BY: SUN STAFF
Dec 19, CANADA (SUN) —
Tattva Sandarbha
by Srila Jiva Goswami
SECTION TWENTY-THREE
Therefore, although there are many scriptures, only the Srimad Bhagavatam has been glorified in the following manner: "For those who are devoid of sight in Kali-yuga, this Purana has appeared like the sun" (SB. 1.3.44). The metaphor comparing the Bhagavatam to the sun indicates that no other scripture can properly illuminate the Absolute Truth.
The Hayasirsha pancaratra, in the chapter classifying the scriptures, describes the "Tantra-bhagavata" as a virtual commentary on the Srimad Bhagavatam. Other commentaries are the Hanumad bhashya [i], Vasana bhashya, Sambandhokti, Vidvatkamadhenu, Tattva- dipika, Bhavartha-dipika, Paramahamsa-priya, Sukahridaya, and so on, and there are numerous essays such as Muktaphala, Harilila, Bhakti-ratnavali, and others that are composed by persons famous in their respective schools of philosophies. The Srimad Bhagavatam is also glorified in the Danakhanda section of the Caturvarga Cintamani of Hemadri. His chapter dealing with 'giving Puranas in charity' describes the Srimad Bhagavatam with the same characteristics as defined in the Matsya Purana (53.20-22).
In the Parisesha khanda of the same book, Kalanirnaya section, while defining the appropriate religion for Kali-yuga, Hemadri quotes the Srimad Bhagavatam (11.5.36), "The spiritually advanced people praise Kali...", and accepts only the religious principles established in Bhagavatam as appropriate for Kali-yuga.
Sri Sankaracarya, an incarnation of Lord Siva, understood the importance of Srimad Bhagavatam, with its statements about the bliss of devotion, which surpasses even the joy of impersonal liberation and is superior to his doctrine of impersonalism. He did not dare to interpret it knowing it to be the divine exposition of the Supreme Lord on Vedanta. As will be explained later, he taught the doctrine of monism on the order of the Lord to conceal His identity. Still, to make his words successful, by giving a personal exposition on the Srimad Bhagavatam, he touched on it indirectly by composing hymns such as the Govindashtaka, which describes certain pastimes of Lord Krishna. These pastimes--such as Mother Yasoda's amazement at the vision of Krishna's Universal Form and the stealing of the clothes of the young damsels of Vraja--are found only in the Srimad Bhagavatam.
Sri Jiva Toshani Commentary
Although there are numerous Vedic literatures only the Srimad Bhagavatam is compared to the sun, because it sheds light on the dense darkness of the Kali age. Just as when the sun rises rogues and thieves hide and ordinary people become fearless and active, similarly, by reading the Srimad Bhagavatam one's heart is rid of lust and greed and one becomes qualified to engage in the service of the Lord. Hence the Srimad Bhagavatam was revered by great saints and thinkers by their writing commentaries and essays on it.
This practice continues in modern times. Among such contemporary saintly persons, the most noteworthy was His Divine Grace, Om Vishnupada Paramahamsa Parivrajakacarya A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who was not only a scholar of the Bhagavatam, but embodied its teachings to an extraordinary degree. He was a tireless teacher of its philosophy up to his very last moments. By translating the Srimad Bhagavatam into English with elaborate commentaries, he made the message of the Bhagavatam unmistakably clear and accessible to the world. And, by his efforts, many souls who formerly indulged in every sort of rougish vice and sinful act have undergone a change in heart by reading the glorious Bhagavatam. They have left their degraded life and taken to the devotional service of Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. This experience leaves no room for doubting the potency of the Srimad Bhagavata Purana.
Srila Jiva Gosvami again refers to the Caturvarga Cintamani (seventh chapter, Dana khanda) of Hemadri, who recommends that one donate Srimad Bhagavatam, set upon a golden throne and glorifies it as having the same characteristics as described in the Matsya Purana, section nineteen. While determining the religion for this age in the fourteenth chapter of Caturvarga Cintamani, Parisesha Khanda, Hemadri chose a Bhagavatam verse (11.5.36):
"Those who are actually advanced in knowledge are able to appreciate the essential value of this age of Kali. Such enlightened persons worship Kali-yuga because in this fallen age all perfection of life can easily be achieved by the performance of sankirtana."
Commenting on the word "sankirtana" Hemadri declares that "Hari-sankirtan" is the only way. Then he quotes the next verse (.11.5.37):
"Indeed, there is no higher possible gain for embodied souls forced to wander throughout the material world than the Supreme Lord's sankirtana movement, by which one can attain the supreme peace and free oneself from the cycle of repeated birth and death."
In this way Hemadri recognized the authority of Srimad Bhagavatam in giving the principles of religion for Kali-yuga.
Sankaracarya respected Srimad Bhagavatam both by not commenting on it and by composing prayers based on its narrations. One such prayer is Govindashtaka:
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, the personification of supreme bliss, who is the Absolute Truth and knowledge, unlimited and eternal; who is non-different from the sky, yet He is the Supreme Sky; who effortlessly rolled and frolicked in the courtyard in Vraja, yet He appeared tired; who is formless, yet He appears in various forms assumed by Maya, including the form of the universe; who is the shelter of the whole universe, yet appeared as if He needed shelter.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, the personification of supreme bliss, the Supreme Master of the universe, who, by Mother Yasoda's chastisement, appeared frightened like a baby, when she asked, "Are You eating mud"; who opened His mouth to prove that He did not eat mud and thus showed the fourteen planetary systems including the Lokaloka mountain; who is the supporting pillar for the city-like three worlds; and who is beyond vision yet is the source of everyone's vision.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who is the killer of the demons, the enemies of the demigods; who relieves the earth from its burden; who cures the disease of materialism and grants liberation; who eats butter although devoid of all eating; who devours the whole universe at the time of annihilation; who, although different from abhasa yet manifests in the purified vrittis of the clean heart; who is most auspicious and peaceful.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who is the protector of cows; who appeared in cowherd form to perform His pastimes on earth; who is a cowherd by birth; who protected the cowherders by lifting Govardhana Hill and thus enjoyed pastimes with the cowherd damsels; who was called Govinda even by the cows; who has unlimited names; who is distinct among the cowherd boys and is beyond sense perception.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who enters the assembly of cowherd damsels and divides them into groups for is pastimes; who is different from everything, yet He is one with them; who considers it His good fortune to always be smeared by the dust raised from the hooves of the cows; who is pleased with faith and devotion; who is inconceivable, yet His pastimes are meditated upon; and who is like a transcendental touchstone.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who stole the clothes of the bathing damsels and climbed a tree; who, when requested by the naked maidens for their clothes, called them closer; who is the dispeller of lamentation and delusion; who is knowledge personified; who is beyond intelligence and is pure existence personified.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who is most beautiful; who is the original cause of all causes, yet has no cause for Himself; who is free from any superimposition; yet who danced beautifully on the hoods of the Kaliya serpent in the Yamuna; who is time, yet is beyond all divisions of time; who is all- knowing; who destroys the defects of Kali-yuga; and who is the cause of the past, present, and future.
O Mind, bow down to Govinda, who is the reservoir of all worshipable qualities; whose blissful lotus feet are worshiped by all worshipable saintly people within their hearts; whom I worship and who is worshipable in the land of Vrindavana by all the demigods and Srimati Vrindadevi; whose beautiful smile appears spotless like a kunda flower, as if pouring the bliss of nectar; and who grants bliss to His cowherd friends.
Anyone who, fixing his mind on Govinda, chants sweetly "O Govinda, Achuta, Madhava, Vishnu, Gokulanayaka, Krishna", who cleanses all his sins by the ambrosial water of meditation on the lotus feet of Lord Govinda, who then recites this Govindashtaka, certainly attains Lord Govinda, who is the Supreme Bliss within the heart.
Thus ends the Govindashtaka composed by Sri Sankaracarya.
The Personality of Godhead ordered Lord Siva to take birth as Sankara to propagate impersonalism. So Sankara wrote commentaries on Vedanta Sutra, eleven of the principle Upanishads, Bhagavad-gita and Sri Vishnu Sahasranama from the Mayavada viewpoint. He did not interpret the Srimad Bhagavatam, however, because he considered it most dear to the Lord and His devotees, and nondifferent from the Lord. There can be no doubt about Lord Siva's appreciation of the Bhagavatam, because in the Twelfth Canto he is described as the greatest Vaishnava. As such, he is amply qualified to know that it is the supreme pramana and did not interpret it, out of respect.
An account of the Lord Vishnu ordering Siva to incarnate and propagate monism is in the Padma Purana, Uttarakhanda, (71.107):
The Supreme Lord said, "O Siva, by writing speculative scriptures make people averse to Me and hide my glories, this will give rise to population."
The import of this order is as follows: By Lord Buddha's teachings, which swept India, people became contemptuous towards the Vedas and Vedic rituals. They became sunyavadis, or voidists, and Vedic religion was reduced almost to nil. If, therefore, the people were instructed about the personal features of the Supreme Lord, His transcendental, eternal, blissful form and His variegated abode, they might not have taken it seriously, the two extremes, voidism and personalism, been very wide and difficult to negotiate. They may have been offensive. Then they would have had no way to purify their hearts. The first task, therefore, would be to make them faithful to the Vedas and for that the easiest philosophical step for them would be monism, as an intermediate step. To go from the Buddhist "nasti" to the Mayavada "neti, neti", or "The Absolute is nothing" to "The Absolute is something, but has nothing in it," is a simple, incremental move, for there is negligible difference between the two ideas, but that step brought the populace back to the authority of the Vedas.
Later, in the same Uttarakhanda of Padma Purana (236.7) Lord Siva himself describes monism as veiled Buddhism, mayavadam asacchastram pracchanam bauddhamucyate, "Mayavada is an improper explanation of the scriptures; indeed it is veiled Buddhism." This was the scheme of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, for He knows that unless conditioned souls get spiritual knowledge from the Vedas, they can only speculate about the nature of transcendent reality and would have no hope of deliverance from the material world.
Once monism replaced Buddhism and faith in the Vedas was re-established it was then possible to downplay monism and take people further along the path of knowledge to an appreciation for the glories of the Personality of Godhead. Thus later on stalwart Vaishnava acaryas, like Sridhara Svami, Ramanuja, and Madhva, came to drive out impersonalism. In its place they established the bhakti principles as the true spirit and intent of the Vedas and its corollary scriptures. Sridhara Svami, therefore, as the next stage in this progression gave a mixed commentary on the Srimad Bhagavatam, to gently nudge skeptic impersonalists toward the perfect conclusion of the Bhagavatam.
Still later the Supreme Personality of Godhead Himself came in the garb of a devotee, as Sri Krishna Caitanya Mahaprabhu, and went a step further. He taught that even more advanced than vaidhi-bhakti is that of raga-bhakti, or spontaneous loving devotion to Krishna following in the footsteps of the residents of Vrindavana, as explained in the Tenth Canto of Bhagavatam. This raga-bhakti is the ultimate expression of love of God, prema. Being that Mahaprabhu is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who can contest His siddhanta? Rather this progression from voidism to monism to raga-bhakti was all part of the Lord's plan for giving mercy to conditioned souls, for by such arrangement they have a chance to end the otherwise unending cycle of birth and death. Thus the Lord was not being cruel when He instructed Lord Siva to appear and spread the doctrine of absolute oneness between God and the individual soul; He was being merciful.
In later sections, Srila Jiva Gosvami shows many of the inconsistencies between Sankara's teachings and the conclusion of the Vedas. In the next section he explains the glories of the Srimad Bhagavatam as revealed in the Bhagavatam itself.
[i] None of these commentaries are available at present except the Bhavatha-dipika of Sridhara Swami.
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