jabdakhata

Ramakrishna was born in a poor Brahmin family, he was devoid of formal knowledge and education but he was not "illeterate" as some of the contemporary studies would like to believe. He got to know of scriptures from various sources like enlightened discussions, but what would be the need of a formal education for a person who is born illuminated. Just as it says in Gita that for a "Brahmavid or the knower of the Brahman, the knowledge of the vedas is as limited as compared to a small water tank in an area which is flooded with water". He did not need to know the scriptures, he was born to teach them from his own direct experience, of arriving at the same truth by following various disparate paths. He was a personification of the Upanishad's profound statement - "There is but one truth, the wise call it by various names". He, using simple colloquial Bengali language, similies and metaphores, clarified effortlessly the most profound and most difficul

Before getting back to the discussion on Sri Krishna, lets talk about another person who figures very prominently on the divine appearance list. The difference between the rest and him is that 1) He is the most recent 2) His leela or divine play has been well documented and corroborated by various sources. Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa has been varioulsy refered as "Avatar", "Yugavatar", "great saint", "mystic", "sage" and "phenomenon" (the last one by Christopher Isherwood). However, my belief is that nobody, except for a very select few, knew who he truly was, he revealed himself only to his nearest and dearest whom he called as 'Antaranga' or the innermost circle. In his own language, he was "achin gachh" or that unknown plant, ever mysterious and beyond comprehension of ordinary mortal. Vivekananda certainly knew who he was, being his foremost disciple. The very depth of his feeling about Ramakrishna c

Elsewhere when we look around the world we find similar parallels. Every 500 or 600 years, when a part of the world is submerged under great darkness, there came great men with message of deliverance. In the West when the Roman civilization was at its nadir, when barbarsim, beastliness and debauchery reigned supreme, when ritualism and oppression haunted the Western faiths, both Jewsih and pagan, there appeared a great man with the message of selfless love, compassion who laid the foundation of future European civilization based on what later came to be known as Christian principles. Similarly about 600 years later there appeared another great man who was a karmayogin, who united much of the barabaric cruel and viscious Arabic tribes into a cohesive force on the principles of universal bortherhood and replaced the terrible prevailing practices of the different tribes with a comprehensive rule of law, of worshipping one true god in place of stones and woods so that they could be bou

During the 6th century BC whole of India was immersed in a worst form of ritualism. Cast system reached its most loathsome form when the priestly class dominated and the wisdom of the brahmins degenerated into obnoxious practices through misinterpretation of the Vedas. Brahmins used their dominant position in the society to establish their sway and power over everybody, including the kings. The so called inferrior castes and common men were debarred from parctising religion as per Vedas and most of the great truths were anyway outside the reach of common men as there were no documents, every teaching was based on Sruti. In this despondent situation there appeared a prince who had renounced his kingdom and his married life in search of Truth. He was lord Buddha, the enlightened one. He openly embraced everybody and debarred none. People flocked to him, for getting the taste of the eternal peace. And in the next three of four centuries, many great kings, most prominent being Ashoka, to

After studying German grammer and while studying Sanskrit grammer, I came across some very interesting similarities between the two. Perhaps this is one of the reason why the "Aryan" theory came into existence after Europeans discovered the linguistic similarities of the ancient Indians with Europeans. The similarity is the underlying base for the Indo-Germanic languages. However to my mind the root cause of this similarity is not because European sprache spread across the globe towards the East along with Aryans (the theory has now been established as a bunkum except being tenaciously held by some racists and Marxists), but rather Sanskrit spread towards Europe which was at that point of time a mainly barabarian regime devoid of any capability of constructing a civilized form of language. Sanskrit was probably then as popular as English is today and thus early Europeans eagerly and zealously adopted the syntax as their base. Coming to the similarities that I observed -

Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore in English) was a person whom very few can comprehend and even less can speak about. However there are many so called "experts" on him. I do not profess to be one and I am simply delighted to read him and interprete him in my own way. Here is a piece which I got on his viewpoints on religion. Towards the fag end of his life in 1937 he was delivering a lecture in the parliament of religions organized by Ramakrishna Mission. Religions at their most profound level, he indicated, help to reveal a spirit of harmony that bridges the dark abysms of time and space…that reconciles contradictions…and imparts perfect balance to the unstable. Yet, “ when these same religions travel far from their sacred sources ,” he noted, “ they lose their original dynamic vigour, and degenerate into the arrogance of piety, into an utter emptiness crammed with irrational habits and mechanical practices, then is their spiritual inspiration befogged in the turbidity of