With this new English edition of the six Sandarbhas, beginning with the publication of the Bhāgavat Sandarbha that has just been published, Satyanarayana Dasa and the Jiva Institute of Vaishnava Studies will have produced an outstanding scholarly work that can take a distinguished place alongside other treatises of philosophy and theology, not just for practitioners of bhakti, but for academics as well.
In the following verse, Śrī Sūta Gosvāmī simultaneously describes both qualities of Vaikuṇṭha [discussed in the two previous sections]: It is beyond the visible or manifest world and is a place from which no one falls down:
Teaching is an art. An expert teacher is one who educates in such a way that the students embrace the teaching as their own, without confusion or degradation. The conditioned souls, being unaware of any other reality, do not aspire to become free of the material world, but would rather be happy in this life, or at best, in some future heaven. Yet a compassionate teacher is moved to help relieve them of their material identification.
So the conclusion is that nobody, whether nitya-siddha or sādhana-siddha, ever falls from Vaikuṇṭha. The question that naturally follows is, “So then, where do we come from?” or, “How did we come to be in this bound condition?” The simple answer is that we are nitya-baddha (perpetually bound), which is to say that till now, and indefinitely onwards till the moment of liberation, we have always been bound by the material energy,
Our disputant may set forth yet another objection: If this section is properly analyzed, we can conclude that it refers only to those devotees who reach Vaikuṇṭha from the material world. This can be ascertained by studying the six items that determine the import of a text, such as its opening and closing statements. These are described in the following verse
Another objection could be raised: Conditioned souls are called patita, or fallen, and this implies that previously they were not fallen. When we say, “This is a mashed potato,” it means that it was not mashed previously. So, although we are unable to understand how we fell, we must have, otherwise we would not be designated as “fallen.
It has been shown logically that falling from Vaikuṇṭha is not possible under any circumstances. Nor is there any scriptural evidence to support such an event. However, there are many scriptural texts to the effect that it is impossible to fall down from the spiritual world, regardless of whether one has resided there eternally or has attained it after many lifetimes in the mundane world.
