course invites us to question the basic narratives of our world. Its conclusions are enlightening and at times provocative. For example:

·         We rule the world because we are the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in our own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. 

·         Humans are ecological serial killers – even with stone-age tools, our ancestors wiped out half the planet's large terrestrial mammals well before the advent of agriculture.

·         The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud – wheat domesticated Sapiens rather than the other way around.

·         Money is the most universal and pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised. Money is the only thing everyone trusts.

·         Empire is the most successful political system humans have invented, and our present era of anti-imperial sentiment is probably a short-lived aberration.

·         Capitalism is a religion rather than just an economic theory – and it is the most successful religion to date.

·         The treatment of animals in modern agriculture may turn out to be the worst crime in history.

·         We are far more powerful than our ancestors, but we aren’t much happier.

·         Humans will soon disappear. With the help of novel technologies, within a few centuries or even decades, Humans will upgrade themselves into completely different beings, enjoying godlike qualities and abilities. History began when humans invented gods – and will end when humans become gods. 

5 comments:

N L Sriram said...

Malleshwaram is probably unique for its confluence of Dvaita, Vishishtadvaita and Advaita, with mathas and temples belonging to all three. Of course 8th cross was Iyengar territory, nicknamed "plug road" in honour of the tufts! Come exam time, we would be extra religious, making the rounds of all the mathas and temples daily regardless of denomination in order to cover all bases.

Is the distinction between Bhagavata and Mahabharata that the former is "purana" and the latter "itihasa"? People seem to take exception to the classification of Ramayana and Mahabharata as "mythologies", since that seems to imply that they were myths, and hence did not really happen.

Regarding the "Bhagavata", DVG narrates the story of an elderly pundit who venerated the texts and would wrap them with all the expensive shawls, etc., that he would get as sambhavana for his scholarship. When DVG made fun of it asking whether the books would get cold otherwise, his answer was that since none of us has seen God, these texts were His representatives on earth!

4 November 2014 at 07:54 

N L Sriram said...

ABOUT EXTINCTION

Extinction by Mark Alpert
Jim Pierce, a soldier-turned-scientist, hasn't heard from his daughter Layla in years, not since she rejected his military past and started working as a hacker. But when a Chinese assassin shows up at Jim's lab looking for her, he knows that she's cracked a very serious military secret. Now her life is on the line if he doesn't find her first.

The secret is a Chinese government project called Supreme Harmony. In an effort to silence dissent, China's Ministry of State Security has developed a new surveillance system that uses swarms of cyborg insects — ordinary houseflies equipped with minuscule cameras and radio controls — to spy on dissident groups. [Real-life scientists are developing this technology for military reconnaissance.] To analyze the glut of video collected by the swarms, Chinese researchers lobotomize a group of condemned prisoners and insert electronic implants into their brains, turning them into a network of zombie-like "Modules" who are wirelessly linked to one another and to the swarms. But the project goes disastrously awry when the network develops its own intelligence, a collective consciousness that takes control of the Modules.

Acting covertly at first, the newly conscious network sets out to exterminate the human race by lobotomizing dozens of scientists and soldiers and incorporating them into Supreme Harmony. The Modules infiltrate the Chinese government and go to America as well. As Jim Pierce searches for his daughter, he realizes that he's up against something that isn't just a threat to her life, but to human life everywhere.

Luckily, Jim can fight the man-machine network because he's part-machine himself. Maimed by a terrorist bombing, Pierce wears an ultra-advanced prosthetic arm with impervious polyimide skin and high-torque motors that can punch through walls. With the help of Kirsten Chan, a brilliant and beautiful NSA intelligence agent, Jim goes to China and begins a desperate 1,500-mile journey to the laboratory where Supreme Harmony was born. To save humanity, Jim must fight the network on the ultimate battlefield — the virtual world of his own mind.

All the technologies described in Extinction are real. [The novel's author is a contributing editor at Scientific American, which has reported on the recent advances in brain-machine interfaces.] In one form or another, our machines will eventually replace us. Extinction tells the story of how it could happen tomorrow.

4 November 2014 at 08:00 

Namjoshi said...

Oh wow! Thts so interesting!! Thank you for sharing. Hope both of you are doing well.

Kindest Regards,
Dinesh & Medha.

4 November 2014 at 08:22 

Chandrika said...

Nicely written Uncle-as always. Your blogs are always an enjoyable read. Please keep them coming!

Warm Regards,
Chandrika Moudgal (Prapulla & Raghuveer Moudgal's daughter-in-law)

5 November 2014 at 03:33 

N N Sachitanand said...

Michael Crichton , in his novel "Prey" , wrote ten years ago about a swarm of micro-robots who
combine to develop their own intelligence.

5 November 2014 at 19:01