Vrindavan Today, 2019.01.10 (VT): The 508th disappearance day of Srila Jiva Goswami was celebrated at the Jiva Institute with a short play in the Sanskrit language depicting... Read More
By Satyanarayana Dasa – Continuation from Paramātmā Sandarbha, Anuccheda 93.4: Devotees are Self-Satisfied – Translation:
[An objection is raised] It is not to be conjectured that since the Lord gives bliss to His devotees and they to Him, He [or His devotees] must not be self-satisfied; nor that since He gives pleasure to His devotees while neglecting others, He must be subject to another form of bias.
The answer to the first objection is that although the sages have bodies endowed with the power of pure sattva and have thus attained the very heights of self-satisfaction, when we see the Lord’s affection towards these devotees it can be understood that this quality is a consequence of His self-satisfaction and not opposed to it.
By Satyanarayana Dasa – At present I am working on Paramātmā Sandarbha, the third book of Jīva Gosvāmī’s Ṣaṭ Sandarbhas. I thought of sharing the 93rd Anuccheda of the book, which is an elaborate analysis of the nature of Bhagavān and His relation with the world and His devotees
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:
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.
