The Subject Matter
The Bhagavat itself tells us what it is:
निगमकल्पतरोर्गलितं फलं शुकमुखादमृतद्रवसंयुतम् ।
पिबत भागवतं रसमालयं मुहुरहो रसिका भुवि भावुकाः ॥
nigama-kalpa-taror galitaṁ phalaṁ
śuka-mukhād amṛta-drava saṁyutam
pibata bhāgavataṁ rasam ālayaṁ
muhur aho rasikā bhuvi bhāvukāḥ
«It is the fruit of the tree of thought (Vedas) mixed with the nectar of the speech of Sukadev5. It is the Temple of spiritual love! O men of piety! Drink deep this nectar of Bhagavat repeatedly till you are taken from this mortal frame.»
The Garuda-purana and the Bhagavat say again:
ग्रन्थोऽष्टादशसाहस्रः श्रीमद्भागवताभिधः।
grantho ’ṣṭādaśa-sāhasraḥ śrīmad bhāgavatābhidhaḥ
सर्व्ववेदेतिहासानां सारं सारं समुद्धृतम् ।
sarva-vedetihāsānāṁ sāraṁ sāraṁ samuddhṛtam
सर्व्ववेदान्तसारं हि श्रीभागवतमिष्यते ।
तद्रसामृततृप्तस्य नान्यत्र स्याद्रतिः क्वचित् ॥
sarva-vedānta-sāraṁ hi śrī-bhāgavatam iṣyate
tad-rasāmṛta-tṛptasya nānyatra syād ratiḥ kvachit
«The Bhagavat is composed of 18,000 slokas. It contains the best parts of the Vedas and the Vedanta. Whoever has tasted its sweet nectar will never like to read any other religious book.»
Every thoughtful reader will certainly repeat this eulogy. The Bhagavat is pre-eminently the book in India. Once you enter into it, you are transplanted, as it were, into the spiritual world where gross matter has no existence. The true follower of the Bhagavat is a spiritual man who has already cut his temporary connection with phenomenal nature and has made himself the inhabitant of that region where God eternally exists and loves. This mighty work is founded upon inspiration, and its superstructure is based upon reflection. To the common reader, it has no charm and is full of difficulty. We are, therefore, obliged to study it deeply through the assistance of such great commentators as Sridhar Swami and the divine Chaitanya and His contemporary followers.
Now the great preacher of Nadia, who has been Deified by His talented followers, tells us that the Bhagavat is founded upon the four slokas which Vyas received from Narad, the most learned of the created beings. He tells us further that Brahma pierced through the whole universe of matter for years and years in quest of the final cause of the world, but when he failed to find it abroad, he looked into the construction of his own spiritual nature, and there he heard the Universal Spirit speaking unto him the following words:
ज्ञानं परमगुह्यं मे यद्विज्ञानसमन्वितम् ।
सरहस्यं तदङ्गञ्च गृहाण गदितं मया ॥
यावानहं यथाभावो यद्रूपगुणकर्म्मकः ।
तथैव तत्त्वविज्ञानमस्तु ते मदनुग्रहात् ॥
अहमेवासमेवाग्रे नान्यद्यत्सदसत्परम् ।
पश्चादहं यदेतच्च योऽवशिष्येत सोऽस्म्यहम् ॥
ऋतेऽर्थं यत्प्रतीयेत न प्रतीयेत चात्मनि ।
तद्विद्यादात्मनो मायां यथाभासो यथा तमः
jñānaṁ parama-guhyaṁ me yad vijñāna-samanvitam
sarahasyaṁ tad-aṅgañ cha gṛhāṇa gaditaṁ mayā
yāvān ahaṁ yathā-bhāvo yad-rūpa-guṇa-karmakaḥ
tathaiva tattva-vijñānam astu te mad-anugrahāt
aham evāsam evāgre nānyad yat sad-asat param
paśchād ahaṁ yad etach cha yo ’vaśiṣyeta so ’smy aham
ṛte ’rthaṁ yat pratīyeta na pratīyeta chātmani
tad vidyād ātmano māyāṁ yathābhāso yathā tamaḥ
«Take, O Brahma! I am giving you the knowledge of My own self and of My relations and phases which is in itself difficult of access. You are a created being, so it is not easy for you to accept what I give you, but then I kindly give you the power to accept, so you are at liberty to understand My essence, My ideas, My form, My property, and My action together with their various relations with imperfect knowledge. I was in the beginning before all spiritual and temporal things were created, and after they have been created, I am in them all in the shape of their existence and truthfulness, and when they will be all gone, I shall remain full as I was and as I am. Whatever appears to be true without being a real fact itself, and whatever is not perceived though it is true in itself are subjects of My illusory energy of creation, such as, light and darkness in the material world.»6
It is difficult to explain the above in a short compass. You must read the whole Bhagavat for its explanation. When the great Vyas had effected the arrangements of the Vedas and the Upanisads, the completion of the eighteen Puranas with facts gathered from the recorded and unrecorded tradition of ages, and the composition of the Vedanta and the large Mahabharata, an epic poem of great celebrity, he began to ruminate over his own theories and precepts and found like Fauste of Goethe that he had up to that time gathered no real truth. He fell back into his own self and reached his own spiritual nature, and then it was that the above truth was communicated to him for his own good and the good of the world.
The sage immediately perceived that his former works required supercession in as much as they did not contain the whole truth and rather nothing but obscuration of the truth. In his new idea he got the development of his former idea of religion. He commenced revelation of the Bhagavat in pursuance of this change. From this fact our readers are expected to find out the position which the Bhagavat enjoys in the library of Hindu theological works.
The whole of this incomparable work teaches us, according to our great Chaitanya, the three great truths which compose the absolute religion of man. Our Nadia preacher has styled them as: (a) sambandha, i.e., the relation between the Creator and the created, (b) abhidheya, i.e., the duty of man to God, and (c) prayojan, i.e., the prospects of humanity. In these three words is summed up the whole ocean of human knowledge as far as it has been explored up to this era of human progress. These are the cardinal points of religion, and the whole Bhagavat is, as we are taught by Chaitanya, an explanation both by precepts and examples, of these three great points.
The first cardinal point deals with establishment of the knowledge of the relation that exists between the Creator and His creation, which is not perceived by the conditioned souls as they are under the grasp of maya, the enveloping energy of the Creator.
In all of its twelve skandhas or divisions, the Bhagavat teaches us that there is only one God without a second, who was full in Himself and is and will remain the same. Time and space, which prescribe conditions to created objects, are much below His supreme spiritual nature, which is unconditioned and absolute. Created objects are subject to the influence of time and space, which form the chief ingredients of that principle in creation which passes by the name of maya.
Maya is a thing which is not easily understood by us who are subject to it, but God explains, as much as we can understand in our present constitution, this principle through our spiritual perception. The hasty critic starts like an unbroken horse at the name of maya and denounces it as a theory identical with that of Bishop Berkeley. «Be patient in your inquiry» is our immediate reply to him. In the mind of God there were ideas of all that we perceive in eternal existence with Him, or else God loses the epithet of omniscient so learnedly applied to Him. The imperfect part of nature implying want or non-existence of substance proceeded also from certain of those ideas, and what else, excepting a principle of maya eternally existing in God subject to His omnipotence, could have a hand in the creation of the world as it is? This is styled the maya-sakti of the omnipresent God. Cavil as much as you can. This is a truth in relation to the created universe.
This maya intervenes between us and God as long as we are not spiritual, and when we are able to break off her bonds, we, even in this mortal frame, learn to commune in our spiritual nature with the unconditioned and Absolute. No, maya does not mean a false thing only, but it means concealment of eternal truth as well. The creation is not maya itself but is subject to that principle. Certainly the theory is idealistic, but it has been degraded into foolishness by wrong explanations. The materialist laughs at the ideal theory saying how could this body, water, air, and earth be mere ideas without entity, and he laughs rightly when he takes Sankar Acharya’s book in his hand as the butt end of his ridicule.7
The true idealist must be a dualist also. He must believe all that he perceives as nature is created by God full of spiritual essence and relations, but he must not believe that the outward appearance is the truth.
The Bhagavat teaches that all that we healthily perceive is true, but its material appearance is transient and illusory. The scandal of the ideal theory consists in its tendency to falsify nature, but the theory, as explained in the Bhagavat, makes nature true, if not eternally true as God and His ideas. What harm can there be if man believes in nature as spiritually true and that the physical relations and phases of society are purely spiritual?
No, it is not merely changing a name, but it is a change in nature also. Nature is eternally spiritual, but the intervention of maya makes her gross and material. Man in his progress in religion attempts to shake off this gross idea as childish and foolish in its nature, and by means of subduing the intervening principle of maya, lives in continual union with God in his spiritual nature. The success attained in shaking off this bond is salvation of the human nature. The man who has got salvation will freely tell his brother that, «If you want to see God, see me, and if you want to be one with God, you must follow me.»
The Bhagavat teaches us this relation between man and God, and we must all attain this knowledge. This sublime truth is the point where the materialist and the idealist must meet like brothers of the same school, and this is the point to which all philosophy tends.
This is called sambandha-jnan of the Bhagavat or, in other words, the knowledge of relations between the conditioned and the Absolute.
We must now attempt to explain the second great principle inculcated by the Bhagavat, i.e., the principle of duty. Man must spiritually worship his God. There are three ways in which the Creator is worshipped by the created.
वदन्ति तत्तत्त्वविदस्तत्त्वं यज्ज्ञानमद्वयम् ।
ब्रह्मेति परमात्मेति भगवानिति शब्द्यते ॥
vadanti tat tattva-vidas tattvaṁ yaj jñānam advayam
brahmeti paramātmeti bhagavān iti śabdyate
All theologians agree in maintaining that there is only one God without a second, but they disagree in giving a name to that God owing to the different modes of worship which they adopt according to the constitution of their mind. Some call Him by the name of Brahma, some by the name of Paramatma, and others by the name of Bhagavan. Those who worship God as infinitely great in the principle of admiration call him by the name of Brahma. This mode is called jnan or knowledge. Those who worship God as the Universal Soul in the principle of spiritual union with Him give Him the name of Paramatma. This is yoga. Those who worship God as all-in-all with all their heart, body, and strength style Him as Bhagavan. This last principle is bhakti.
The book that prescribes the relation and worship of Bhagavan procures for itself the name of Bhagavat, and the worshipper is also called by the same name.8
Such is the Bhagavat which is decidedly the book for all classes of theists. If we worship God spiritually as all-in-all with our heart, mind, body, and strength, we are called Bhagavatas, and we lead a life of spiritualism, which neither the worshipper of Brahma nor the yogi uniting his soul with Paramatma, the Universal Soul, can obtain.
The superiority of the Bhagavat consists in the uniting of all sorts of theistic worship into one excellent principle in human nature, which passes by the name of bhakti. This word has no equivalent in the English language. Piety, devotion, resignation, and spiritual love, unalloyed with any sort of petition except in the way of repentance, compose the highest principle of bhakti. The Bhagavat tells us to worship God in that great and invaluable principle, which is infinitely superior to human knowledge and the principle of yoga.
Our short compass will not admit of an explanation of the principle of bhakti beautifully rising from its first stage of application in the form of Brahmic worship in the shape of admiration which is styled the santa-rasa, to the fifth or the highest stage of absolute union in love with God, sweetly styled the madhura-rasa of prema-bhakti. A full explanation will take a big volume which is not our object here to compose. Suffice it to say that the principle of bhakti passes five distinct stages in the course of its development into its highest and purest form.9 Then again when it reaches the last form, it is susceptible of further progress from the stage of prema (love) to that of mahabhava, which is in fact a complete transition into the spiritual universe where God alone is the bridegroom of our souls in the purest state.
The voluminous Bhagavat is nothing more than a full illustration of this principle of continual development and progress of the soul from gross matter to the all-perfect Universal Spirit who is distinguished as personal, eternal, absolutely free, all-powerful, and all-intelligent. There is nothing gross or material in this process. The whole affair is spiritual. In order to impress this spiritual picture upon the student who attempts to learn it, comparisons have been made with the material world, which cannot but convince the ignorant and the novice or unpracticed in this process. Material examples are absolutely necessary for the explanation of spiritual ideas. The Bhagavat believes that the spirit of nature is the truth in nature and is the only practical part of it.
The phenomenal appearance of nature is truly theoretical, although it has had the greatest claim upon our belief from the days of our infancy. The outward appearance of nature is nothing more than a sure index of its spiritual phase. Comparisons are therefore necessary. Nature, as it is before our eyes, must explain the spirit, or else the truth will ever remain concealed, and man will never rise from his boyhood, though his whiskers and beard grow white as the snows of the Himalayas. The whole intellectual and moral philosophy is explained by matter itself. Emerson beautifully shows how all the words in moral philosophy originally came from the names of material objects. The words heart, head, spirit, thought, courage, and bravery were originally the common names of some corresponding objects in the material world.
All spiritual ideas are similarly pictures from the material world, because matter is the dictionary of spirit, and material pictures are but the shadows of the spiritual affairs which our material eye carries back to our spiritual perception. God in His infinite goodness and kindness has established this unfailing connection between the truth and the shadow in order to impress upon us. The clock explains the time, the alphabet points to the gathered store of knowledge, the beautiful song of a harmonium gives the idea of eternal harmony in the spirit-world, today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow thrust into us the ungrasped idea of eternity, and similarly, material pictures impress upon our spiritual nature the truly spiritual idea of religion.
It is on these reasonable grounds that Vyas adopted the mode of explaining our spiritual worship with some sorts of material phenomena, which correspond with the spiritual truth. Our object is not to go into details. So we are unable to quote some of the illustrations within the short compass of this lecture.
We have also the practical part of the question in the eleventh book of the Bhagavat. All of the modes by which a man can train himself up to prema-bhakti, as explained above, have been described at great length. We have been advised, first of all, to convert ourselves into most grateful servants of God as regards relation to our fellow brethren. Our nature has been described as bearing three different phases in all our bearings in the world. Those phases are named sattva, raja, and tama. Sattva-guna is that property in our nature which is purely good as far as it can be pure in our present state. Raja-guna is neither good nor bad. Tama-guna is evil. Our pravrttis or tendencies and affections are described as the mainspring of all our actions, and it is our object in our life and conduct as well as thought to train up those affections and tendencies to the standard of sattva-guna as decided by the moral principle.
This is not, however, easily done. All of the springs of our actions should be carefully protected from tama-guna, the evil principle, by adopting the raja-guna at first, and when that is effected, man should subdue his raja-guna by means of the natural sattva-guna, which is the most powerful of all three of them when cultivated. Lust, idleness, wicked deeds, and degradation of human nature by intoxicating principles are described as exclusively belonging to tama-guna, the evil phase of nature. These are to be checked by marriage, useful work, and abstinence from intoxication and trouble to our neighbors and inferior animals.
Thus, when raja-guna has obtained supremacy in the heart, it is our duty to convert that raja-guna into sattva-guna, which is pre-eminently good. That married love, which is first cultivated, must now be sublimated into holy, good, and spiritual love, i.e., love between soul and soul. Useful work will now be converted into work of love and not of disgust or obligation. Abstinence from wicked work will be made to lose its negative appearance and converted into positive good work. Then we are to look to all living beings in the same light in which we look to ourselves, i.e., we must convert our selfishness into all possible disinterested activity towards all around us. Love, charity, good deeds, and devotion to God will be our only aim. We then become the servants of God by obeying His high and holy wishes.
Here we begin to be bhaktas, and we are susceptible of further improvement in our spiritual nature, as we have described above. All this is covered by the term abhidheya, the second cardinal point in the supreme religious work, the Bhagavat.
We have now before us the first two cardinal points in our religion explained somehow or other in the terms and thoughts expressed by our saviour who lived only four and a half centuries ago in the beautiful town of Nadia situated on the banks of the Bhagirathi. We must now proceed to the last cardinal point termed by that great re-establisher as prayojan or prospects.
What is the object of our spiritual development, our prayer, our devotion, and our union with God? The Bhagavat tells that the object is not enjoyment or sorrow, but continual progress in perfectly attaining spiritual holiness and symmetry or harmony both within and all around in perfect bliss.10
In the common place books of the Hindu religion in which the raja- and tama-gunas have been described as the ways of religion, we have descriptions of a local heaven and a local hell; the heaven as beautiful as anything on earth, and the hell as ghastly as any picture of evil. Besides this heaven, we have many more places where good souls are sent up in the way of promotion. There are eighty-four divisions of the hell itself; some more dreadful than the one that Milton has described in his Paradise Lost. These are certainly poetical and were originally created by the rulers of the country in order to check evil deeds of the ignorant people, who are not able to understand the conclusions of philosophy.
The religion of the Bhagavat is free from such a poetic imagination. Indeed, in some of the chapters, we meet with descriptions of these hells and heavens and accounts of curious tales, but we have been warned, somewhere in the book, not to accept them as real facts but as inventions to overawe the wicked and to improve the simple and the ignorant. The Bhagavat certainly tells us of a state of reward and punishment in the future according to deeds in our present situation. All poetic inventions, besides this spiritual fact, have been described as statements borrowed from other works in the way of preservation of old traditions in the book which superseded them all and put an end to the necessity of their storage.
If the whole stock of Hindu theological works which preceded the Bhagavat were burnt like the Alexandrian library and the sacred Bhagavat preserved as it is, not a part of the philosophy of the Hindus except that of the atheistic sects would be lost. The Bhagavat, therefore, may be styled both as a religious work and a compendium of all Hindu history, culture, and philosophy.
The Bhagavat does not allow its followers to ask anything from God except eternal love towards Him.11 The kingdom of the world, the beauties of the local heavens, and sovereignty over the material world are never the subjects of Vaisnava prayer.
The Vaisnava meekly and humbly says, «Father, Master, God, friend, and husband of my soul! Hallowed be Thy Name! I do not approach You for anything which You have already given me. I have sinned against You, and I now repent and solicit Your pardon. Let Thy holiness touch my soul and make me free from grossness. Let my spirit in all humility be devoted completely to Your holy service in absolute love towards Thee. I have called You my God, and let my soul be inspired in admiration at Your greatness! I have addressed You as my Master, and let my soul be unflinchingly devoted to Your service. I have called You my friend, and let my soul remain overwhelmed in reverential love towards You and not in dread or fear! I have called You my husband, and let my spiritual nature be in eternal union with You, forever loving and never dreading or feeling disgust. Father, let me have strength enough to go to You as the consort of my soul, so that we may be one in eternal Love! Peace to the world!»
Of such a nature is the prayer of the Bhagavat. One who can read the book will find the highest form of prayer in the expressions of Prahlad towards the universal and omnipresent Soul with powers to convert all unholy strength into meek submission or entire annihilation. This prayer will show what is the end and object of a Vaisnava’s life. He does not entertain any ambition to be the king of a certain part of the universe in his next life after death, nor does he dread a local, fiery, and turbulent hell, the idea of which would make the hairs of young Hamlet stand erect like the forks of a porcupine! His idea of salvation is not total annihilation of personal existence as Buddhists and the twenty-four Gods of the Jains procured for themselves! The Vaisnava is the meekest of all creatures and completely freed from all ambition. He wants to serve God spiritually after death as he has served Him both in spirit and matter while in this life. His constitution is a pure spirit, and his highest object of life is the attainment of divine and holy love both here and hereafter.
Here may arise a philosophical doubt. How the human soul could have a distinct existence from the universal Soul when the gross part of the human constitution will be no more? The Vaisnava can’t answer it, nor can any man on earth explain it satisfactorily. The Vaisnava meekly answers. He feels the truth, but he cannot understand it. The Bhagavat merely affirms that the Vaisnava soul, when freed from gross matter, will distinctly exist not in time and space but spiritually in the eternal spiritual kingdom of God where love is life, and hope and charity and continually increasing ecstasy without change are its various manifestations.
In understanding the true essence of the Deity, two great errors confront us and frighten us back to ignorance and its satisfaction. One of them is the idea that God is above all attributes, both material and spiritual, and is consequently above all conception. This is a noble idea but useless. If God is above conception and without any sympathy with the world, how was then this creation possible? This universe composed of properties feasible? The distinctions and phases of existence evidenced? The difference of value witnessed? Man, woman, beast, trees, magnetism, animal magnetism, electricity, landscape, water, and fire distinctly seen? In that case, Sankar Acharya’s mayavad theory would have been absolute philosophy.
The other error is that God is all attributes, i.e., intelligence, truth, goodness, and power. This is also a ludicrous idea. Scattered properties can never constitute a being. It is more impossible in the cases of co-existence of incoherent, incompatible, mutually opposed, or even belligerent principles, such as justice and mercy, and fullness and creative power, and so forth. Both ideas are imperfect.
The truth, as stated in the Bhagavat, is that properties, though many of them opposed or belligerent in nature, are united in a spiritual Being where they have full congruity, unity, sympathy, and harmony. Certainly this is beyond our comprehension. It is so owing to our nature being finite and God being infinite. Our ideas are constrained by the idea of space and time, but God is above any sort of limit or constraint. This is a glimpse of truth, and we must regard it as truth itself. Often, says Emerson, a glimpse of truth is better than an arranged system, and he is right.12
The Bhagavat has, therefore, a transcendental personal, all-intelligent, active, absolutely free, holy, good, all-powerful, omnipresent, just and merciful, and supremely spiritual Deity without a second, creating and preserving all that is in the universe. The highest object of the Vaisnava is to serve that infinite being forever spiritually in the activity of absolute love.
These are the main principles of the philosophy and religion inculcated by the work called the Bhagavat, and Vyas, in his great wisdom, tried his best to explain all these principles with the aid of pictures perceivable in the material world. The shallow critic will no doubt hastily and summarily reject this great philosopher as a man-worshipper. He would go so far as to scandalise him as a teacher of material love and the injurious principles of exclusive asceticism.
The critic should first read deeply the pages of the Bhagavat and train his mind up to the best eclectic philosophy which the world has ever obtained, and then we are sure he will pour panegyrics upon the great principal of the college of theology at Badrik Ashram which existed not less than 4,000 years ago.
The shallow critic’s mind will undoubtedly be changed if he but reflects upon only one great and fundamental point, i.e., how it could at all be possible that a spiritualist of the rank and school of Vyas, teaching the best principles of theism throughout the whole of the Bhagavat, and composing the four texts quoted in the beginning as the foundation of his mighty work, could have created upon the belief of men the idea that the sensual connection between a man with certain females is the highest object of worship! This is surely impossible, dear critic! Vyas could not have taught a common vairagi to set up an akhada (a place of worship) with a number of females, if found anywhere! Vyas, who could teach us repeatedly in the whole of the Bhagavat that sensual pleasures are momentary like the pleasure of rubbing the itching hand and that man’s highest duty is to have spiritual love with God, could never have prescribed the worship of, or even any indulgence in, sensual pleasures.13
His descriptions are undoubtedly thoroughly spiritual, and you must not connect matter of the gross world with it. Following this advice, dear critic, go through the Bhagavat, and I doubt not you will, in three months, weep and repent to God for having despised this great and noble revelation emanating through the heart and brain of the great Badarayan.
Yes, you nobly tell us that such philosophical comparisons produced injury in the ignorant and the thoughtless. You nobly point to the immoral deeds of the common and perverted vairagis, who shamelessly have the hardihood to call themselves «the followers of the Bhagavat and the great Chaitanya.» You nobly tell us that Vyas, unless purely explained, may lead thousands of men into great risk and trouble in time to come. But dear critic! Study the history of ages and countries. Where have you found the philosopher and the reformer fully understood by the people?
The popular religion is fear of God and not the pure spiritual love which Plato, Vyas, Jesus, and Chaitanya taught to their respective peoples. Whether you give the Absolute religion in figures or simple expressions or teach them by means of books or oral speeches, the ignorant and the thoughtless must degrade it. It is indeed very easy to tell and sweet to hear that Absolute Truth has such an affinity with the human soul that He comes through it as if intuitively. No exertion is necessary to teach the precepts of true religion. This is a deceptive idea.
It may be true of ethics and of the mere alphabet of religion but not of the highest form of faith which requires an exalted soul to understand. It certainly requires previous training of the soul in the elements of religion; just as the student of the fractions must have a previous attainment in the elemental numbers and figures in arithmetic and geometry. «Truth is good» is an elemental truth which is easily grasped by the common people. But if you tell a common uneducated man that God is infinitely intelligent and powerful in His spiritual nature, he will conceive a different idea from what you yourself entertain of the expression.
All higher truths, though intuitive, are realisable only through education beginning from the simple and elementary principles of religion. That religion is the purest which gives you the purest idea of God, and the absolute religion requires an absolute conception by man of his own spiritual nature. How, then, is it possible that the ignorant will ever be able to obtain the absolute religion as long they are ignorant of the basic teachings and philosophy of religion? It is only when thought awakens that the thinker no longer remains ignorant and becomes naturally capable of obtaining an absolute idea of religion.
This is a truth, and God has made it such in His infinite goodness, impartiality, and mercy. Labour has its wages, and the idle must never be rewarded. «Higher the work, greater is the reward» is a useful maxim of truth. The thoughtless must necessarily remain satisfied with mere superstition till he wakes and opens his eyes to the God of love.
The reformers, out of their universal love and solicitude for rendering good to all, sincerely endeavor by some means or other to make the thoughtless drink the cup of salvation, but the latter drink it with wine and fall to the ground benumbed under the influence of intoxication because the imagination has also the power of making a thing what it never was. It is in this way that the evils of nunneries and the corruption of the akhadas commenced. No, we must not minimise or scandalise the saviour of Jerusalem or the saviour of Nadia for these subsequent evils of some perverted followers. Luthers, in spite of such cheap critics, are just what we want for the correction of those evils by means of true interpretation of the original precepts.
Two more principles characterise the Bhagavat, viz., liberty and progress of the soul throughout eternity. The Bhagavat teaches us that God gives us truth as He gave it to Vyas, and for us all, when we earnestly seek for it. Truth is eternal and inexhaustible. The soul receives a revelation of truth only when he is really anxious for it. The souls of the great thinkers of the by-gone ages, who now live spiritually, often approach our inquiring spirit and assist it in its proper and gradual development. Thus Vyas was assisted by Narad and Brahma.
Our many sastras, or in other words, books of thought, do not contain all that we could get from the infinite Father. No book is without its errors. God’s revelation is no doubt absolute truth, but it is scarcely received and preserved in its natural and pristine purity.
We have been advised in the fourteenth chapter of the eleventh skandha of the Bhagavat14 to believe that truth, when revealed, is absolute, but the same is liable to be imbued with the tincture of the nature of the receiver in course of time and is thus completely changed and converted into error through continual exchange of hands from age to age. Consequently sincere revelations from authentic sources are continually necessary in order to keep up truth in its original purity.
We are thus warned to be careful in our studies of old authors, however wise they are reputed to be. Here we have full liberty to reject any wrong idea which is not sanctioned by the peace of conscience.
Vyas was not satisfied with what he collected in the Vedas, arranged in the Puranas, and composed in the Mahabharata. The peace of his conscience did not sanction his labors. It dictated him from inside, «No, Vyas! You cannot rest contented with the erroneous picture of truth which was necessarily presented to you by the sages of by-gone days! You must yourself knock at the door of the inexhaustible store of truth from which the former sages drew their wealth. Go, go up to the fountainhead of truth, where no pilgrim meets with disappointment of any kind.» Vyas did it and obtained what he wanted. We have been all advised to do so.
Liberty then is the principle which we must appreciate as the most valuable gift of God. We must not allow ourselves to be led by those who lived and thought before us. We must think for ourselves and try to get further truths which are still undiscovered or unadapted in the present conditions and circumstances for purpose of our realisation of the same.
In the twenty-third text of the twenty-first chapter of eleventh skandha of the Bhagavat, we have been advised to take the spirit of the sastras and not the words.
फलश्रुतिरियं नृणां न श्रेयो रोचनं परम् ।
श्रेयोविवक्षया प्रोक्तं यथा भैषज्यरोचनम् ॥
phala-śrutir iyaṁ nṛṇāṁ na śreyo rochanaṁ param
śreyo-vivakṣayā proktaṁ yathā bhaiṣajya-rochanam
The Bhagavat stands therefore for a religion of liberty, of unmixed truth, and of absolute love.
The other characteristic is progress. Liberty certainly is the father of all progress. Holy liberty is the cause of progress upwards and upwards in eternity and in endless activity of love. Liberty abused causes degradation, and the Vaisnava must always carefully use this benign and beautiful gift of God. The progress of the Bhagavat is described as the rise of the soul from nature up to nature’s God, from maya, the absolute and the infinite energy, to the transcendental absolute Person Himself.
Hence the Bhagavat says about itself:
निगमकल्पतरोर्गलितं फलं शुकमुखादमृतद्रवसंयुतम् ।
पिवत भागवतं रसमालयं मुहुरहो रसिका भुवि भावुकाः ॥
nigama-kalpa-taror galitaṁ phalaṁ
śuka-mukhād amṛta-drava-saṁyutam
pibata bhāgavataṁ rasam ālayaṁ
muhur aho rasikā bhuvi bhāvukāḥ
«It is the fruit of the tree of thought, mixed with the nectar of the speech of Sukadev. It is the Temple of spiritual love! O men of piety! Drink deep this nectar of the Bhagavat repeatedly till you are taken from this mortal frame!»
Then in the same strain the saragrahi or the progressive Vaisnava adds:
सुरससारयुतं फलमत्र यद्विरसतादिविरुद्धगुणञ्च तत्।
त्यज विरागमितो मधुपायिनो रसिकसाररसं पिव भावकाः ॥
surasa-sāra-yutaṁ phalam atra yad
virasat-ādi-viruddha-guṇañ cha tat
tyaja virāgamito madhu-pāyino
rasika-sāra-rasaṁ piba bhāvakāḥ
«That fruit of the tree of thought is a composition, as a matter of course, of the sweet and the opposite principles. O men of piety! Like the bee taking honey from the flower, drink the sweet principle and reject that which is not so.»
The Bhagavat is undoubtedly a difficult work, and where it does not relate to picturesque descriptions of traditional and poetical life, its literature is stiff and its branches are covered in the garb of an unusual form of Sanskrit poetry. Works on philosophy must necessarily be of this character. Commentaries and notes are therefore required to assist us in our study of the book. The best commentator is Sridhar Swami, and the truest interpreter is our great and noble Chaitanyadev15. God bless the spirit of our noble guides who impart wisdom for our eternal good.
These great souls were not like comets appearing in the firmament for a while and disappearing as soon as their mission is done. They are like so many suns shining all along to give light and heat to the succeeding generations. Long time yet to roll on, when they will be succeeded by others of their sublime mind, beauty, and caliber.
The texts of Vyas are still ringing in the ears of all theists as if some great spirit is singing them from a distance! Badrik Ashram! What a powerful name! The seat of Vyas and of the selected religion of thought! The pilgrim tells us that the land is cold! How mightily did the genius of Vyas generate the heat of philosophy in such cold region! Not only did he heat the locality but sent its serene ray far to the shores of the sea! Like the great Napoleon in the political world, he knocked down empires and kingdoms of old and by-gone philosophy by the mighty stroke of his transcendental thoughts! This is real power!
Atheistic philosophy of Sankhya, Charvak, the Jains, and the Buddhists shuddered with fear at the heroic approach of the spiritual sentiments and creations of the Bhagavat philosopher! The army of the atheists was composed of gross and impotent creatures like the legions that stood under the banner of the fallen Lucifer, but the pure, holy, and spiritual soldiers of Vyas, sent by his almighty Father, were invincibly fierce to the enemy and destructive of the unholy and the unfounded.
He that works in the light of God sees the minutest things in creation; he that wields the power of God is invincible and great; and he that performs his destined mission with God’s holiness in his heart finds no difficulty whatsoever in the accomplishment of his duty against unholy things and thoughts. God works through His agents, and these agents are styled by Vyas himself as the incarnation of the power of God. All great souls were incarnations of this class, and we have the authority of this fact in the Bhagavat itself:
अवतारा ह्यसंख्ये या हरेः सत्त्वनिधेर्द्विजाः ।
यथाविदासिनः कुल्याः सरसः स्युः सहस्रशः ॥
avatārā hy asaṅkhyeyā hareḥ sattva-nidher dvijāḥ
yathāvidāsinaḥ kulyāḥ sarasaḥ syuḥ sahasraśaḥ
«O Brahmans! God is the soul of the principle of goodness! The incarnations of that principle are innumerable! As thousands of watercourses flow out of one inexhaustible fountain of water, so these incarnations are but emanations of that infinitely good energy of God which is full at all times.»
The Bhagavat, therefore, allows us to call Vyas and Narad as saktyaves-avatars of the infinite energy of God, and the spirit of this text goes far to honor all great reformers and teachers who lived and will live in future in this or other countries. The Vaisnava is ready to honor all great men without distinction of colour or caste, because they are filled with the energy of God.
See how universal is the religion of Bhagavat. It is not intended for a certain class of the Hindus alone, but it is a gift to man at large in whatever country born, whatever society bred, and whatever culture produced. In short, Vaisnavism is the absolute love binding all men together into the infinite, unconditioned, and absolute God.
May its peace reign forever in the whole universe in the continual development of its purity through the exertions of the future heroes, who will be blessed according to the promise of the Bhagavat with powers from the almighty Father, the Creator, Preserver, and the Annihilator of all things in heaven and earth.
5 Sukadev Goswami spoke the Bhagavat to the emperor Maharaj Pariksit before the intellectual giants of the universe on the banks of the River Yamuna near present day Delhi.
6 Sri Chaitanya’s lecture to Prakasananda in Chaitanya-charitamrta.
7 The Padma-purana thus puts the following expression into the mouth of Siva, and Chaitanya puts great stress on this text in his denouncement of Sankar’s mayavad:
मायावादमसच्छास्त्रं प्रच्छन्नंबौद्धमुच्यते ।
मयैव विहितं देवि कलौ ब्राह्मण-मूर्त्तिना ॥
māyāvādam asach-chhāstraṁ prachchhannaṁ bauddham uchyate
mayaiva vihitaṁ devi kalau brāhmaṇa-mūrtinā
«Mayavad philosophy is Buddhism in disguise and I (the Lord of tama-guna) have given expression to it in the shape of a brahman, meaning Sankar Acharya.»
8 This explanation is gathered from what Chaitanya said to Sanatan vide Sri Chaitanya-charitamrta, Madhya-lila, 20.157–61.
9 These five stages are called santa, dasya, sakhya, vatsalya, and madhura.
10 Rupa Goswami, one of the disciples of Mahaprabhu Sri Chaitanya, says:
भुक्ति मुक्तिस्पृहा यावत्पिशाची हृदि वर्त्तते ।
तावद्भक्तिसुखस्यात्र कथमब्युदयो भवेत् ॥
bhukti-mukti-spṛhā yāvat piśāchī hṛdi vartate
tāvad bhakti-sukhasyātra katham abyudayo bhavet
11 In the third skandha of the Bhagavat, Kapila tells his mother:
सालोक्य-सार्ष्टि-सामीप्य-सारूप्यैकत्वमप्युत ।
दीयमानं न गृह्णन्ति विना मत्सेवनं जनाः ॥
sālokya-sārṣṭi-sāmīpya-sārūpyaikatvam apy uta
dīyamānaṁ na gṛhṇanti vinā mat-sevanaṁ janāḥ
«God offers all sorts of happiness to His servants, but they do not want anything except His holy service.»
12 Ralph Waldo Emerson: «A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard wordsand tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.»
13 Vyas himself apprehended these stupid critics, and with a view to prevent degradation of his spiritual principles, he gave the following warning text to the mouth of Kapila in the third skandha:
न तथास्य भवेन्मोहो बन्धश्चान्यप्रसङ्गतः ।
योषित्सङ्गाद् यथा पुंसो यथा तत्सङ्गिसङ्गतः ॥
na tathāsya bhaven moho bandhaś chānya-prasaṅgataḥ
yoṣit-saṅgād yathā puṁso yathā tat-saṅgi-saṅgataḥ
«The company of a woman or that of a man who cultivated friendship with woman with an immoral heart is very injurious to the man of a religious temperament.»
मन्मायामोहितधियःपुरुषः पुरुषर्षभ ।
श्रेयो वदन्त्यनेकान्तं यथाकर्म्म यथारुचि ॥
man-māyā-mohita-dhiyaḥ puruṣaḥ puruṣarṣabha
śreyo vadanty anekāntaṁ yathā-karma yathā-ruchi
15 The Eastern saviour and foremost teacher of the Bhagavat, the greatest apostle of love of God and father of congregational chanting of the Holy Name of the Lord, Sri Chiatanya Mahaprabhu, demonstrated the inner meaning of the Bhagavat through His divine life and precepts and heralded it as the natural commentary on the Vedanta. It was His wish that the Bhagavat be taught in every town and village on the globe.