Personal attacks, God-given intelligence, Rādhā-rasa Sudhānidhi, sad dhiya

I still have a number of interesting notes I made on often not-published comments in my notebook.

December 2007 -PERSONAL ATTACKS are useless. They will not change the issues, moral or philosophical, we discuss, at all. Mistakes made by me years ago do not disqualify me from preaching for the rest of my life.

Advaitadas: 'You know, we did not fall from the spiritual world.'
Critic: "But someone told me that he heard from someone that you looked at a girl in 1971".
Advaitadas: "You know, you need not be a pure devotee to do raganuga bhakti".
Critic: "Yes, but someone told me that he heard from someone that you smoked a cigarette in1969."
Advaitadas: I confess, I did both of these things back then. Now -
1. If I sin, I will be responsible.
2. If I tell others not to sin, and they sin, they are responsible.
3. If I encourage sin, and others follow, I am responsible for that.

GOD GIVEN INTELLIGENCE-
(Reply to non-published anon comment on the misogyny issue: 'Advaitadas, apply your God-given intelligence to the acaryas' commentaries' - 22 December 2007)

AD: "Do Rupa and Sanatan not already have God-given intelligence? Rūpa Goswāmī himself declared hṛdi yasya preranayā... vande caitanya-devasya (BRS 1.1.2) "Caitanya deva inspired me within the heart" and Mahāprabhu told Sanātan Goswāmī (CC Madhya 24) yabe likhibā kṛṣṇa sphurabe tomāy - "When you write Kṛṣṇa will reveal it to you." God also gave us intelligence to create atom bombs, heroin and pedophile websites. You erred (bhrama) when you said you took me to task, not the śāstras. śāstras and their comments, however, contain no error (bhrama pramāda vipralipsa karaṇāpaṭava), so how can we trust you know it better than them? Isn't yours laukika śraddhā instead of śāstrīya śraddhā? God gave us intelligence to understand śāstra via the principle of bhajatāṁ prīti-pūrvakaṁ dadāmi buddhi-yogaṁ taṁ (B.G. 10.10), "If you perform loving bhajan I give you the divine intelligence", not to squeeze a new, self-serving purport from it, or try to reconcile it with TV-talk show-opinions. Furthermore, Jīva Goswāmī says that of śabda (śāstra), anumāna (mental assumption) and pratyakṣa (sense perception) only śabda is reliable."

THAWING
The worst of the winter in Vraja is over. Give me 1,000 winters in Vraja for 1 summer -in the winter there is at least the shelter of blankets and clothes against the cold, but in summer there is no shelter from the heat whatsoever.

RĀDHĀ RASA SUDHĀNIDHI
Rādhā-rasa Sudhānidhi is a masterpiece, rich with sweet rasa and prema, but I always found it a pity that it nowhere mentions Rādhākuṇḍa, only Vṛndāvan. Actually, however, Bengali devotees, Sādhu Bābā included, habitually call all of Vraja ' Vṛndāvan' - so Rādhākund is included there. Rādhā-rasa Sudhānidhi consists of verses of glorification - it does not provide material for contiguous līlā smaraṇam, but all of the verses are extremely fit for guṇa smaraṇa, nāma-smaraṇa and mañjarī sevā smaraṇa. The fact that Prabodhānanda Saraswatīpāda's mañjarī swarūpa is not known is not a problem, because the mañjarī swarūpa of Raghunāth Dās Goswāmī is also disputed, and the authorship anyway doesn't matter that much. It is for our own mañjarī-inspiration that we read these books. Śrīla Ānanda Gopāl Goswāmī said about this that if a mango is sweet, who cares who planted it and where the orchard is.

SAD DHIYA
Those who think that just living in Vraja will bestow prema, no matter how, on the base of Rupa Goswami's yatra svalpo'pi sambandha sad-dhiyam bhāva janmane (BRS, "Even the slightest relationship with the 5 chief items of bhakti, of which living in Vraja is one, bestows bhāva in the sad-dhiya") should know that Jīva Goswāmī and Viśvanāth Cakravartī comment 'sad-dhiyaṁ niraparādha cittānām' - 'sad dhiya means those who are not offensive."