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| 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 20th Century,” he would
say. “I want to return his language to the 16th 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.
