A fellow Vaisnava wrote to me, asking about the flavor of Gaudiya Vaisnavism I followed since joining the Gaudiya Kutir. (Not that the Kutir is a movement to join!) He understood, reading my profile and the faq page at the Kutir's website, that there must be a fair deal of plurality among the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, and wanted to hear more. Here's what ensued.

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I do have a history with both ISKCON and Gaudiya Matha. I haven't really joined Gaudiya Kutir as such, inasmuch as my being one of the founding members of the Kutir doesn't count. But let me be clear in that Gaudiya Kutir is not a movement or a mission one would join to begin with, unlike one might for example join ISKCON or Gaudiya Matha. Gaudiya Kutir is an organization founded for advancing pan-Gaudiya interests. It is not a branch of the tree as such, it's more of a gardener's tool, or a fresh load of fertilizer thrown in to help the tree grow.

But yes, I have received initiation from a Gaudiya Vaisnava guru outside of ISKCON. I am initiated by 108 Sri Ananta dasa Babaji Maharaja, the current mahanta of Radha-kunda and as such the 34th holder of Sri Raghunatha dasa Gosvami's post, and one of the most substantial and respected devotional scholars in contemporary Gaudiya Vaisnavism.

There is much, much diversity out there among the broad Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition. I wouldn't know where to start describing such a broad topic, would you not happen to have any more specific questions to start with? There are substantial differences both among the diverse GV branches spread across India, between them and ISKCON & Gaudiya Matha, as well as between ISKCON and Gaudiya Matha, and even between different sub-groups within ISKCON, and even more so within the Gaudiya Matha. While some of the diverging views are not great enough to have caused division, some others have led to long-standing friction between different branches of our tradition. Frictions have been particularly prominent among and around groups founded by charismatic leaders where reform and re-establishment of "the truth" have significantly featured in the group's carrying spirit.

As a general observation, I might note that Gaudiya Matha, and more so ISKCON, are practically more "modernized" in that they have attempted to tailor their presentation so as to cater to a Western audience, and as such both their philosophical emphases as well as their praxis have evolved from the more traditional forms of Gaudiya Vaisnavism available in India. Some differences are there also on account of their spirit of attempting to reform what they perceive have been shortcomings in the older tradition's ability to represent Mahaprabhu's aims — which is, it goes without saying, a fairly complex theme to explore with all the myriads of interpretations and all the subjectivity that is involved in making such assessments.

A skilled sadhaka will know how to harvest the essence of what makes devotion flourish from wherever it is that Sri Caitanya's mercy has been sprinkled, regardless of external and even substantial disagreements that may be there between one's so-called "own" branch and the rest of the Gaudiya Vaisnava landscape. Love for what Sri Caitanya brought gives one the talent of being able to recognize and admire his gifts of grace in even the remotest and unlikely places.

Today I ended up browsing the website of Alan Kazlev, a prolific author who has written some articles of interest concerning guru, guru-hood and related challenges. This blog entry, originally an e-mail to him, concerns a misgiving I had about objections on the meaning of the word "guru". Some of his writings were of substantial interest in reflecting my past experiences with guru-figures — expect to read related reflections in the future.

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Browsing your website, the following text put me studying and writing. There's an objection there to the explanation of "guru" drawn from interpretation of "gu" and "ru" along with a note stating that it is "an idea popularised by frauds and is complete nonsense", quoted from what's reputed as an authoritative source in Sanskrit.

Before tackling the objection itself, I'd like to note that one will hear this definition from a great number of sources, many of which I would never characterize as a fraud — Sivananda springs to mind as an example, and a quick Internet search would no doubt show a great many more.

Traditional etymologies elaborating on a word by examining its constituents are in fact quite common. Often, they either involve interpretation of the syllables of the word in connection with verbal roots, or otherwise derive meanings that take syllables as abbreviations of longer terms.

In this particular case, you'll find the etymology at the Upanisads themselves, in the Advaya-taraka-upanisad — not a modern source by any count, listed as one of the 108 classical Upanisads in Mundaka as it is. The verse reads as follows:




Verses exploring the word "guru" are also found in the Guru-gita:









While I am more mystified over the source of the "gu" syllable as "darkness", one of the direct meanings of the syllable "ru", as found in Sir Monier Williams' Sanskrit dictionary, is "to break, shatter". As seen in some of the verses from Guru-gita, the "gu" has been taken as indicating "guNa", the ropes that bind the Atman to mAyA, while the guru is engaged in the "ru", or the act of shattering the illusion. Anything under the guNa is no doubt veiled in avidyA, of which darkness is the mighty emblem — and a common metaphor at that.

Of course, the word also means "heavy", that certainly is one of the dozens of dictionary definitions for the word. It also means "great", "large", and "extended". And it also means "hard to digest", "high in degree", "violent", "vehement", "excessive", "difficult", "hard" and "grievous" even. Yet it also means "important", "serious" and "momentous", "valuable" and even "highly prized". But alas, it also means "haughty" and "proud", even if "venerable" and "respectable". Then it also just means "a spiritual parent or preceptor", or in general "parents and other venerable persons" — these two are as much direct dictionary meanings as any of the others given, even if "heavy" and "weighty" happen to be the first in the list.

Take that for whatever it's worth, the fruit of a pleasant moment of research all the same.

These are some notes I wrote to a friend concerning madhukari, the practice of collecting almsfood from houses, and especially from the houses of Vrajavasis — which is the way most bhajananandi-mahatmas of the past would sustain their lives.

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Doing madhukari, dainya awakens in the heart and the svarupa of the dhama begins to unveil. As the dhama is a manifestation of the sandhini-sakti, and is rough on the surface for our perceptions alone, so are the dhama-vasis, whether people, animals or vegetation. Perceiving them with humility and regarding them as worshipable as the dhama itself opens the path to the aprakata-dhama, and the aparadha of disregarding or treating the dhama-vasis with contempt cuts the from our eyes the strands that connect the drisyamana-dhama and the aprakata-dhama. This is why the mahatmas of the past were carefree in collecting madhukari. Madhukari from the Vrajavasis' houses is not collected only for filling the belly, it is collected for attaining prema.

With regards to thoughts of the Vrajavasis not being pure, being in need of purification, and so forth. Of course, to mundane eyes they exhibit a host of habits unfit for a sadhaka, and so forth. Compare this to the dirt floating atop Radha-kunda. The dirt would never stop you from admiring and worshiping the kunda, or from drinking the kunda's water — liquid prema! Read the following from Pandit Baba's vyakhya on the first verse of Manah-siksa, where Sripada advises his mind to develop unprecedented rati for the residents of Vraja:


There are a host of verses along these lines, and even more to the point of disregarding the "rough edges" as Pandit Baba has it, in Prabodhananda's work. Bhangabihari Vidyalankara notes in his Manah-siksa-tika:


The issue of accepting madhukari is only an issue as long as this faith has not awakened. Equipped with faith as described above, the foodstuffs begged from the houses of the Vrajavasis are givers of prema as much as the water of Radha-kunda and the dust on the alleys of Govardhana is — no matter its shape before our eyes. And again without such faith, adverse effects may be had — just as one may get seriously ill from drinking the kunda's water without faith.

One baba advised me, "When taking madhukari, always meditate on its being cooked by Lalita, Visakha and the other sakhis — then there will be prema while eating." I can tell you from experience that the devotional effects of madhukari are far beyond anything I have ever experienced from any other preparations. And again, drinking the kunda's water while meditating on its prema-svarupa, and so forth — bhai, these are very powerful forms of sadhana, as they have you directly linked with divine substance of astonishing powers.

Yes, one can of course think like this with all foods and get a positive effect! There is, however, a subtle difference there. With the foods begged from the houses of the Vrajavasis, the process is a discovery of unperceived qualities, while with other cookings it is more of a superimposition — just like the difference between drinking water from or bathing directly in Radha-kunda, and invoking sacred waters into a bucket or a container.