3 Gaudiya Vaishnava history – Bhaktivinoda Thaktura & modernity

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Chanting Chanting Chanting Chanting Today we continue our discussion on the history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism and today we enter into the modern period the modern period is what began from Bhaktivedanta Thakur more or less so here we have been discussing the history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism and we started with the Goswamis in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu soon after that, who was just before them and then we discussed about Vishwanatha Chakra Thakur and Baldev Vidya Bhushan yesterday today we discuss about Bhaktivinoda Thakur in our last session we were discussing about Bhaktivedanta Thakur and to some extent about Srila Prabhupada the underlying theme that is being discussed is that this world is always a place of challenge that in this world there will always be ups and downs and not just ups and downs at the material level for those who are materially attached that is there of course there is happiness and distress that is there but even for those who are spiritually purposeful those we could say there is a spiritual level there is a material level now those who want to themselves go towards Krishna they are spiritually purposeful however the great Acharyas are not just spiritually purposeful they are spiritually purposeful in the material world that means it’s not just that they want to go towards Krishna they want to take the people in this world towards Krishna they want Krishna to be manifested in this world and thus the ups and downs of this world affect them also may be not personally but in terms of the service that they are going to do that affects them and they respond to it in a transcendental way by staying fixed in their purpose generally Acharyas their characteristic is fixed in purpose flexible in path path means how is that purpose to be achieved that has to be done at different times in different ways so in the Indian tradition itself there was much upheaval then every century in human history there are people who feel oh this is the most difficult century this is the most tough of times this is like no other time in the history of the world and yet there are times which bring far greater change and challenge than others so when right from the Goswamis down to Baldevidya Bhushan most of the challenges were internal to our tradition Islam although it was it had turned out to be a political superior in the sense that Islam had gained a lot of political power and there are some Islamic rulers who were always who were quite tyrannical and religiously intolerant but it had never been an intellectual competitor hmm much of the time it had been a political superior but intellectual competitor hardly and because of this what happened is that the Brahminical elite the intellectuals didn’t feel any need to engage with Islam they just felt it important to engage in theological philosophical debates with others in the tradition and that’s why within the Vedic tradition the various Acharyas have written critiques of even thought systems that were insignificant in terms of their mass following so for example Buddhism Jainism Charvakism Buddhism was quite influential at one time between 5th century BC to 5th century AD and so was Jainism but after Shankaracharya unified the Vedic tradition then after that it was no longer a major challenge Buddhism became another challenger only post independence when the framer of our constitution Vimrao Ambedkar adopted Buddhism but then his was a political adoption of Hindu Buddhism and it is quite different from what was traditionally considered Buddhism but anyway still Buddhist scholars often wrote commentaries on the Vedic text of course critiquing them and the Indic scholars responded to them.
Now Islam was never a competitor in that league this is not a disrespect of Islam this is just a fact of the intellectual history of India but the Acharyas did not feel any need to write any critique of Islam however when European colonialism came to India things changed dramatically European colonialism from Europe came two distinct schools of thought. One was Christianity and the other was rationality now rationality is the spirit of science now there are some Christians who claim that rationality also came from Christianity and that’s a separate discussion in itself but over a period of time Christianity and rationality started diverging and often there were conflicts at the intellectual and political level within Europe and especially in UK within parties which were more overtly Christian and parties which were more overtly rational however both of them they shared the same purpose attack Sanatana Dharma their purpose was different that Christianity wanted to evangelise that we want all these people who are pagans in every religious tradition there is a derogatory name for outsiders Muslims have kafirs, Christians have pagans, the Vedic tradition has lekshas and yavanas so they wanted to Christians wanted to evangelise and they thought this is a big dark continent of uncivilised people now the rationalists they thought these people are so unscientific they believe in all kinds of mythological things that one western scholar when he came to India he said that humanity has always had a mythological imagination but nowhere has that mythological imagination run as wide as in the Indian tradition not just one or two gods but thousands and thousands of gods not just imagining one heaven but dozens of nearly a dozen fourteen planetary systems and beyond that so many planets how could anyone be so irrational and now these attacks had bite for many reasons one of the reasons was primarily that they had technological power with that the British although they were relatively much smaller in number they by the power of technology often had better weapons and sometimes those could be a game changer in today’s world also there is a saying that you bring a knife to a gunfight you can’t even reach the opponent, the opponent shoots you if you are fighting with an ordinary gun against somebody who has a machine gun that’s disastrous if we are somebody fighting with a machine gun against somebody who has got cannons that’s disastrous and this advanced technology and the scientific spirit that it seemed to signify created a formidable intellectual challenge for the Indian tradition especially for the intellectuals so now we won’t go deeply into the history of British colonialism, our focus is the Gaudiya Vaishnav history but Gaudiya Vaishnavism emerged in Bengal and Bengal was one of the first places that Britain got its foothold and when it got its foothold from there there was a battle of Plassey which they won and after that things went forward and forward and each time when the British despite having far lesser forces would win against rulers with far greater forces whether they be Hindu rulers or whether they be Muslim rulers the legend of British brilliance grew in the human mind that it was not just that these people were rational, it was not just that these people had great technology, they seemed to have been great at strategy also now of course that strategy could be called cunning by some people and deceptiveness by others but then the Muslims had also done something similar but here the British were outwitting even the Muslims so there grew in India the what was especially in Bengal and it spread all over the world all over the country what grew in Bengal was called as the Bhadraloka the Bhadraloka were an educated class of people who found their employment with the British government and the British educated them so that these people could fit into their vision of the government now when the Muslims ruled India, now even when I am using the word Muslims, I am neither using it in the derogatory sense nor in a in a overtly generalising strengths there is a significant difference between the Muslim rulers and the British rulers many of the Muslims who came to rule India found India attractive and settled in the British never decided to settle in India in fact for the British India was such a terribly hot country filled with so many diseases that whoever was sent to India, whether it be to be a Viceroy or the Governor General or whoever was seen to have got a punishment it was like being exiled in India what is called to Kalapani and somebody would be sent to Andaman and Nicobar, they may be sent to a government service but that government service is like a punishment so the British had a great disdain disdain means looking down at India the Muslims may have also had that but it was primarily towards the religion of India which was according to them idolatry and it had to be destroyed but they adopted India as their home and there are very few British who actually wrote positively about India it’s only early when the colonial ambitions had not become prominent that they wrote positively but as the colonial ambitions started taking root then much of the writing about India was negative and because the British never intended to settle in India they decided that India would best be ruled by Indians who were not just politically obedient to the British but who also had become intellectually persuaded that the British way of living is better and would therefore do the will of the British without too much opposition now of course it is also a fact of history that the Indian independence struggle arose among the same educated class of people who the British had trained to be subordinate to them because when the Indian educated class studied about British history as the Britain wanted them to do then they learned there about democracy they learned there about the non dictatorial forms of government and they saw how Britain what Britain considered to be ideals over there and what they were implementing in India were so different and they protested initially through words then through agitations and then through very aggressive action so while all this political turbulence was slowly gaining steam the spiritual tradition of India faced an unprecedented challenge the challenge was previously intellectually each side had to prove that their philosophy was the conclusion of the Vedic literature of course Buddhist Jains didn’t accept the Vedic literature but they were not very significant so whether it was Shankaracharya or Ramanacharya or Madhvacharya or even the Gaudiya Sampradaya the primary challenge was that the Vedas were accepted as authority but what do the Vedas mean so by writing commentaries on the Vedic literature the particular teachers and acharyas of each tradition would try to establish the authenticity of that tradition but with the British rule coming into India and catching the intellect of majority of the Indians or majority of the influential Indians who were well educated now the question became not what do the Vedas mean but what do the Vedas even matter that they say so many things and what among it is even relevant today and unfortunately here this was a question which the Brahminical elite of India were not equipped to face so the driving question now we can’t understand from today’s perspective how consequential catastrophically consequential the pre-British times the question was what do the Vedas mean what is the actual meaning of the Vedas what do the Upanishadic text mean which philosophy is most faithful to the Vedas but in the British times the question became do the Vedas even matter so the idea became that what is the rational meaning of life that if you want to have a meaningful life if you want to have a purposeful life then how can that be understood rationally are the Vedas rational so this was enormous tension and many of the Brahmanas who had often excelled in Sanskrit were utterly uninterested and unequipped to face this intellectual challenge the Brahmanas just neglected it as a political cheat now again when I use the word Brahmanas and generalising but just as the Brahmanas had neglected the intellectual challenge of Islam they neglected the intellectual challenge of Christianity and Rationality but this was a different animal this was a far more deadly beast and it started making inroads into the Indian mind especially the Indian intelligentsia whatever they were now when the so these two schools of thought Rationality and Christianity both were critiquing Sanatana Dharma and those who are supposed to be the protectors of Sanatana Dharma mostly spoke mostly spoke and taught in Sanskrit and they spoke and taught in the local languages when it was the oral tradition going on but neither of these were equipped to counter the challenges that were written in books in English and initially the Brahmins were so elitist that they refused to even teach British who wanted to learn Sanskrit Sanskrit but somehow a few British learned and then the British wrote books critiquing the Vedic literature in English now Max Muller wrote a book on his he wrote a edited a series of books called the Sacred Texts of the East something like that and initially starts out being quite appreciative oh the creative depths are so great but then he says the creative insights they come like flashes of lightning but at the end you have what is an ocean of darkness and confusion and his aim was that he wanted to intellectually destabilise and destroy the very foundations of Sanatana Dharma so that the light of Christian wisdom would illumine the heart of the savage and uncivilised Indians. I am just paraphrasing his words over here.
Now it was in this environment that Bhaktivinod Thakur grew up and understanding the context is so important to understand what Bhaktivinod Thakur actually did so when Bhaktivinod Thakur was active he right from his childhood was quite intellectually precocious. He had a he was constantly quite sick facing varieties of ailments and he grew up in a time of great intellectual ferment and he got educated in the in the British educational system and he after facing various challenges rose to a very influential position as a magistrate as a judge now this was not a position that the British gave very easily to Indians because what it meant was that a brown man could now be in a position to judge a white man and they absolutely considered the brown man as no moral or intellectual capacity to judge us but the fact that Bhaktivinod Thakur rose to that level showed his brilliance now if we consider his religious and spiritual evolution that is also an interesting trajectory now of course from a transcendental perspective we can say that he is an eternal associate of the lord and he just manifested his eternal spiritual nature at a particular time yes that is true and that is one way of looking at things but if you are looking at it from that way then there is very little to learn about how Bhaktivinod Thakur understood his times and how he responded to those times so if you want to learn about how to practise and present the timeless path of divine love, Krishna Bhakti to our times then it is important for us to recognise what actually was happening in those times so what did Bhaktivinod Thakur do? He grew up in a Shakta family and his grandfather was apparently quite a spiritually evolved person and he predicted this is the time I am going to die and he prepared his death and he departed. He was a worshipper of the goddess and so Bhaktivinod Thakur said in childhood sometimes he would feel fear and he was told chant the names of Ram and he found that chanting the names of Ram gave him such sense of fearlessness that that’s what he took up eventually and so he grew up in a religiously eclectic background and he grew up in a time when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was still known in the Bengali mind although it had been several centuries that had passed yet the effect of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was still significant now when British people came to Bengal they said that in many many homes in India they found Gaura or Gauranitai or Gauragadadhar were being worshipped so they were almost like folk deities of Bengal now when he grew up he went through various intellectual phases he explored Unitarian Christianity Christianity has two broad aspects to it there is Trinitarian Christianity which is Catholicism they accept the son, the father and the Holy Spirit Unitarian Christianity is more universal and they try to be like one church for the whole world and then he wrote he read many of the western philosophers and that time he was a part of the literati of the literary people in those times he moved around among those he wrote English poetry and he wrote English poetry not just replicating the themes that were taught in the schools which were primarily western themes but he also wrote a poem about the great king Puru who stood a firm against Alexander and he grew up in a very intellectually broad way and then as he was growing he was at a time when many of these Indian intellectuals who had studied the British way, now the British focus was or purpose in giving Indians the Indian education system according to the British way was that Indians would reject their own tradition and become British but that didn’t happen many Indians used the values that they learnt from the British education system to critique the British themselves and they also used those values to critique their own tradition and many of them tried to see what was of value that they could find in this tradition and they all came up with different ideas there was the Brahmo Samaj which came and then there was Arya Samaj and then there were many other organisations that were coming which were trying to find some sense within the Vedic tradition and try to bring a rational presentation of the Vedic tradition that would be commensurate that would be acceptable and appealing to the contemporary mind when Bhaktivinod Thakur tried to reconcile these two parts of him the experiential part of him said that there was something of sublime value in the tradition that he had grown up in and the rational part of him said that this approach of looking at things that he had got from the west was also significant and then he started looking at the Vedic tradition from that perspective the Bhagwat was very popular in Bengal at that time and when he started reading it the an essay on the Bhagwatam that is the first book that was like Bhaktivinod Thakur’s coming out book.
Nowadays the word coming out refers to somebody who has some private practises or beliefs which they don’t generally tell the world which they keep hidden and at a particular point of time they decide to bring it out. So he tried to give in that essay which was actually later published in the book and which was actually a talk given by him to the Bengali friends and a few British had also come over there. He tried to explain the value of the Bhagwatam to them and he starts in a very empathic tone he said I grew up like you thinking that these Puranas were the stories with nothing of value in them but he talks about his journey and how his thoughts changed so for him it was that he was still attracted to the personality of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu such an exemplary renunciate and he appreciated the value of renunciation as well as morality that Mahaprabhu had demonstrated and then he said why is Mahaprabhu worshipping a person like Krishna who is so immoral.
In fact when the British came to India they targeted the religious systems of India and among them there were two primary targets. One was Kali and the other was Krishna they said how can any thoughtful civilised person worship a deity who is so brutal who wears a garland of skeletons around her head around her neck and how can any thoughtful civilised person worship a deity who is so utterly immoral who dances with other men’s wives and so Kali and Krishna were the two major targets of the British and Bhaktivinoda Thakur had read this literature and then he prayed oh Mahaprabhu please help me understand this mystery and that was the time when after great effort he discovered the Chaitanya Charita Amrit it’s significant that he had to put in great efforts and years of searching to find even one copy of Chaitanya Charita Amrit we had discussed earlier about how Chaitanya Charita Amrit had actually saved the Gaudiya tradition by making a bridge built between the scholars in Vrindavan and the followers in Bengal however because the Chaitanya Charita Amrit was so philosophical because it spent so much time in building the philosophy it was not a book that people who just wanted to hear gaur katha were likely to cherish so Chaitanya Bhagwat and Chaitanya Mangal were relatively easily available but Bhaktivinoda Thakur was told by some of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas at that time although he didn’t think of himself as a Gaudiya Vaishnava they told him that if you want to understand Mahaprabhu and his teachings and his personality and his object of worship you need to read the Chaitanya Charita Amrit and then that’s what he was searching for and finally when he found the Chaitanya Charita Amrit and he read the Chaitanya Charita Amrit that brought about a dramatic transformation in him and from that time onwards he became not just a follower of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu but a prominent teacher of the glories of the teachings of Mahaprabhu and what Bhaktivinoda Thakur did thereafter was remarkable. Now if we look at it from a historical perspective for much of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition Bhaktivinoda Thakur was an outsider now we consider him to be Gaudiya Vaishnava Acharya but at that time he was an outsider.
He had been born in the Shakta family. He was educated in the British educational system he worked for the British government and given how Shakta worship was prevalent at that time in the in Bengal it was at some tension with Gaudiya Vaishnavism and most of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas at that time were more priests. They would chant Gaur Nithay, teach people to chant Gaur Nithay and do some rituals for people but they were not really that great scholars again not all of them but many of them and Bhaktivinoda Thakur was an outsider so now they were not doing the job of teaching Gaudiya Vaishnavism in a way that could be appealing or even relevant to the mainstream mind of that time.
To the intelligent, educated, English speaking people of those times. So now Bhaktivinoda Thakur had to by his own study learn the tradition and then teach it now he took initiation from Bipin Bihari Goswami who was a prominent Mahanta priest the word Mahanta has many different meanings but one of the meanings is that one who is like an official head of a Matha or of a group so Bipin Bihari Goswami was the formal initiating guru and that’s how Bhaktivinoda Thakur gained a foothold within Gaudiya Vaishnavism now he was inspired much more by Jagannath Babaji whom he found immensely saintly person completely absorbed in love for Krishna and love for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu but either way through both of these he slowly got connected and then with the Gaudiya tradition and then he started becoming a spokesperson for the Gaudiya tradition now he was speaking to an audience of people who were very much rational and to some extent critical of the Vedic tradition and having heard the criticism of Krishna Bhakti as immorality as an expression of immorality or at least a licence for immorality they were not at all receptive to the learning about Krishna now this immorality also had Sahajiyaism associated with it and I will talk about the challenge of Sahajiyaism in the session tomorrow when we talk about Bhaktisiddhans Rakur’s life but today let’s focus on the challenge of rationality so now in order to present Gaudiya Vaishnavism Bhaktivinoda Thakur also had to establish it what Gaudiya Vaishnavism was not and thus he established a list of which are the bona fide followers and which are the upper sampradayas and he did a lot of writing now Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s writing was his main contribution he was not a organisation builder in the normal sense of the word he did actually come up with the idea of an organisation much of the Bhaktivruksha that has present in many parts of our movement as its seeds in what Bhaktivinoda Thakur taught or conceived rather but now his books in general his writings we could say they were his main service and through his writings he was reaching out to many different people at one level he was reaching out to the rational people that rational approach was there he was also reaching out to the masses now for the masses what was he doing? He was writing songs so the music as a means for spiritual cultivation has been a major part of all the theistic traditions of the world and this was especially prominent in the Bhakti tradition because its a path of love and music and singing is a natural way of expressing love but unfortunately the masses were singing devotional songs but often those devotional songs did not have the proper philosophical understanding and Bhaktivinoda Thakur took the same metre, same tone, same style and composed profound devotional songs now today when we hear Bhaktivinoda Thakur songs, those are the only songs that we hear but if we consider the other similar songs that were there during his times those other songs were often songs which were completely mundane with something about Krishna but a lot of mundane emotion mixed with it so what he did was an artistic genius it’s like nowadays some devotees may take some popular Bollywood tunes and then have Hare Krishna kirtan in those tunes now of course for those who are familiar with Hare Krishna they may be reminded of the Bollywood song by those tunes but those who have no knowledge about Hare Krishna when they hear those Bollywood tunes then for them the Bollywood tunes are familiar hey what are you singing with this tune that’s what is new so or nowadays some devotees use mantra mantra rock and these kind of things for those whom rock is new and rock is what is exciting when they hear Hare Krishna in rock what will happen is they will remember the rock and forget the Hare Krishna but for those whom rock is cool and they are familiar with it then that’s comforting music with that Hare Krishna is new so what we consider as tradition those songs and the style of those songs at one time was a deviation but Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s expertise was that the style that was a deviation he made it into the style of the tradition so of course I am simplifying much of the history over here but this was his outreach to the masses now as far as the rationality was concerned he focused on many things one was his philosophical writings or theological writings and the other was the first time he did this tradition was writing novels so he wrote books like Chaitanya Shiksha Amrita and Jaiva Dharma Chaitanya Shiksha Amrita is a very systematic book of theology Jaiva Dharma and then Prema Pradeepa these are books which are written in the form of novel the idea of novel as a literary genre was something novel in the past there would be plays and we discussed how Natya, how dramas had been a major part of our tradition and they were a part of the religious tradition of most of the religions across the world but novels were something different plays are what are written primarily for being enacted novels are not enacted at all that’s why a novel has to be made into a movie then there has to be a script written and there is a lot more that goes into a script than just telling a story how the story is to be depicted also all that is given over there so Bhaktivinoda Thakur is the first person in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition who wrote a novel so what was he doing? you remember we discussed how there is a tradition and there is a contemporary audience and realisation Prabhupada says means to present the wisdom of the tradition in a way that is interesting for the audience of the times so what he did was the format of the novel was becoming very interesting and it was new and intriguing for people during those times and he took the wisdom of the tradition and presented it in the form of a novel now apart from that he so this was systematic works of theology like the Chaitanya Shiksha Amrita then he also wrote novels now another thing that he tried to do these books were more systematic but presented in an innovative format but one of the biggest critiques of the tradition was its seeming irrationality the irrationality was with respect to the idea of two things the cosmology was crazy and the mythology was crazy that all these creatures and all these like in Krishna Leela there are all these demons and how can you how can any thoughtful person believe in all these demons and this whole cosmology all these time spans and dimensions in terms of size and idea of a serpent on whose hoods the universe is standing or a serpent at the bottom of the ocean these seem utterly irrational to the rationally educated mind and Bhaktivinoda Thakur had to address all this so one of his much misunderstood works was the Krishna Samhita now there were many challenges that Bhaktivinoda Thakur faced and he came up with very very creative ways of presenting the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and the broad Vedic tradition also in ways that could be intelligible to people so Bhaktivinoda Thakur played multiple roles at one place he when Dayanand Saraswati who founded Arya Samaj wrote critiquing the worship of deities so like I said this project of trying to find out what is of value in the Vedas and presented the modern mind different people try to do it differently so Arya Samaj what they did was they said only the original Vedas are pure and everything after that the Puranas, Itihasas all deviant and all of them should be rejected and they said the whole idea of deity worship comes in this later literature so Bhaktivinoda Thakur even defended the worship of Kali when the Arya Samaj is criticised so one more thing that Bhaktivinoda Thakur did was that he wrote a magazine Sajjan Toshni and others and it was through that magazine that he was cultivating a regular intellectual following he was writing books but books take a lot of time and effort to write and they are published gradually read gradually but magazines go on on a steady basis so he would write magazines and people would read and they would write letters and would respond to them and what he was doing through this was he was having a very live community of people being cultivated so nowadays with social media people may cultivate a community Bhaktivinoda Thakur was doing like that at that time now Bhaktivinoda Thakur as I said because he was a Grahasta, because he had a job and because he was primarily intellectual who focused on writing and presenting things intellectually he was not himself directly a community builder in the sense of he personally cultivating people and encouraging them in their spiritual lives and counselling them that was not what he was doing but he was laying the intellectual foundation which was useful at his times and subsequent times also so now in Chaitanya Shiksha Amrit to some extent and Krishna Samhita he addressed these two questions those of the irrational seeming of the cosmology and the mythology seeming to be just wild imagination so this is where he followed the tradition and he brought in the idea of explaining things in non-literal terms so Bhaktivinoda Thakur took these three terms the words kanishta madhyama and uttama so these are terms which are very generic terms within Sanskrit kanishta means introductory madhyama means the intermediate level and uttama is the best now in the Goswami’s literature these terms were used in particular ways kanishta meant a devotee at a particular level, madhyama meant a devotee at a particular level, uttama meant a devotee at a particular level and he did not take that particular framework he explained that kanishta are the literalists those who take scripture literally that everything that is described in scripture this is how it exactly happened and there is nothing more to discuss about and those who are intelligent, rational, thoughtful people they say these are all stories who will take it seriously so if at all there is some value in these stories we have to look at the symbolic meanings of the stories so he said the madhyamas they look for non-literal meaning in the stories and he acknowledged that those who look for non-literal meaning are actually more intelligent that they are more thoughtful and thus Bhaktivinod Thakur gave non-literal meaning to the various demons in the Krishna Leela so for example Putana represents a false guru, Dhenukasura represents this and Shaktasura represents that now if we look at what Bhaktivinod Thakur has done in the chapter of Chaitanya Shikshamrut he actually doesn’t give any elaboration why does Putana represent false guru why does Shaktasura represent so and so why does this demon represent so and so he just gives like one sentence description and he moves on his idea was not so much to get to focus on the non-literal meaning his idea was to get people to open their minds to see that there is some more wisdom over it, yeah you can look at from non-literal perspective but there are literalists, there are those who look for non-literal meaning but beyond that he said are the transcendentalists and these are the uttama, the rasika bhaktas and for them Krishna is a spiritual reality and they are absorbed in complete devotion to Krishna and they are experiencing another level of reality and he said this is what the Bhagavatam is actually offering, this is what ultimate purpose of bhakti is to actually develop that consciousness by which one can become immersed in loving absorption in the ultimate reality so in this way he patted the non-literal meaning seekers on their back, yeah you are more intelligent you are more intelligent than literalists but don’t think all devotees are literalists yes there are transcendentalists they are not taking these stories literalistically at the material level, they are completely absorbed in the spiritual level and that is the level we need to aspire so now sometimes the kanishta and uttama can appear to be very similar and when that happens then those who are seeking non-literal meaning can become very disrespectful and dismissive of even the transcendentalists so literalists say that everything that is described in Krishna Ila is just exactly what happened at the material level but the transcendentalists understand that Krishna is a spiritual reality and that absorption in the spiritual reality is what is most important now I am not going to go too much into the difference between literalists and transcendentalists at this point but the key point that I am making over here is Bhaktivinoda Thakur accommodated the intellectuals and their need for going beyond what seemed to them to be super simplistic meanings and similarly when he talked about the Bhagavatam for people who had a lot of difficulty in accepting the sheer time scales of the Bhagavatam the sheer geographical and cosmological distances of the Bhagavatam he said that within the Bhagavatam there is information that is vyavaharik that is about the material world and the most important part of the Bhagavatam is the parmarth and now he uses different terms and again more important the specifics of what he says is the purpose of what he is trying to achieve he is not forcing people to have to give up science to come to bhakti okay by the rational approach yeah you can look at some things and some things make sense some things may not make sense but that’s not what is the most important thing the most important thing is that one needs to experience Krishna and the spiritual knowledge that is there in the Bhagavatam is what is of prime importance that is what we should be seeking that is what we should be savouring and once that was understood so many people started becoming more and more open to the traditions to the Bhagavatam and it was that legacy that was carried on thereafter by by Bhakti Sanskrit Akhur eventually Vashila Prabhupada and that is what we are carrying on now so this approach of trying to understand and explain scripture rationally in a way that the modern mind can understand and accept it not giving up or compromising on the import of scripture but on explaining it in an appropriate way that was the expertise of Bhaktivinoda Thakur in many ways Bhaktivinoda Thakur was not a very confrontational person he was an intellectual and gave intellectual presentations of spiritual wisdom now of course among the biggest contributions of Bhaktivinoda Thakur was actually not just the books that he wrote not just the songs that he wrote but also the rediscovery of the appearance place of Shri Yajna Mahaprabhu Now Mahaprabhu had become a person a deity of great influence within Bengal and thus there were many people who would claim XYZ oh this is the place where Mahaprabhu did this and what place could have more prestige in the minds of the followers of Mahaprabhu in the place where he was born so there was a place which is claimed to be the place of the appearance of Mahaprabhu and what Bhaktivinoda Thakur observed was that things didn’t seem to add up not only were the people who were taking care of that particular place not really very devoted to Mahaprabhu not only were they not reflecting the character of Mahaprabhu but also from whatever descriptions he had he could find from archaeology, he could find from the scriptures these things didn’t seem to add up and then he took up this challenge of trying to find out what is the actual place of Mahaprabhu now this idea of claiming some special connection with someone who is of great importance and thereby claiming speciality for oneself is very common across the world when Satsvarupa Maharaj was trying to write the first volume of Lila Amrit where he was describing Prabhupada’s time in India he said that there were almost like 75 postmen who came and told that I was a postman who told Swamiji that you know you should not write and magazines people will throw away you write books but now somebody who has to write history has also become like a detective and Satsvarupa Maharaj decided he will not attribute to any postman because it was almost impossible to find out who that postman was Prabhupada had already departed and there was nobody else at that time who had seen any postman speak this to Prabhupada so the point I am making is this was a historical challenge and it was not just a, this was a intellectual detective challenge but the stakes were high because for those people who were claiming that a particular place was the appearance place of Mahaprabhu for them it was not a matter of prestige it was also a matter of money that people would come and give donations over there and when people’s monetary interests are challenged they can become fired so Bhaktivinoda Thakur while he might not have been confrontational in the same sense in which say Prabhupada was in terms of calling out to people using strong words to condemn people he was still a warrior and he was ready to fight. Now the sahajiya challenges that he faced we will mention them briefly when we talk about sahajiyism as a primary challenge at the time of Bhaktivinoda Thakur but at this point what he did was he did extensive research and then he found out where the yoga feet was and while we now talk about the incident when we saw across the Jalangi river a place which seemed to be lit at night that is the place of Mahaprabhu appearance that vision we considered extraordinarily authoritative but it was not that everybody would accept that vision.
Bhaktivinoda Thakur had to do the hard work of providing sound evidence and reasoning and then eventually when Jagannath Babaji came and he was completely emaciated. He couldn’t even get up and he had a basket which he was carried around and when he was brought to the place which Bhaktivinoda Thakur had ascertained was the place of the appearance of Mahaprabhu he started jumping up in ecstasy that persuaded many people and that’s how yoga feet was discovered of course there is a parallel tradition where even now in Mayapur there are people who claim that some other place is the yoga feet and there are people who still believe that but this was one of the biggest contributions of Bhaktivinoda Thakur and then he wanted to build a magnificent temple over there and his idea was that let us have a temple which reflects not just the glory of Mahaprabhu’s divine identity but also the glory of Mahaprabhu’s moon. Mahaprabhu had told Dityanand Prabhu go house to house, knock on people’s doors and ask them to chant the holy names so Bhaktivinoda Thakur despite being a highly respected magistrate started going to people’s houses door to door and asking them for some small contribution to build this temple for Mahaprabhu then eventually he retired and he focused, he was all this time working in the British government and he focused on using the position that he had from the British government in in spreading Krishna Consciousness by bringing respectability to Krishna Consciousness and also sharing using the respect that he had from that position to actually to influence people.
When he was in the Jagannath Puri area he actually did a lot of work to improve the administration of Jagannath Puri temple when he was in Vrindavan he actually acted to in official position he had gone there he tried to remove the dacoits from that area terrorising priests, pilgrims who were coming there so the principle Yukta Vairagya he used in many ways to assist in carrying forward the mission of Mahaprabhu eventually of course he retired and then he immersed himself in chanting the holy names and in becoming completely absorbed in the Lord and he it was who felt that I need a ray of Vishnu to carry on this mission I have done my part so much more needs to be done and that’s how Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur eventually appeared and his story is what we will discuss in our next session but what Bhaktivinoda Thakur achieved is in many ways remarkable among all the things that he did he is laying the foundation for modern day Gaudiya Vaishnavism is the most enduring contribution so when you look at Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s contribution we discussed broadly three things today his legacy first I focused on the context the time of intellectual ferment where Islam had never been an intellectual competitor even the western way of living both Christianity and Rationality they were seen as not only intellect at least by many they were seen as intellectual threats and the traditional Brahminical orthodoxy was not prepared because they spoke in Sanskrit or in the local languages not in English so Bhaktivinoda Thakur had to study himself and discover and recover the tradition in many ways and we discussed among the challenges that he faced was he reached out to the classes through his books his books on theology his books on theology his books novels like Jaiva Dharma and Prema Pradeep and then his books for people presently privileged in Rationality like Krishnasamhita and then he reached out to the masses through his songs and then beyond that at a cultural level so this was intellectual contribution and beyond at a cultural level what he did was that he recovered the Yoga Peetha the place of appearance of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and then his legacy was continued on by his illustrious son Bhaktisiddhanta Thakur Thank you very much. Are there any questions or comments? So where was CC hidden? Well it was not exactly hidden it was not a book that was widely available it is that some people may have had it in their library and they never read it and they had some respect for it as a book that is old and it was kept so now how did he know that it has answers? Well he was told that there were Gaudiya Vishnu scholars and some of them said that this is a book which you should read so it’s just like say if somebody is very scientifically minded then we may tell them okay read the Origins magazine or read XYZ book read this devotee author’s book so now the devotee who were telling us this may themselves not be very scientific also. They may not exactly know what the book contains but they tell us that okay you know you should read this book this will provide answers to your questions okay so yeah let me find out let me read this book.
So it was like that as a magistrate how could he go house to house? Well to some extent he went he did he retired and he focused on cultivation on the building of the temple but on rather he focused on directly spreading Krishna consciousness but as a magistrate it was not that that was a the job was his job was not a job which kept him busy 24 hours a day. Life was relatively much more regulated at those times and he was a very regulated person so he made time because it was important for him I am not sure what is the question over here what has a magistrate being a magistrate got to do with his going on this was his personal life and he chose to live the way he wanted to and does being material position help in spreading bhakti? It depends that if somebody has the calibre to not only achieve that big material position and to take on the responsibility of that material position without becoming overwhelmed then that is okay. For some people achieving a big material position itself becomes so consuming that they have no time or energy or capacity left for doing anything else.
So one has to pursue according to one’s adhikar what is one’s capacity what is one’s ability based on that one decides Now what are the ways for reaching out to the masses? Well it depends. Prabhupada had Harinam Sankirtana speech. Prabhupada also wanted skits and dramas to happen and now we have devotees on social media trying to do various things There is no one thing.
The world itself is a big place and different devotees using their creativity will come up with different opportunities So it depends what doors will open and what will have how much impact There is one one one George Harrison did extraordinary things for Prabhupada and who knows if in future somebody like that will be there So broadly speaking it’s like outreach can happen in two distinct ways One is that it’s top-down the other is bottom-up So top-down is basically we reach somebody who is like a Shrestha leader and that person influences the masses or the other is bottom-up that we influence so many people in the masses that the classes start taking us seriously So if we become very influential in a particular part of the world or particular part of the country then the politicians start taking us seriously over there then the other leaders start taking us seriously So how outreach will happen, whether it will happen through the classes or the masses, we can’t really say Different devotees will feel inspired to serve in different ways and time will tell which of these efforts is successful Yes, there are some questions Is there some organisation who can now when was the point he shifted from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu from Shakta to Gaur Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Well, he was never a Shakta in the sense of being a conscientious worshipper of the Goddess It was not that he was regularly chanting the mantras of the Goddess It was He was born in that family So the point I was making while mentioning his Shakta background was that he was not an insider by birth in the Gaudiya Vishnu tradition and he had to enter into the Gaudiya tradition and become a spokesperson for that That was a significant challenge So what is the connection between Bhaktivinoda Thakur, Vipin Bihari Goswami, Jagannath Babaji Well, as I said our parampara is the shiksha parampara and Bhaktivinoda Thakur writes in his he wrote his own autobiography as a long letter to one of his sons Lalita Lalita Nath So there he mentions about how after initiating by Vipin Bihari Goswami he was transformed significantly So he did respect Vipin Bihari Goswami as as a spiritual teacher At the same time Vipin Bihari Goswami was a part of the Jati Goswamis to some extent not with respect to him but and he was on the side of the famous Brahman versus Vaishnava debate that later took place He was on the side of the Brahmanas basically. Although he was a Gaudiya Vaishnava he said that to be a true teacher of Gaudiya Vaishnavism one has to be born in a Brahminical family Now Bhaktivinoda Thakur did not support that. At the same time Bhaktivinoda Thakur didn’t want to oppose his Guru directly.
That’s why and he was also Sikh. So then Bhaktivinoda Thakur represented him in that particular debate and there was a significant confrontation in which Bhaktivinoda Thakur was widely seen to have emerged as the better So when Bhaktivinoda Thakur wanted to break free completely Gaudiya Vaishnavism from the stronghold of the Jati Goswamis Bhaktivinoda Thakur emphasised the Shiksha line entirely and that’s why in the Parampara line that we have the inspirational Guru of Bhaktivinoda Thakur is seen to be Jagannath’s Babaji. So Bhaktivinoda Thakur never rejected him but he got his primary inspiration from Jagannath’s Babaji So the Parampara continued through Bhaktivinoda Thakur through Gaurav Biswas Babaji to Bhakta Sanskar Thakur So Yes Prabhu Bhagavan is seen to be connected to Shiksha level and Madhyama’s analytical level and the transverse Vedic as Nila level So if somebody is not competent in the analytical way if they are accepting as it is and if they are following it properly will they be able to achieve without understanding intellectually is a chance of fall down So now when Bhaktivinoda Thakur presented the hierarchy of Kanishta, Madhyama and Uttama So is it that if somebody is not intellectual enough to look at the non-literal meanings of scripture then is it that that person will not understand or not grow Now see the non-literal meaning Bhaktivinoda Thakur in that particular hierarchy explained it to be higher than literal but then I also mentioned that the literal and the transcendental they can seem very similar So does everybody have to look at non-literal meanings Not necessarily.
The important thing is that when we are looking at scripture literally we should not reduce Krishna to the material that now we say don’t reduce Krishna to simply the metaphorical and that is true but when we are taking literally what does that mean? That means say if I am talking with you, now you have a material body and I have a material body So when Krishna came here, when Mahaprabhu came here, did they have a material body? No So literally when somebody is literalist they may not have a clear understanding of the difference between matter and spirit So if one has a proper understanding of matter and spirit and they are guided by those who are properly devoted then there is no problem in them rising upwards from without necessarily taking the detour of the non-literals as long as they are philosophically grounded So if that is a need then that is accommodated It is not that non-literal meaning is an essential step forward in one’s spiritual growth If that is a need then it can be accommodated That is the point which Bhaktivinod Thakur is making Now as far as Chaitanya Chaitanya Amrit being found in a house in Odisha that’s possible Now as far as authority is concerned the book was mentioned in the tradition as a very important book and many people knew about the book To know the Gaudiya Vishnu tradition means to study that book like I mentioned The book’s importance was known widely So it was just that the book was not widely available or not widely read like if you consider Ramayana the Ramcharitmanas is much more widely read than the Valmiki Ramayana at least in North India So but that does not mean Valmiki Ramayana is unknown or not respected So Chaitanya Chaitanya Amrit was a very important book It was widely respected but it was not widely read that’s why it was not widely replicated and that’s why it was not widely available I don’t think anybody has any Gaudiya scholar seriously questions the authenticity of the Chaitanya Chaitanya Amrit itself So now what attracted him So What attracted him to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu specifically Well Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s character, he grew up hearing about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and when he met people who didn’t seem to be just sentimental followers of Mahaprabhu but also seemed to be scholars that drew him Those were not many but eventually when he met them that was a big transformative effect and they told him that there is a whole book which is a philosophical presentation of Mahaprabhu’s teachings That’s what further attracted him See we may all respect some figures without really seeing them as the models for our life So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is always a respected figure in the cultural iconography of Bengal but from there to become the model of his life that was a different thing Now were Catholics and Protestants both attacking Adityanathan Dharma Well Catholics were not much in India at that time because British were colonising India and Britain was primarily a Protestant country and the Catholics Portuguese were there in Goa and they did their inquisition which was horrible That’s something which Catholic Church has never apologised for They apologised for the inquisition in various other places So the Catholics were not really widely prevalent in India It was mainly the Protestants and among the scientists well no, as I said none of the top scientists of those times really bothered to travel to India India for them was like uncivilised dirty disease ridden messy sweaty place So those who were busy in scientific work they didn’t come to India So it was scientifically minded people in general those who had taken the rational approach they they were criticising and as far as the Protestants were concerned it was interesting that initially when the British came to India they came purely for mercenary for financial purposes and they saw that Indian religion was very very close to Indians and they, the British were shrewd in some ways they saw that one reason for the fall of Muslim rulers was that the Muslims antagonised the religious culture, religious temples and religious structures of India. So the British initially had a policy that they would, of religious non-interference let Hindus do whatever they want and we will we will focus on our commercial interests only. In fact for several years at least initial years the British actually banned Christian missionaries from coming to India So no Christian missionary was allowed to legally be in India So they would come from outside India near Bengal there is a place outside what is called India Serampore.
So from there they would penetrate into India they would do their missionary work and go back and hide and if they were caught they would be arrested There were also times when the British had their British guards in their royal red dress when Jagannath Yatra would go they would have them giving the royal escort and shooting the guns and respecting But then a lot of things changed with the political changes in Britain and especially so when the British East India Company was there ruling India they tried to focus only on commercial interests but after the especially after 1857 battle the what we call as the first independence struggle or the battle the mutiny, the rebellion whatever the word we use So then Britain somehow managed to maintain its hold on India and that time it was decided by Britain that the East India Company cannot take care of India It has to come under the British crown and so India was basically not ruled by a British government till then. It was ruled by a British company So when the British government took it up and after that the protestants gained power in the British Parliament, British House of Commons whatever you want to call it But then they started doing quite aggressive evangelisation So it’s a complex history but so there was conflict with the rationalists the rational interest, the religious interest, the commercial interest and all of them had their own internal challenges also. So in tomorrow’s session we will continue and discuss about the challenges that Bhakti Sanjh Thakur faced and we will talk about impersonalism, how it arose as a force and why Bhakti Sanjh Thakur was so strong and Prabhupada so strong as impersonalist.
When Bhakti Sanjh Thakur was not at all strong against it. We will also look at the independent struggle and how our tradition has interacted with the independent struggle and then we will also talk about Sahajiyaism Thank you very much Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur Ki Jai Srila Prabhupada Ki Jai Gaur Bhakta Vrinda Ki Jai Tai Gaur Premanende Hare Krishna