The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute.
We wish you a Hare Krishna</p> We wish you a Hare Krishna</p> We wish you a Hare Krishna</p> And a Sun Myung Moon! -- Maxwell Smart
If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.
It is only when the mind, which has taken shelter behind the walls of self-protection, frees itself from its own creations that there can be that exquisite reality. After all, these walls of self-protection are the creations of the mind which, conscious of its insufficiency, builds these walls of protection, and behind them takes shelter. One has built up these barriers unconsciously or consciously, and one’s mind is so crippled, bound, held, that action brings greater conflict, further disturbances. So the mere search for the solution of your problems is not going to free the mind from creating further problems. As long as this center of self-protectiveness, born of insufficiency, exists, there must be disturbances, tremendous sorrow, and pain; and you cannot free the mind of sorrow by disciplining it not to be insufficient. That is, you cannot discipline yourself, or be influenced by conditions and environment, in order not to be shallow. You say to yourself, “I am shallow; I recognize the fact, and how am I going to get rid of it?” I say, do not seek to get rid of it, which is merely a process of substitution, but become conscious, become aware of what is causing this insufficiency. You cannot compel it; you cannot force it; it cannot be influenced by an ideal, by a fear, by the pursuit of enjoyment and powers. You can find out the cause of insufficiency only through awareness. That is, by looking into environment and piercing into its significance there will be revealed the cunning subtleties of self-protection. After all, self-protection is the result of insufficiency, and as the mind has been trained, caught up in its bondage for centuries, you cannot discipline it, you cannot overcome it. If you do, you lose the significance of the deceits and subtleties of thought and emotion behind which mind has taken shelter; and to discover these subtleties you must become conscious, aware. Now to be aware is not to alter. Our mind is accustomed to alteration which is merely modification, adjustment, becoming disciplined to a condition; whereas if you are aware, you will discover the full significance of the environment. Therefore there is no modification, but entire freedom from that environment. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties—only through that understanding is there the eternal; because in that there is no “you” functioning as a self-protective focus. But as long as that self-protecting focus which you call the “I” exists, there must be confusion, there must be disturbance, disharmony, and conflict. You cannot destroy these hindrances by disciplining yourself or by following a system or by imitating a pattern; you can understand them with all their complications only through the full awareness of mind and heart. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living, an ecstasy which cannot be described, because all description must destroy it. So long as you are not vulnerable to truth, there is no ecstasy, there is no immortality.
The thunderstorm is a constant phenomenon, raging alternately over some part of the world or the other. Can a single man or creature escape death if all that charge of lightning strikes the earth?
Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.
If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact.
When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti.
Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
Freedom is entirely different from revolt. There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act. And hence there is no fear, and a mind that has no fear is capable of great love. And when there is love it can do what it will.
BEAWAR, or NAYANAGAR, a town of British India, the administrative headquarters of Merwara district in Ajmere-Merwara. It is 33 m. from Ajmere. Pop. (1901) 21,928. It is an important centre of trade, especially in raw cotton, and has cotton presses and the Krishna cotton mills. It was founded by Colonel Dixon in 1835. Entry: BEAWAR
In the United Provinces and the Punjab, there is an Asvinadi lunar reckoning, known as the Fasli, according to which the year 1308 began in A.D. 1900; so that the reckoning has an apparent initial point in A.D. 593. The name of this reckoning is derived from _fasl_, "a harvest," of which there are two; the _fasl-i-rabi_ or "spring harvest," commencing in February, and the _fasl-i-kharif_, or "autumn harvest" commencing in October. The years of this reckoning begin with the _purnimanta_ Asvina krishna 1, which now falls in September. A peculiar feature of it is that, though the months are lunar, they are not divided into fortnights, and the numbering of the days runs on, as in the Mahommedan month, from the first to the end of the month without being affected by any expunction and repetition of _tithis_; and, for this and other reasons, it seems that in this case a new form of Hindu year was devised, of such a kind as to enable the agriculturists to realize their produce and pay their assessments comfortably within the year. The Hijra era has, of course, now drawn somewhat widely away from this and the other reckonings derived from it; the Hijra year commencing in A.D. 1900 was 1318, ten years in advance of the Fasli year. Entry: III
ARJUNA, in Hindu mythology, a semi-divine hero of the _Mahabharata_. He was the third son of Pandu, son of Indra, His character as sketched in the great epic is of the noblest kind. He is the central figure of that portion of the epic known as the _Bhagwad-gita_, where he is represented as horrified at the impending slaughter of a battle and as being comforted by Krishna. Entry: ARJUNA
BRINDABAN, a town of British India, in the Muttra district of the United Provinces, on the right bank of the Jumna, 6 m. N. of Muttra. Pop. (1901) 22,717. Brindaban is one of the most popular places of pilgrimage in India, being associated with the cult of Krishna as a shepherd. It contains bathing-stairs, tanks and wells, and a great number of handsome temples, of which the finest is that of Govind Deva, a cruciform vaulted building of red sandstone, dating from 1590. The town was founded earlier in the same century. Entry: BRINDABAN
Darrang originally formed, according to tradition, part of the dominions of Bana Raja, who was defeated by Krishna in a battle near Tezpur ("the town of blood"). The massive granite ruins found near by prove that the place must have been the seat of powerful and civilized rulers. In the 16th century Darrang was subject to the Koch king of Kamarupa, Nar Narayan, and on the division of his dominions among his heirs passed to an independent line of rajas. Early in the 17th century the raja Bali Narayan invoked the aid of the Ahoms of Upper Assam against the Mussulman invaders; after his defeat and death in 1637 the Ahoms dominated the whole district, and the Darrang rajas sank into petty feudatories. About 1785 they took advantage of the decay of the Ahom kingdom to try and re-establish their independence, but they were defeated by a British expedition in 1792, and in 1826 Darrang, with the rest of Assam, passed under British control. Entry: DARRANG
KAMA, or KAMADEVA, in Hindu mythology, the god of love. He is variously stated to have been the child of Brahma or Dharma (virtue). In the _Rig Veda_, Kama (desire) is described as the first movement that arose in the One after it had come into life through the power of fervour or abstraction. In the Atharva-Veda Kama does not mean sexual desire, but rather the yearning after the good of all created things. Later Kama is simply the Hindu Cupid. While attempting to lure Siva to sin, he was destroyed by a fiery glance of the goddess' third eye. Thus in Hindu poetry Kama is known as Ananga, the "bodiless god." Kama's wife Rati (voluptuousness) mourned him so greatly that Siva relented, and he was reborn as the child of Krishna and Rukmini. The babe was called Pradyumna (Cupid). He is represented armed with a bow of sugar-cane; it is strung with bees, and its five arrows are tipped with flowers which overcome the five senses. A fish adorns his flag, and he rides a parrot or sparrow, emblematic of lubricity. Entry: KAMA
The _Ramayana_ and _Mahabharata_ afford evidence of the employment of incense by the Hindus, in the worship of the gods and the burning of the dead, from the remotest antiquity. Its use was obviously continued by the Buddhists during the prevalence of their religion in India, for it is still used by them in Nepal, Tibet, Ceylon, Burma, China and Japan. These countries all received Buddhism from India, and a large proportion of the porcelain and earthenware articles imported from China and Japan into Europe consists of innumerable forms of censers. The Jains all over India burn sticks of incense before their Jina. The commonest incense in ancient India was probably frankincense. The Indian frankincense tree, _Boswellia thurifera_, Colebrooke (which certainly includes _B. glabra_, Roxburgh), is a doubtful native of India. It is found chiefly where the Buddhist religion prevailed in ancient times, in Bihar and along the foot of the Himalayas and in western India, where it particularly flourishes in the neighbourhood of the Buddhist caves at Ajanta. It is quite possible therefore that, in the course of their widely extended commerce during the one thousand years of their ascendancy, the Buddhists imported the true frankincense trees from Africa and Arabia into India, and that the accepted Indian species are merely varieties of them. Now, however, the incense in commonest use in India is benzoin. But the consumption of all manner of odoriferous resins, gum resins, roots, woods, dried leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds in India, in social as well as religious observances, is enormous. The grateful perfumed powder _abir_ or _randa_ is composed either of rice, flour, mango bark or deodar wood, camphor and aniseed, or of sandalwood or wood aloes, and zerumbet, zedoary, rose flowers, camphor and civet. The incense sticks and pastils known all over India under the names of _ud-buti_ ("benzoin-light") or _aggar-ki-buti_ ("wood aloes light") are composed of benzoin, wood aloes, sandalwood, rock lichen, patchouli, rose-malloes, _talispat_ (the leaf of _Flacourtia Cataphracta_ of Roxburgh), mastic and sugar-candy or gum. The _abir_ and _aggir butis_ made at the Mahommedan city of Bijapur in the Mahratta country are celebrated all over western India. The Indian Mussulmans indeed were rapidly degenerating into a mere sect of Hindus before the Wahabi revival, and the more recent political propaganda in support of the false caliphate of the sultans of Turkey; and we therefore find the religious use of incense among them more general than among the Mahommedans of any other country. They use it at the ceremonies of circumcision, _bismillah_ (teaching the child "the name of God"), virginity and marriage. At marriage they burn benzoin with _nim_ seeds (_Melia Azadirachta_, Roxburgh) to keep off evil spirits, and prepare the bride-cakes by putting a quantity of benzoin between layers of wheaten dough, closed all round, and frying them in clarified butter. For days the bride is fed on little else. In their funeral ceremonies, the moment the spirit has fled incense is burnt before the corpse until it is carried out to be buried. The begging fakirs also go about with a lighted stick of incense in one hand, and holding out with the other an incense-holder (literally, "incense chariot"), into which the coins of the pious are thrown. Large "incense trees" resembling our Christmas trees, formed of incense-sticks and pastils and osselets, and alight all over, are borne by the Shiah Mussulmans in the solennial procession of the Mohurrum, in commemoration of the martyrdom of the sons of Ali. The worship of the _tulsi_ plant, or holy basil (_Ocymum sanctum_, Don), by the Hindus is popularly explained by its consecration to Vishnu and Krishna. It grows on the four-horned altar before the house, or in a pot placed in one of the front windows, and is worshipped every morning by all the female members of every Hindu household. It is possible that its adoration has survived from the times when the Hindus buried their dead in their houses, beneath the family hearth. When they came into a hot climate the fire of the sacrifices and domestic cookery was removed out of the house; but the dead were probably still for a while buried in or near it, and the _tulsi_ was planted over their graves, at once for the salubrious fragrance it diffuses and to represent the burning of incense on the altar of the family Lar. The rich land round about the holy city of Pandharpur, sacred to Vithoba the national Mahratta form of (Krishna)-Vishnu, is wholly restricted to the cultivation of the tulsi plant. Entry: INCENSE
The worship of Krishna, especially in his infant and youthful form (which appeals chiefly to women), is widely popular in the neighbourhood of Mathura, the capital of that land of Braj where as a boy he lived. Its literature is mainly composed in the dialect of this region, called Brajbhasha. That of Rama, though general throughout Hindostan, has since the time of Tulsi Das adopted for poetic use the language of Oudh, called Awadhi or Baiswari, a form of Eastern Hindi easily understood throughout the whole of the Gangetic valley. Thus these two dialects came to be, what they are to this day, the standard vehicles of poetic expression. Entry: 1
Of scientific geographical exploration in Asia (beyond the limits of actual surveys) the modern period has been so prolific that it is only possible to refer in barest outline to some of the principal expeditions, most of which have been directed either to the great elevated table-land of Tibet or to the central depression which exists to the north of it. In southern Tibet the trans-Himalayan explorations of the native surveyors attached to the Indian survey, notably Pundits Nain Singh and Krishna, added largely to our knowledge of the great plateau. Nain Singh explored the sources of the Indus and of the Upper Brahmaputra in the years 1865-1867; and in 1874-1875 he followed a line from the eastern frontiers of Kashmir to the Tengri Nor lake and thence to Lhasa, in which city he remained for some months. Krishna's remarkable journey in 1879-1882 extended from Lhasa northwards through Tsaidam to Sachu, or Saitu, in Mongolia. He subsequently passed through eastern Tibet to the town of Darchendo, or Tachienlu, on the high road between Lhasa and Peking, and on the borders of China. Failing to reach India through Upper Assam he returned to the neighbourhood of Lhasa, and crossed the Himalayas by a more westerly route. Both these explorers visited Lhasa. Entry: I
III. _Period of Decay._--Isolated plays remain from centuries later than the 14th; but these, which chiefly turn on the legends of Krishna (the last incarnation of Vishnu), may be regarded as a mere aftergrowth, and exhibit the Indian drama in its decay. Indeed, the latest of them, _Chitra-Yajna_, which was composed about the beginning of the 19th century, and still serves as a model for Bengali dramatic performances, is imperfect in its dialogue, which (after the fashion of Italian improvised comedy) it is left to the actors to supplement. Besides these there are farces or farcical entertainments, more or less indelicate, of uncertain dates. Entry: III
DWARAKA, DWARKA, or JIGAT, a town of British India, in Baroda state, near the extremity of the peninsula of Kathiawar, Bombay. Pop. (1901) 7535. As the birthplace and residence of Krishna, it is the most sacred spot in this part of India, and its principal temple is visited annually by many thousand pilgrims. The approach from the sea is by a fine flight of stone steps, and the great spire rises to a height of 150 ft. Entry: DWARAKA
It is not a little remarkable that, as happened with the Vaishnava reformation initiated by Ramanuja and Ramanand, and with the Vallabhacharya cult of Krishna established at Mathura, the first impulse to literary composition in Urdu should have been given, not at the headquarters of the empire in the north, but at the Muhammadan courts of Golkonda and Bijapur in the south, the former situated amid an indigenous population speaking Telugu, and the latter among one whose speech was Kanarese, both Dravidian languages having nothing in common with the Aryan tongues of the north. This fact of itself defines the nature of the literature thus inaugurated. It had nothing to do with the idiom or ideas of the people among whom it was born, but was from the beginning an imitation of Persian models. It adopted the standards of form and content current among the poets of Eran. The _qasida_ or laudatory ode, the _ghazal_ or love-sonnet, usually of mystical import, the _marsiya_ or dirge, the _masnavi_ or narrative poem with coupled rhymes, the _hija_ or satire, the _ruba'i_ or epigram--these were the types which Urdu took over ready-made. And with the forms were appropriated also all the conventions of poetic diction. The Persians, having for centuries treated the same themes with a fecundity which most Europeans find extremely wearisome, had elaborated a system of rhetoric and a stock of poetic images which, in the exhaustion of original matter, made the success of the poet depend chiefly upon dexterity of artifice and cleverness of conceit. Pleasing hyperbole, ingenious comparison, antithesis, alliteration, carefully arranged gradation of noun and epithet, are the means employed to obtain variety; and few of the most eloquent passages of later Persian verse admit of translation into any other language without losing that which in the original makes their whole charm. What is true of Persian is likewise true of Urdu poetry. Until quite modern times, there is scarcely anything in it which can be called original.[15] Differences of school, which are made much of by native critics, are to us hardly perceptible; they consist in the use of one or other range of metaphor or comparison, classed, according as they repeat the well-worn poetical stock-in-trade of the Persians, or seek a slightly fresher and more Indian field of sentiment, as the old or the new style of composition. Entry: 3
Whilst Sankara's chief title to fame rests on his philosophical works, as the upholder of the strict monistic theory of Vedanta, he doubtless played an important part in the partial remodelling of the Hindu system of belief at a time when Buddhism was rapidly losing ground in India. Not that there is any evidence of Buddhists ever having been actually persecuted by the Brahmans, or still less of Sankara himself ever having done so; but the traditional belief in some personal god, as the principal representative of an invisible, all-pervading deity, would doubtless appeal more directly to the minds and hearts of the people than the colourless ethical system promulgated by the Sakya saint. Nor do Buddhist places of worship appear as a rule to have been destroyed by Hindu sectaries, but they seem rather to have been taken over by them for their own religious uses; at any rate there are to this day not a few Hindu shrines, especially in Bengal, dedicated to Dharmaraj, "the prince of righteousness," as the Buddha is commonly styled. That the tenets and practices of so characteristic a faith as Buddhism, so long prevalent in India, cannot but have left their marks on Hindu life and belief may readily be assumed, though it is not so easy to lay one's finger on the precise features that might seem to betray such an influence. If the general tenderness towards animals, based on the principle of _ahimsa_, or inflicting no injury on sentient beings, be due to Buddhist teaching, that influence must have made itself felt at a comparatively early period, seeing that sentiments of a similar nature are repeatedly urged in the Code of Manu. Thus, in v. 46-48, "He who does not willingly cause the pain of confinement and death to living beings, but desires the good of all, obtains endless bliss. He who injures no creature obtains without effort what he thinks of, what he strives for, and what he fixes his mind on. Flesh-meat cannot be procured without injury to animals, and the slaughter of animals is not conducive to heavenly bliss: from flesh-meat, therefore, let man abstain." Moreover, in view of the fact that Jainism, which originated about the same time as Buddhism, inculcates the same principle, even to an extravagant degree, it seems by no means improbable that the spirit of kindliness towards living beings generally was already widely diffused among the people when these new doctrines were promulgated. To the same tendency doubtless is due the gradual decline and ultimate discontinuance of animal sacrifices by all sects except the extreme branch of Sakti-worshippers. In this respect, the veneration shown to serpents and monkeys has, however, to be viewed in a somewhat different light, as having a mythical background; whilst quite a special significance attaches to the sacred character assigned to the cow by all classes of Hindus, even those who are not prepared to admit the claim of the Brahman to the exalted position of the earthly god usually conceded to him. In the Veda no tendency shows itself as yet towards rendering divine honour to the cow; and though the importance assigned her in an agricultural community is easily understood, still the exact process of her deification and her identification with the mother earth in the time of Manu and the epics requires further elucidation. An idealized type of the useful quadruped--likewise often identified with the earth--presents itself in the mythical Cow of Plenty, or "wish-cow" (Kamadhenu, or Kamadugha, i.e. wish-milker), already appearing in the Atharvaveda, and in epic times assigned to Indra, or identified with Surabhi, "the fragrant," the sacred cow of the sage Vasishtha. Possibly the growth of the legend of Krishna--his being reared at Gokula (cow-station); his tender relations to the _gopis_, or cow-herdesses, of Vrindavana; his epithets _Gopala_, "the cowherd," and _Govinda_, "cow-finder," actually explained as "recoverer of the earth" in the great epic, and the _go-loka_, or "cow-world," assigned to him as his heavenly abode--may have some connexion with the sacred character ascribed to the cow from early times. Entry: HINDUISM