англ. название записи: Q&A: Rasa-lila, Krishna's Marriage in Dvaraka, Are the Vedas Old or Eternal - 2025-03-23
0:20Apostolos related with, because Aishvarya always is there in Madhurya Lila, but for example, when Krishna left the Rasa Lila, or in Rama Lila, when they go to the forest, or Mahaprabhu takes Sannyasa, this attribute is related with the opulence of renunciation in Aishvarya field, or we should understand in other way. This beauty, fame, strength, the beauty of Krishna is apart, or these attributes come also from Aishvarya who is supporting Madhurya for increase the rasa?
1:07Or Krishna leaving Vrindavan, or Krishna disappearing from the rasa lila. So these are all quite different, they have some similarity but also different. When Sri Krishna left the rasa lila, he left with Srimati Radhika, but then later also he left Radhika, but he had a purpose to actually relish more rasa, to increase the rasa through the mellows of separation, and also to show to all the other gopis that Radhika's love is supreme.
1:54He left Rasa Lila with Srimati Radhika. It shows that at the time of meeting, her love is supreme. And then he left Radhika, and everyone saw her separation. And then they realized, at the time of separation, her love is supreme. So both in meeting and separation, Radharani is supreme. So once the Vraja-gopis, they all had a great honor for Radhika. When you honor someone who has more bhakti than yourself, then their mercy comes to you and your bhakti increases. And so the prema of all the Vraja-gopis went up by this and then they all danced with Krishna together.
2:41So Krishna is very rasik. He had his intentions behind leaving Vraja gopis and leaving Radhika in the Rasa Lila. So sometimes Vaishnavas have said that, oh just see, Krishna left all the gopis or he left Radhika and this shows his vairagya, that he is detached.
3:09So this is just from the point of view of tattva to give instruction to general persons. But actually, Krishna cannot at any moment give up his devotee. Krishna cannot have vairagya towards his devotee because Krishna is prema-adhin, he is controlled by love. So that is a superficial interpretation of the lila, that it's the manifesto. This is why Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, he says that of the six opulences of the devotee, Sri beauty is the angi, that is the body.
3:55And then, Aishvarya, Sri, Samagri, here, the word Aishvarya, in this context of the six opulences of the Lord, it means the capability to be the biggest and the smallest, simultaneously, and the control of everything, and the biggest and the smallest, so this Aishvarya, that is one of the characteristics of the Lord, Virya, to have all shaktis, especially Achintya, inconceivable potence, Aishvarya, Sri, Virya, Yash,...
4:33Yash here means that the glory of Krishna is mangala-mayi, because there are many persons who are famous, but if you hear and chant about them, you'll go to hell, but if anyone will hear or chant about Krishna in any way, his whole life becomes auspicious, so yash means not just really well known, yash doesn't mean he's a celebrity, of course he is well known, he is a celebrity, but the yash means mangala-mayi, that his glories bring auspiciousness to everyone.
5:12So, aishvarya, sriya, sriya, then beauty. So, beauty is the main one. This is angi, just like your body is the body and your arms and legs are the limbs that come from the body. So, all the opulences, actually, they depend on Sri beauty. Beauty is the main one, angi, and the others are parts of that. Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura said, of these six opulences, jnana and vairagya are not directly Krishna's qualities, but they're the attributes of his qualities.
5:44In other words, if someone will be touched by his yash, or by his sri, then they will develop jnana and vairagya.
6:00So, we cannot say that Krishna is so renounced, he can renounce his pure devotees.
6:11This would be contrary to rasa. He's controlled by love. Everything he does is for his devotees. So, even if superficially, you know what he said?
6:28I do everything, all the activities I do, many different types of activities, but everything I do, I do it for my devotees, so Krishna cannot give them up, because vairagya means the absence of raga, the modal passion, attachment, so Krishna's svarupa is necessarily vairagya, if you like, it is devoid of the modal passion, because it's a shuddha sattva, Vishuddha-sattva-svarupa. But to be devoid of something is not a quality because it's a negative abstraction.
7:25If you say, oh, I have the quality of deathlessness, amrita, immortality, immortality. So immortality, you can say it's a quality, but if you search the person, you will not find that quality there because it's a negative abstraction. It means not having death.
7:52Understand? So not having something is not a thing, but it's the way that we speak, it's the way, so that is called the vikalpa. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in the commentary on the word vikalpa, it's described that one type of vikalpa, there are many types of vikalpa, but one type is a negative abstraction, that you think in your mind that a negative abstraction is actually a positive quality.
8:23So, we should think about it in this way. So, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura said that four of the opulences, they are directly Krishna's qualities of his svarupa, and they are, and Sri is the main one, and the others are, it's an angas, but jnana and vairagya are in a separate category, because they're, in one sense, they are negative abstractions, but they give, they have an effect.
8:56on us. When we remember the Supreme Lord, then naturally jnana and vairagya will come to us. That means the removal of bodily identification. Vairagya, one of the characteristics is detachment from sense gratification. So if Sri Krishna will be enjoying with the gopis, but then he'll be detached and give them up, then did he give up sense gratification or not?
9:32His meeting with the gopis was never sense gratification in the first place. So if Krishna will leave the gopis, Then what kind of vairagya is this? So someone can say in a general sense that to give a teaching to a neophyte person. Oh, you are very attached to sense gratification. You are attached to beautiful women and this and that. But look, Krishna is not like you. He doesn't have faults like you because Krishna leaves all the gopis. Isn't it that?
10:02So it may be said to give some lesson to a general person, how Krishna is great and you should, how can you be a devotee of Krishna if you don't have the qualities like Krishna, Krishna is not a sense enjoyer, he can give up all beautiful women, so you should also give up, someone may say like this, but it's a very superficial analysis, because Krishna's loving pastimes with the gopis, they were never sense gratification in the first place, Krishna is not kāmī, kāma-last, Krishna is premi, the love of gopis has become famous by the name of kāma, it is kāma-rūpā-bhakti, but only kāma-rūpā, it has the form, it has the shape as if it were kāma, but prema-iva-gopa-ramaṇam kāma-atyakta-mātratām, the love of gopis is actually prema, so kṛṣṇendriya-prīti-icchā-dharit-prema-nāma, the desire to please Krishna's senses, that is called prema, so there's no kāma,
11:17in gopis' love. Sahaja-gopīra-prema, nāhi prākṛta-kāma, the natural love of gopis is not in any way a material type of lust, but it became famous by that name kāma, but actually it's complete, just pure love without any tinge, with not the slightest smell of the desire for sense gratification. So Krishna loves the gopis in that way, gopis love Krishna in that way, and Krishna loves the gopis in that way, and Krishna loves the gopis in that way.
11:57Of pure love. They are not trying to enjoy sense gratification. So if Krishna will leave the gopis, we cannot say that he is giving up sense gratification. That's our projection and also one type of vikalpa, a thought construct which is not correlated to the actual reality. You should study the description of the six opulences in the Jaiva Dharma, the explanation to what I have said is based on Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura's comments in the Jaiva Dharma.
12:33I didn't understand it, Lalita-mādhava, when Krishna wants to marry Rukmini and he asks this permission from, and Bhīṣmaka is like setting him this rule that he cannot marry other, why is he hesitating? Because at that time, since I understood that he thinks that Radhika has passed away, so how can this thought arise that he will in the future be able to maybe marry Radhika?
13:03First of all, there was no condition that he could not marry anyone. The condition was that he could not marry anyone without the permission of a queen. So the door was not closed. On marriage, it was only closed. He cannot marry someone that would mean he does not get along with, you know, because if they're co-wives and they hate each other, then their life is spoiled.
13:35The co-wives, they should get along with each other. And so if and when, and so then, Gurudev, he asked this to Bhishma Maharaja, Gurudev asked Bhishma Maharaja, but you should agree to this condition for Krishna, that once Rukmini, she asks Krishna to accept a sakhī, some dear friend whom she loves, then this condition will be lifted.
14:13That means that once Rukmini has asked for Krishna to meet with one of her sakhīs and accept as his beloved, then after that, Krishna will not require her permission again for any other process. So this is how there was some condition from both sides. One, there's a condition, and the second condition that there's a condition, under this condition, that condition will be cancelled.
14:47Now, Krishna heard the news that the demigods had said Radhika has entered the sun planet. So, Krishna, first of all, Krishna had a hope that he would meet Radhika somehow again one day.
15:05And secondly, he is not Raghunātha Ramachandra who has made the ekapatnī-vrata. You cannot force Krishna to become like Ramachandra and make ekapatnī-vrata, the vow to only have one wife. How is it possible?
15:23because Krishna has made the promise that I reciprocate with everyone. So if any person loves Krishna in madhura-rasa, then he must accept them as his beloved. This is his vow.
15:45Ramachandra has made the ekapatni-vrata because he is Maryada Purushottama. So Lord Rama, his pastimes, don't think his pastimes are about maryada. The pastimes of Lord Rama are also only about prema, love. However, that praying never oversteps the boundaries of social maryada, and therefore he is called maryada-purushottama.
16:09All his pastimes are pastimes of love. His love for Sita, his love for Hanuman, his love for Lakshman, his love for Kaushalya, his love for Kaikeyi even. He has love for his associates so much, but he has the pastime of setting a good example in all respects in regard to the Vedic dharma.
16:36But Krishna is not like that. For him, he is ready to transgress all boundaries of the religious and social etiquette for the sake of prema. So Krishna is the lila-purushottama. In his lila, he will do anything to relish rasa because he is rasa-rasika. So, primarily, Krishna looked towards Purnamasi for help, because of his deep attachment to Srimati Radhika, and also because when the Supreme Lord does something, it can have five or six different purposes, but you should know the first and primary purpose is always, prema-rasa-nirdhāra-saukīrti-sāra, to relish the essence of Radhika's love.
17:37That's the primary, and all the others will be secondary and included in that. Is it clear? Yeah. One more question, 30 minutes.
17:52Gurudeva, Srila Bhakti Sundar Govinda Dev-Goswami led to you in 1996 to translate the Jaiva Dharma. In the chapter 13, you speak about that, well, you do the knowledge of the Vedas is inconsistent, because not in the material, like ancient, because not in the material knowledge is inconsistent. Why when people give reference to the Vedas or the ages? It's like an ancient 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago. Why not? Because it's eternal. When you open one book, it's like this happened two days ago. It's so near to the soul. It's eternal. Why always concept that the Vedas is like a...
18:53Yes, yes, that the Vedas are old is not their selling point, you know? Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Thakura would call the persons who have a fetish for old things, antiquarians, you know? Oh, this knowledge is so authentic because it's so old. There's so many old things that are completely wrong. Just because something's old doesn't make it more right than something that's less old.
19:31So the Vedas are eternal, but the general persons, they are impressed by the longevity of a tradition, you know, because if a tradition does not have any value, then it will not last a long time. There are so many fads and fashions and ideas that came in and out of popularity, you know?
20:07But if there's something that's very substantial, then it has the power to endure over long periods of history, we can say. Like Christianity, is there still, after 2000 years, still there are millions of Christians. Why? Because there's substance. There's some substance here which is valuable. And so when we speak about religious scriptures, then we can also say, because the Vedas, not that they're 5,000 years old, but according to our traditional history, they were written down 5,000 years ago. Before that, Vedas are called śruti. Śruti means that which is heard. So it wasn't written down. It was heard. It was passed down as an oral tradition.
21:03But when Kali-yuga came, because of the gradual degradation of human mental power, the memory was being reduced, so due to the curse of Gautama Rishi, so in Kali-yuga the memory is reduced, and so in order to preserve the Vedic knowledge, Vyasadeva divided Vedas into four, and gave the four sections to four disciples who would specialize in that part, and they had their disciples.
21:39And so various aspects of the Vedas were entrusted to different gotras, different traditions, the lineages in order to preserve them. And they were written down. So different strategies were taken to preserve them in the form of writing and preserve them in a form of understanding that particular section. In other words, different aspects of the brahmin community would be specialists in that aspect of the Vedas.
22:13So you have veda-pramāṇa, veda-pramāṇa, and like our śāstrādhi, Catur-veda. And so in this sense that this text has a long history and therefore it must be substantial, we can intuit from, we can infer that there perhaps there's more likelihood to be something substantial here, but it's not a proof of its validity. śabda. The proof is śabda-pramāṇa. Śabda-pramāṇa does not mean that our śabda is the Vedas and so if something is written here then I accept it to be true because it's written here. That is the, let us say, that is the weak interpretation of śabda-pramāṇa, understanding according to sādhana-vṛtti-prapāṭī. The strong interpretation of the word śabda-pramāṇa that is according to vidvat-vṛtti-prapāṭī is when you hear the sound of the Vedas in the Vedas,
23:21Guru-paramparā, you see God, because the sound itself is not different from the Supreme.
23:46But just because something is old does not make it more valid than something that is more recent. For example, whatever Chaitanya Mahaprabhu has revealed, whatever Rupa Goswami has revealed is superior to the Vedas. So what is apparently, it's all, that is also eternal. But when we speak about its appearance in this world, we say Rupa Goswami has written Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu 500 years ago, like that.
24:15And this is actually superior even to the Vedas. The Vedas, what Rupa Goswami has revealed, the Vedas and the Vedas themselves are still searching for that.
24:37The Vedas are still searching for the lotus feet of Sri Krishna.
24:49But common people are very impressed by this aura of the ancient authority.
25:02Because we also have the mental connection between age and wisdom. If a person is really old and wrinkled and has a long white beard, then they look wise, even if they're foolish.
25:17And Sukadeva Goswami, he's only 16 and he's naked, he's not even shaving, so he cannot today experience. These are material assumptions. And in preaching, sometimes persons, they utilize the general assumptions of the public for their benefits.
25:41noleiche, namun syuben posebamu. Nain overall sakit ipin kama k wreakta doishanja yudoka, yudoka twenty seven dolar, osumura tombe domadha, osumura facade fansir shaken barheja. Usa antiga zarkasожan, kintira 발on, aldai, ko küç hemis hitam, aquí kintira para User Vice, Kipurzaja Sodja.
26:47Old Testament are proven and expressed in the most elaborate form in the New Testament, but the Old Covenant is superseded by the New Covenant of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. So, we can see here's a religion, but it has a reactionary element to previous tradition, and we can say Islam also is a reactionary to also developing on ideas of Christianity, and also reactionary to some of the ideas. Everything is not in agreement in the sense that let's say Christ is accepted as a prophet but he's not accepted as directly one of the three the tripartite aspects of God himself. Then you have Judaism as it is today.
27:40Talmudic Judaism is perhaps only 900 years old. It's very, very reactionary against Christianity and to a certain degree Islam and so on. Whereas the Vedas, they're not quarreling with a Christian or a Muslim or a Sikhism. Let's take Sikhism. Sikhism is a Hindu reaction to the Hindu invasion, sorry, the Muslim invasion of India. How did Sikhism come about?
28:09It was Hindus becoming more martial. It's like a martial branch of Hinduism, because at that time in history it was necessary to muster the martial spirit to counteract the invasion of Islamic persons.
28:30Buddhism, it was a rejection of the Vedas as well. So if you look at the various religions today, you see generally they're a reaction to something else. Vrindavan. And they have some positive content, but they're also very much defined by their negation or enmity toward another idea.
28:53But we can say, because the Vedas, no one can really trace out historically, though we may say it was written down, we say 5,000 years, some scholars may say 3,000 years, or something like that, but whatever. Raghunatha. But it's known that it was an oral tradition before that. So where it was written down, even the scholars admit this is not the origin of this religious conception. The religious conception far, far predates the written word. And therefore, it is not reactionary to any of the religious concepts that we see today. It was meant to be ideas for the whole of mankind.
29:42so in this way one may deliberate on on the value of its being old but actually the oldness is not really the antiquity is does not support in a foolproof way in a way which is incontrovertible that this is true it's true because it's all this a non sequitur it does That something is old must be true. So this is not something that we put real emphasis upon. We put emphasis upon that Veda is suthi, it is manifested. And this is why if you study the 11th and the 12th canto, there's a history of how the Vedas came to this world. And even though it's very old, because the history itself begins with the manifestation of the Vedas begins with the first person in the universe, Lord Brahman, but the oldness,
30:55That is not the foundation of the truth of the Vedas, but rather the foundation of the truth is that the Supreme Lord placed the syllable of Aum in the heart of Brahma, and then Brahma went into meditation, and when his senses were completely praktyahara was done, his senses were fully withdrawn from the external contact, then he heard the sound and it said actually that it's the Paramatma who is hearing the sound and then when a person's senses become detached from the external world the Paramatma allows the Jiva to hear that same sound om and when the Paramatma allows the Jiva who has controlled his senses to hear that sound it manifests first as Brahman and then Paramatma and then Bhagavan
31:59And the sound differentiates into the various varieties of sound, a-a-e-e-ru, the vanakram, with the long and short syllables and everything, and then manifests from the Vedas, the Vedic mantras come from, four Vedas come from the four mouths of North Brahma, and this is how the Vedas manifest in this world. So the Vedas are the sound form of God himself.
32:32They are Shabda Brahma. Brahma just eating truth in the form of sound. So this is our conception of the authority of the Vedas is based on this.
32:53Supreme Lord said, I have two bodies, my form is Parabrahma and my form is Shabda Brahma. These are my two forms in Srimad Bhagavad-gita, so you could understand it.
33:07Gora Prenganam Dei
