Prapanna-Jivanamrita

A Joyous Reunion

[Here are some notes I wrote for a summary study of Prapanna-jivanāmṛta I'm working on. If I get a good response, I'll include more here.]

Introduction to a study of Prapanna-jivanāmṛtam

I first visited the ashram of Shridhar Maharaja in the winter of 1981. At that time I met Vyenkatta Bhatta Das Brahmachari who was working on the English translation of Prapanna-jivanamritam. We stayed in a rented house down the road from the Chaitanya Saraswat Math. There was Kashiram Das, Brajendra Kumar Das, and Kanu Priya Das, who had along with Venkatta Bhatta had all come to take shelter of Shridhara Maharaja. They had come to take sannyāsa. They were determined to dedicate themselves full-time to preaching Kṛṣṇa consciousness and felt that sannyāsa would be the best preaching platform. At that time I was going through a deep spiritual crisis of my own. Having taken harinām initiation from His Divine Grace Bhaktivedānta Swāmi, I felt I needed further spiritual guidance. I was convinced that Shridhar Mahārāja could provide that guidance. While we all had different motives for coming, gradually we became transformed by our stay at the Māth, as they called the Krishna temple of Shridhar Mahārāja.

We would rise early and attend the religious services at the temple, or mangala-aroti. As the morning progressed, we would find ourselves sitting before Shridhar Mahārāja, listening carefully to his discourse. He sat in a large wooden arm-chair, for he was a big man. And as we sat close, he would take questions on any and all subjects; his was a vast and erudite intellect, bathed in years of spiritual contemplation of divine truth. Apart from our own small problems and ideas, our main subject of discourse was the Prapanna-jīvanāmṛtam.

Shridhar Maharaja was capable of summing up big ideas in few words. His discourse was as terse as the Sanskrit of Vyāsadeva, but it required that we learned a new vocabulary. Subjective Evolution, Die to Live, Reality is By Itself and For Itself, Hegelian thought, Negative Tendency, and Positive and Progressive Immortality.

At times, we felt that Shridhar Maharaja’s English needed improvement. He had received a quite formal education at the hands of Scottish Jesuits at Presidency College in Calcutta around the time of the First World War, or the “Great War” as he always called it. So his English Pronunciation tended towards a bit of a Scottish brogue. And while my grandmother had a bit of a brogue herself, we often found his accent difficult to follow. As we listened we discovered that it wasn't Śrīdhara Mahārāja's english that was lacking, but our own education.

We found that we often lacked a sufficient philosophical vocabulary and grammar to properly interpret his language. It wasn’t his English that was deficient, it was our capacity to grasp his meaning. We recorded his discourses. It took us years of close listening and study to realize how subtle was his understanding. Later, I would collaborate with Bhakti Sudhir Goswāmi in bringing out a number of published works based on Shridhar Maharaja’s teachings: The Search for Shri Krishna, Reality the Beautiful; Shri Guru and his Grace; The Golden Volcano of Divine Love; The Loving Search for the Lost Servant; and Subjective Evolution of Consciousness.

With each publication we were forced to confront our inadequacies: In order to truly represent his teachings to an educated public we had to study Bengali, Sanskrit, Western philosophers such as Berkely, Hume, Locke and Hegel. We had to dig into the chronology of the Puranas, the history of India, including the Bengali Independence Movement and the arcane practices of the Gaudiya Math. At Guardian of Devotion Press in San Jose, California we established a publishing company with our own printing press dedicated exclusively to publishing the works of Shridhar Mahārāja.

But somehow the Prapanna-jivanamrita eluded us.

Our crew of would-be saints would return from Shridhar Maharaja’s discourse to the rented blue house down the road from the ashram, across the street from rice paddies where cobras made their home. After lunch and a siesta we would all meet to discuss what we had learned. It was a great time of intense spiritual discovery.

Shridhar Maharaja had often told us that we needed to “Increase our Negative Tendency.” This is difficult to understand in light of the idea that we need to be positive. Isn’t positivity the goal? Why should we increase our “negative” tendency.

Real learning, however, takes place as a consequence of a genuine need to understand something. The very definition of “learning disability” is that we feel we know something. As long as I know something, I can’t learn. He would give the example of a piano teacher who charges two prices: One price for new students, but double-charge for intermediate students. The teacher would have twice as much work; first the student would have to unlearn everything he knew and then re-learn. We were in much the same position, since we felt that we had already learned everything. Shridhar Mahārāja was only giving us “master classes” since we were already “masters.” The men who sought sannyāsa initiation felt they needed only a figure-head spiritual master, one who would put the stamp on their diplomas. Since they were already “spiritual masters,” getting a stamp from Shridhar Mahārāja would just make it official. Having received their stamp from him, they could go forth and initiated disciples and establish their own missions.

But “increasing negative tendency” means one needs to be empty in order to be filled. To receive Divine Mercy, one must be as Saul on the road to Rome. Only when Saul realized how fallen he was he could accept the mercy of Christ. Only when Christ felt completely forsaken and abandoned in the Garden of Gethsemane could he call out to the Lord like a child unto its mother, begging for mercy. Only then can one attain true understanding and Divine Love.

As we sat in the blue house, confident with our spiritual attainments, we puzzled over the meaning of Prapanna-jivanamritam. Its translation was a purely academic matter. It was another Sanskrit book, and Vyenkatta Bhatta was confident that his Sanskrit was adequate to the task of translation.

Upstairs in the blue house we had our main headquarters. A large room with a concrete floor and no furniture. There we would roll out our sleeping bags and rest. But as the sun went down over the Ganges, Vyenkatta would light his oil lantern. He had an old Smith-Corona Typewriter, propped up on a battered trunk. A ream of onion-skin paper, typed in tiny print and marked up with corrections was stacked on the trunk. He would consult an old Sanskrit book and peck away at his translation.

During this time, we had a visitor. It was Akshayananda Swami. Originally from New Zealand, he had arrived from Vrindaban, where he had been temple president during Prabhupāda’s time. Since he had a working knowledge of Hindi and was superior by dint of being a Swāmi, he felt it only right that he be put in charge of the Sanskrit translation.

He and Vyenkatta would wrangle over the meaning of a verb or a noun in Sanskrit until late at night. Akshayananda was a bit eccentric as were we all. In his days in Vrindaban, he had acquired a strange Hindu musical instrument, a kind of violin. He would prop it on his knee and scrape it with a weird-looking bow. It produced an eerie heart-piercing sound that would scare away the monkeys in the mango tree. After we had all gone to sleep, we could hear him on the roof of the building, scratching away a mystical drone in the Bengali night.

In the morning, we would visit Shridhar Maharaja. They would try to read their translation to him. He was confident that they could take it to Govinda Mahārāja, who could smooth out the difficulties. But they insisted.

The title of the book, Venkatta thought, might be best rendered as “Nectar of Surrender.” After all, Prabhupāda had two successful titles: Nectar of Devotion (Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu) and Nectar of Instruction (Upadeṣāmṛta) both by Rūpa Goswāmī.

But Shridhar Maharaja resisted.

He didn’t like the title, “Nectar of Surrender.” One of the problems is the word Amṛta, pronounced A-MREE-TA. It’s an interested word.

The word amṛta means “deathless, immortal, eternal,” but also “nectar, ambrosia, liquor.” It’s hard to understand how one word could have such a range of meaning.

The Puranas describe a battle between the gods and demons, where the gods win. Their prize is amṛta, a kind of drink. The recipe is simple:

Ingredients:

1 Ocean of Milk

1 Mount Mandara, covered with various plants, spices, herbs and flowering trees. (Used as axis, or churning rod.

108 gods

109 demons

1 large serpent, Vasuki by name.

An Avatar of Vishnu, Kurma, to steady the axis.

Vishnu Himself to sit atop the mountain, steadying it from above

Preparation:

1. Remove Mount Mandara from its resting place and carry it to the Ocean of Milk. Fix the mountain atop the Kurma Avatara to use as a churning rod, and carefully wrap the Vasuki serpent around the mountain. Have God Himself as Lord Vishnu sit atop the mountain.

2. Arrange the gods on one side, the demons on the other.

3. Gods take the serpent by the tale, demons take the serpent by the head.

4. Commence churning.

5. Continue thus, for a few thousand years time by the calculation of the gods.

6. Allow the herbs and flowering trees of Mount Mandara to fully steep in the churned liquid.

7. When poison is produced by the mixture, have Lord Shiva catch the poison in his throat.

Serves: gods not demons. The resulting mixture is called amṛta. The idea is that this drink, or nectar, produces immortality. Since it is better to have immortal gods than demons, it is best to offer the mix to the gods.

The word amṛta, then, has this connotation of immortality. It may be considered as “nectar” but the subtext is always deathless. Hence a translation of this word might render “immortal nectar” or “deathless ambrosia,” but without a careful reading of the context, i.e, the above-mentioned Puranic story, it lacks meaning in English.

Shridhar Mahāraja’s intention in the book was to describe how surrender in divine love is both process and goal. He liked the title, “Positive and Progressive Immortality,” and insisted on this so much that the English editors and translators finally consented to using it as a subtitle, while sticking with “Nectar of Surrender.”

Shridhara Maharaja’s point was that amṛta means immortality (a mṛtyu), but not in a commplace conception. Normally, the sense of “a-mṛtyu” is negative: death-less, or im-mortal. But real eternal life should be positive. We must have a place in a higher world; a positive role to play in the spiritual world.

This may be achieved through surrender. Normally surrender also has a negative connotation. Shridhar Maharaja embraces the idea that “increasing one’s negative tendency” leads to “positive immortality.” So these two apparently negative concepts, “surrender” or “increasing one’s negative tendency” and amṛta or deathlessnes, become positive in a perfect Hegelian synthesis.

And for who?

For the jīva. The jīva refers to the conditioned soul, whose tendency for exploitation, or “positive tendency” has evolved in reverse, from the undifferentiated plane of cosmic consciousness to the world of exploitation where he resists surrender to the almighty. “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven,” in the words of Milton.

Shridhar Maharaja echoed these themes in lecture after lecture. His insistence on using the expression “positive and progressive immortality” was essential to understanding the meaning of Prapanna-jivanamritam. He really eschewed an english translation, since he felt the Sanskrit was perfectly scientific.

Translators of Hegel have run into similar problems with Phenomenology of the Spirit. The word Spirit in English translates Geist in German. Geist also means Ghost. When I was a child I was taught by the Roman Catholic Church to believe in the Holy Ghost. Later that translation was abandoned for Spirit. But the problem with translation is that Spirit can also mean esprit de corps, team spirit, group spirit, party spirit, a spirited horse, or even alcohol, spirits.

Shridhar Maharaja avoided reductionism. He did not like that his carefully crafted philosophical explanations of the profound truths of spiritual life be reduced to slogans. He patently disliked “Nectar of Surrender” as a title and rejected it as meaningless.

In the west, “nectar” and “ecstasy” are words much abused. Ecstasy now refers to a psychedelic drug used at rave parties, and nectar certainly has an alcoholic connotation. It was not Shridhar Maharaja’s idea to have a book title that meant something like “Surrender is fun.”

One time, he turned to me while sitting in the big wooden chair. Someone had said, “hari bol!” meaning something like, “cool.” He looked at me, his eyes magnified by the thick black-plastic glasses and said, “Hari Bol and horrible. The prospect of surrender is such.” He knew that surrender is not an easy prospect. The ambrosia derived from sacrifice is not attained easily as we can see from the Purānic story.

And so it went. Every evening the translators would bicker and fight over the Sanskrit, and every morning we would bathe ourselves in the sublime teachings of Shridhar Maharaja. Some progress would be made, they would wrangle and tear up pages and retype. At some point they asked for my help as proof-reader.

It was translation as Divine Comedy. Vyenkatta would try to work out a meaning from the Sanskrit and put it into English. Akshayananda Swami would go through it. The Swami would say, “This is not literary enough. We need to dignify these words.”

He began rewriting Vyenkatta’s prose as Elizabethan poetry. “Some people want to bring Shridhar Maharaja into the 20^th Century,” he would say. “I want to return his language to the 16^th Century with Shakespeare.”

In the end it became a turgid and incomprehensible koan. They would wait until Govinda Maharaja arrived from Calcutta, and, beaming with pride, they would show it to him. He would smile, read a few lines and shake his head. Having been responsible for the original edition, he couldn’t understand what they had done with his Guru Maharaja’s masterwork.

At some point it became clear that the translation wasn’t really acceptable. The work would eventually be published as no alternative existed. The first edition was sparse and the second edition, more heavily edited by Akshayananda Swami was lavish with gold-edged papers and flowery prose. The devotees and followers loved the book; while mistakes had been made much of the original thought shined through. Most of all they loved the idea of the book. In the end it was mostly forgotten, while sincere devotees still try to parse out its meaning.

Later it was discovered that some of the most important elements of the book had really been left out: that is to say the Bengali translation and commentary, which goes deeper than the Sanskrit poetry itself.

Scholarship in Bengali generally demands that when a Sanskrit book is published, it be published in Bengali-Lipi. What this means is that when Sanskrit appears it is set in Bengali-type. It’s something like when we do a Roman transliteration of Sanskrit in English, we do so in romanized letters, ABC, not অ ব চ .

Krishna, for example, is kṛṣṇa according to the international alphabet of Sanskrit transliteration. I’m typing this in unicode, which is standard across all computing platforms from Linux to Windows to Mac OSX. Krishna looks like this in Bengali: কৃষ্ণ and like this in Sanskrit Devanagari: कृष्ण.

In Bengal, the only difference between কৃষ্ণ and कृष्ण is the lipi or typeface if you like. कृष्ण is Krishna. কৃষ্ণ is also Krishna, but in Bengali typeface or lipi.

Since, in the old days of letter-press printing, most printers set their books in metal pieces of type it was very complicated to have have boxes and boxes of type in Devanagari typefaces as well as in Bengali type-faces, most printers chose to set their Sanskrit books in Bengali lipi. That way it´s easier for Bengali scholars to read both the Sanskrit as well as its explanation or commentary.

Before Krishna Das Kaviraja Goswami, most scholarly books were written and set completely in Sanskrit. But because his own great contribution to the literature, Caitanya Caritamrita, was written in Bengali, the entire work was set in Bengali, even though it includes many quotations in Sanskrit. Thus a precedent was set.

Shridhar Maharaja´s Prapanna jivanamritam contains scores of shlokas or verses in Sanskrit, but the entire book is set in Bengali type. This is important, since the book is not a mere ¨shloka book¨ or collection of Sanskrit verses. The heart and soul of Prapanna-jinamamritam is in the Bengali translation of the Sanskrit verses and in the commentary on those verses by Shridhar Maharaja himself. His selection of certain verses is certainly valuable, as is the general “meaning” of those verses. But his particular way of translating those verses gives us the true meaning.

This is precisely what was overlooked in Vyenkatta’s english translations and further obscured by Akshayananda’s flowery language in the 1980s translation of the work. Their translation is certainly well-intentioned. They merely missed the subtle points that Shridhar Maharaja was trying to make by bringing out the book. We can all shrug our shoulders as did Govinda Maharaja when he saw what the Western devotees had done to their Guru Maharaja’s masterpiece. Or we can do some spiritual archeology and refer back to the original Bengali text and commentary as well as the recorded tapes and lectures by Shridhar Maharaja and try to piece together the original meaning.

The purpose of this translation is exactly that. I’m not interested in disparaging someone else’s work. As proof-reader on the original project I also bear some responsibility. I think it’s possible to give multiple meanings on the same text. Shakespeare and Cervantes come to mind.

It’s not my interest to fault-find or point out flaws, but to get to the heart of Shridhar Maharaja’s message. I no longer wear saffron or live in a temple. Still, Shridhar Maharaja changed my life in profound ways. After all, for six years I was his editor in the English language and spent every waking day contemplating his message. All translation is flawed. There are some 600 popular translations of the Bible, all with their nuances. And while Govinda Maharaja finally accepted and praised the English language edition, privately he expressed doubts to me personally.

In the first chapter of Prapanna-jivanamritam, Śrīdhara Mahārāja quotes the Bhagavatam:

“তদ্-ৱাগ্-ৱিসর্গো জনতাঘ-ৱিপ্লৱো

যস্মিন্ প্রতি-শ্লোকম্ অবদ্ধবত্য্ অপি ।

নামান্য্ অনন্তস্য যশো ‘ঙ্কিতানি যত্

শৃণ্ৱন্তি গাযন্তি গৃণন্তি সাধৱঃ” ।।৬।।

“tad-vāg-visargo janatāgha-viplavo

yasmin prati-ślokam abaddhabaty api

nāmāny anantasya yaśo ‘ṅkitāni yat

śṛṇvanti gāyanti gṛṇanti sādhavaḥ” [Prapanna-jivanāmṛta 1.6]

True devotees take delight in reading and singing verses about Kṛṣṇa even if the stanza is flawed, or badly written. Even when the translation is inexact, those books which glorify the holy name and deeds of Kṛṣṇa are welcomed and worshipped. Such literature purifies all sin.

“অভিব্যক্তা মত্তঃ প্রকৃতি-লঘু-রূপাদ্ অপি বুধা

ৱিধাত্রী সিদ্ধাঋথান্ হরি-গুণমযী ৱঃ কৃতির্ ইযম্

পুলিন্দেনা[য্ অগ্নিঃ কিম্ উ সমিধম্ উন্মথ্য জনিতোর্

হিরণ্য-শ্রেণীনাম্ অপহরতি নান্তঃ কলুষতম্”

“abhivyaktā mattaḥ prakṛti-laghu-rūpād api budhā

vidhātrī siddhāṛthān hari-guṇamayī vaḥ kṛtir iyam

pulindenā[y agniḥ kim u samidham unmathya janitor

hiraṇya-śreṇīnām apaharati nāntaḥ kaluṣatam”

[Prapanna-jivanāmṛta 1.7]

“Even though written by a sinner, this book, will help fulfill your dreams, good readers. O learned ones, even a sinner can make a fire by rubbing sticks together. And fire can purify gold. While these truths are spoken by someone as unworthy as myself, this fire can purify gold.”

Sincerity is all in all. I am unfit to pronounce the name of Rūpa Goswāmī. Still, the above-mentioned verse shows that great souls will accept the truth even when spoken by sinners. Gold can be purified with fire, even if the fire is lit by a sinner. In the same way, we hope that devotees will get some light from Spanish version of Prapanna-jīvanāmṛtam.

My goal is to try to strip away some of the flowery language and obscure scriptural references and lay bare the simple beauty of Śrīdhar Mahārāja’s unique genius. The extravagance of the 1980s English translation often obscures its meaning. I hope to return the language to its original sweetness and purity.

For this fresh attempt, I consulted the original Bengali work. While my Bengali is not perfect, I have the advantage of having worked closely with Śrīdhara Mahārāja’s message and have a fair aquaintance with his philosophical ideas. Prapanna-jivanamṛta was his seminal work; written in 1941, when the memory of Bhaktisiddhānta Saraswati Ṭhakura was fresh in the minds of his followers, the world-wide mission of the Guadiya Math. His deeper philosophical ideas underwent some evolution in the 40 years that passed before I met him, but his core ideas never changed. Having studied those ideas for many years, it is not difficult to see how they were developed in the original work.

In translation, it is always important to make ideas clear in the target language. A word for word approach misses many nuances. The difficulty is to understand completely the idea in the language to be translated and reconstruct the meaning in the target language. A literal translation of a bad translation leaves us scratching our heads. Our attempt has been to understand completely the original meaning, then put it into a readily understandable Spanish idiom.

The need to do so is clear. We want to help as many people as possible to understand the simple and profound truths expressed by Śrīdhara Mahārāja. To our predecessors, we honor their work. To point out inexactness in translation should not be taken as personal attack. This is not a commercial enterprise. The present edition is for study only. Our purpose is entirely educational. While we differ in approach, we laud the efforts of previous translators, understanding that they too were purifying gold with the light of their own fires.

Prapanna-jīvanāmṛtam has a very specific philosophical meaning: The word prappana means “surrender.” amṛta means “undying,” or “nectar,” and jīvana means “life.” Positive and progressive immortality in the life of Surrendered Souls would be a more complete title than something like “Nectar of Surrender.” The commonplace conception of immortality is negative: we say im-mortal, or non-dead. Since death itself is a negative, “non-dead” is the negation of a negative. “Non-death” may mean “life” but there must be a more positive conception. The non-dualists like non-death. But theirs is a barren conception.

Positive immortality is possible only for surrendered souls. But what is surrender? How does one arrive at complete dedication in divine love? And what is the nature of positive immortality? These are the themes touched upon by Śrīdhara Mahārāja in his book. The positive immortality of surrendered souls implies participation in the living and dynamic world of the sweet absolute: Kṛṣṇa, Reality the Beautiful. Positive immortality means to join the play of the sweet absolute; to join the dance of divine reality in the highest plane. Lesser concepts of immortality are insipid.

The oneness of God, or the Divine Light, is a popular view of immortality. We are drops in the ocean of consciousness, motes of light that seek reunion with the sun. But this is one-dimensional. The generalized idea of Spirit is that of a nondefinite consciousness, unknown and unknowable, nirvana. But the Kṛṣṇa conception of Divinity supercedes both mundane phenomenal and undefined numinous existence. Surrender opens us to receive mercy from that higher plane. Through surrender the jiva or spirit soul can transcend the sterile immortality of the nondifferentiated plane of consciousness.

And above the nondifferentiated spirit plane, immortality is positive and dynamic. Even there, we find gradation: There is the the Fatherhood of Godhead in Vaikuṇṭha, where Vishnu is worshipped in awe and reverence. There is the Kingdom of God in Ayodhya, where Ram rules with Rajya-Rama. Kṛṣṇa is King also in Dvārakā and Prince of Mathurā. In all these transcendental planes, surrender is coin of the realm. Surrender is the language spoken by residence of all these divine planes. But surrender reaches its highest level in Vrindabana. For this reason, the sayings and teachings of the dedicated souls of Vrindabana are dear to all devotees.