In Bhagawad Gita Chapter 1, Verse 27, Arjuna's state is mentioned as below:
tan samiksya sa kaunteyah
sarvan bandhun avasthitan
krpaya parayavisto
visidann idam abravit
Krpaya is key here. Kripe means mercy (infact translated as compassion as well). Mercy can be from the more powerful to the less powerful ones. The less powerful ones cannot show Kripa to higher ones. So there is an implicit state of Arjuna where he thinks that he is above those on the other side. This is reflected in several statements of Arjuna in prior sholkas, for example Ratham sthapaya me achyuta; kair maya saha yoddhavyam etc.
Chap 1, 28: "drstvemam sva-janam krsna"
-- Arjuna can see only his personal relatives.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Aham Brahmi Asmi
Ham --- one that has to be relinquished, removed, taken out, killed, reject.
Aham -- one that cannot be relinquished, killed, rejected, removed, taken out etc.
I cannot free myself from me.
I can reject you, you can reject me, but no one can reject or be without Him, the God. So He is also aham. aham actually then means God only. Aspect outside which there is no independent identity or existence (astitva) of anything is called Aham. Aham is that which is the basis of everything. He is the Universal / infinite aham and we are all fragmental / subjective / minute / infinitesimal ahams.
Bhagawanta is in pindanda (jiva) and brahmanda (Universal womb). He is "aha" in both. The Bhagawantha in pindanda is referred to as aham, and in brahmanda is referred to as ahah (ahah samvatsaro vahnih analo dharini dharah). He is ahah, the one who gives life and light from within (the Jiva of the pindanda and the Surya of the Brahmanda).
Even Bible seems to say this, Exodus 3:14:
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” (((or, "I am that I am"). And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Vedic Shatapatha BrahmaNa says: Yo-ham-asmi-so-smi "I am what I am".
Ormazd Yasht of the Zoroastrian religion declares: "My first name is ahmi, my last name is ahmi" (Essential Unity of All Religions). Ahmi infact means asmi.
So, "I am" or aham in this context does not mean "me" either in Bible or Upanishads. It infact refers to the Lord.
“parokSha priyA iva hi devAH pratyakSha dviShaH” (in bhR^ihadAraNyaka upaniShad 4.2.2), for the Gods love, as it were, what is mysterious, and hate what is manifest. So, Aham need not be direct. A true sadhaka needs to dig into details.
Asmi -- As + Mi -- Mi is Manam, jnyeyam. One that is to be known. As -- the all determining, the all inspiring one.
So, the Lord is the complete, all inspiring one. The who considers so attains completeness.
Does the Lord also need to contemplate on this idea?
Aham -- one that cannot be relinquished, killed, rejected, removed, taken out etc.
I cannot free myself from me.
I can reject you, you can reject me, but no one can reject or be without Him, the God. So He is also aham. aham actually then means God only. Aspect outside which there is no independent identity or existence (astitva) of anything is called Aham. Aham is that which is the basis of everything. He is the Universal / infinite aham and we are all fragmental / subjective / minute / infinitesimal ahams.
Bhagawanta is in pindanda (jiva) and brahmanda (Universal womb). He is "aha" in both. The Bhagawantha in pindanda is referred to as aham, and in brahmanda is referred to as ahah (ahah samvatsaro vahnih analo dharini dharah). He is ahah, the one who gives life and light from within (the Jiva of the pindanda and the Surya of the Brahmanda).
Even Bible seems to say this, Exodus 3:14:
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” (((or, "I am that I am"). And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Vedic Shatapatha BrahmaNa says: Yo-ham-asmi-so-smi "I am what I am".
Ormazd Yasht of the Zoroastrian religion declares: "My first name is ahmi, my last name is ahmi" (Essential Unity of All Religions). Ahmi infact means asmi.
So, "I am" or aham in this context does not mean "me" either in Bible or Upanishads. It infact refers to the Lord.
“parokSha priyA iva hi devAH pratyakSha dviShaH” (in bhR^ihadAraNyaka upaniShad 4.2.2), for the Gods love, as it were, what is mysterious, and hate what is manifest. So, Aham need not be direct. A true sadhaka needs to dig into details.
Asmi -- As + Mi -- Mi is Manam, jnyeyam. One that is to be known. As -- the all determining, the all inspiring one.
So, the Lord is the complete, all inspiring one. The who considers so attains completeness.
Does the Lord also need to contemplate on this idea?
Manushya.
Manushya -- Those who are capable of understanding or thinking about God. Manushyah --- One with the desire to contemplate on God, aiming to attain completion but have still not attained that state.
We all endevour for completeness by our individual capacities. If we are a small pot then we can be complete to the brin of the pot. If we are a tumbler then we can attain purNatva to our capacity of a tumbler. But Bhagawanta is inifinitely expansive and we can not find completeness to the level of Bhagawanta, because we are not Bhagawanta. Bhagawanta is like an ocean and we are all like pots and cups, we can not be complete to the level of the ocean. Everything can reach complete state but only to a relative extent, to degrees of subjective experiences, of one's individual capacity. The absolute or universal completeness remains infinite.
We all endevour for completeness by our individual capacities. If we are a small pot then we can be complete to the brin of the pot. If we are a tumbler then we can attain purNatva to our capacity of a tumbler. But Bhagawanta is inifinitely expansive and we can not find completeness to the level of Bhagawanta, because we are not Bhagawanta. Bhagawanta is like an ocean and we are all like pots and cups, we can not be complete to the level of the ocean. Everything can reach complete state but only to a relative extent, to degrees of subjective experiences, of one's individual capacity. The absolute or universal completeness remains infinite.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Zen is Dhyan!
"Zen" is the Japanese pronunciation of a Chinese word ("chan"), which is a Chinese pronunciation of a Sanskrit word ("dhyan"), meaning "meditation"? (http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/languages/languages-offered/sanskrit#2)
Deeksha == Dik -- Direction, ksha -- eyes! Dhi -- mind, ksha -- eyes.
Deeksha == Dik -- Direction, ksha -- eyes! Dhi -- mind, ksha -- eyes.
dasharthah sarva bharate
vyasa seems to say somewhere : dasarthah sarva bharate, i.e. everything has 10 faces. So, each verse of Bhagawad Gita can be understood in 10s of ways.
sarvam karmaakhilam
sarvam and akhila both mean the same - everything.
Sarvam - Everything
Akhila - in entirety
karma akhilam
karma aakhilam
akhilam == everything
sarvam karmaakhilam
sarvam and akhila both mean the same - everything.
Sarvam - Everything
Akhila - in entirety
karma akhilam
karma aakhilam
akhilam == everything
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Shesha
One of Lord's innumerable names is "Shesha". Many of us know Him as the multi-headed snake. What Shesha means is "all that remains". So, it is only He would remains at the end of everything, at the begining of everything.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Weaver and the King Story
Beautifully written blog: Wokay.in
http://in.news.yahoo.com/265/20100501/1705/top-the-weaver-the-princess-and-goldman_1.html
Everyone knows that we Indians invented the zero. Without zero and the decimal number system, writing and calculating really large numbers would be very difficult.
This would be awful for people in the financial industry, whose work depends on having really big salaries. Fortunately Brahmagupta came to their rescue.
Another thing which is crucial to the financial services industry is the concept of being too big to fail, which has been put to good use by Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs over the past few years in sucking money from American taxpayers. This beautiful concept was also invented by an Indian - Vishnu Sharma, the author of the Panchatantra, in the story of the Weaver and the Chariot Maker.
The story of the weaver and chariot maker is one of the Panchatantra stories that usually doesn't make it to primary school textbooks or Amar Chitra Katha, mostly because it's full of sex, war, and moral hazard. Since you probably haven't read it, here's a quick summary.
A weaver sees a princess during a festival and falls in love with her. As a weaver, he has no chance of marrying her, so he sinks into depression. His friend, a chariot maker decides to help him out. He designs a flying chariot in the shape of Garuda, dresses the weaver up as Vishnu, and tells him to fly the chariot into the princess's room, tell her that he is Vishnu and wants to marry her Gandharva style. That is, the wedding is kept a secret from everyone except the princess and the faux-Vishnu. The princess agrees, and the weaver comes back every night to consummate the marriage.
Eventually, the maids notice that the princess is spending her days in total bliss, suspect that she's in love, and tell the King. The King asks her what's going on, and she tells him that she's married to Vishnu himself. The King is absolutely delighted, and decides that there's no point in paying tribute to the Chakravarti now that Vishnu himself is on the kingdom's side. The next night, he catches the weaver as he enters the princess's room and asks him to fight the Chakravarti's army.
The weaver is horrified. Pretending to be Vishnu was fine when it allowed him to make sweet, sweet love to the princess, but taking on the role of Vishnu to face an imperial army single-handed is another thing altogether. On the other hand, if he confesses to the King that he is not actually Vishnu and has been boinking the princess under false pretences for the past month, he will have his head chopped off. So he decides to get on to the battlefield and do the best job he can, while the King is whipping up enthusiasm in the population by telling them that Vishnu himself is going to do all the fighting.
By this time, Garuda (the real one, not the mechanical one) has tipped off Vishnu about what's going on, and warned him that if the fake Vishnu doesn't win the battle, the people of the kingdom will lose all faith in him. Vishnu doesn't want to see this happen, so on the battlefield he enters the weaver's body and annihilates the Chakravarti's army. The entire army. Every single soldier. After this, the weaver marries the princess, everyone goes on worshipping Vishnu, and the king becomes the new Chakravarti.
The moral is that you should conduct your affairs in such a way that if you fail, it will lead to someone or something even bigger or more powerful failing too. This lets you get away with anything. The weaver got away with having sex with the princess on false pretences (this is rape under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code), pretending to be a god (awesomely enough, this too is a criminal offence under Section 508), and annihilating an entire army that was fighting a just war - after all, it was the king who broke the treaty (you could make a case for this being genocide under Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).
American banks and financial institutions were very good at absorbing this lesson, and leveraged themselves up to such an extent that if they failed they would take the global economy down with them. And just as the weaver lived happily ever after with the princess, banks have lived happily ever after with taxpayer-funded bailouts.
But no matter how hard American investment banks try, Indians still remain the masters of this art. If the whole truth surrounding Lalit Modi is revealed, big politicians might be trapped. Modi is, thus, likely to get away lightly -- as is A Raja, who might have given away spectrum at bargain basement rates, but whose sacking would lead to the government collapsing. All this goes to show that no matter what the anguished elderly gentlemen who write letters to the editor feel, Indians are still in touch with our ancient and glorious culture.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/265/20100501/1705/top-the-weaver-the-princess-and-goldman_1.html
Everyone knows that we Indians invented the zero. Without zero and the decimal number system, writing and calculating really large numbers would be very difficult.
This would be awful for people in the financial industry, whose work depends on having really big salaries. Fortunately Brahmagupta came to their rescue.
Another thing which is crucial to the financial services industry is the concept of being too big to fail, which has been put to good use by Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs over the past few years in sucking money from American taxpayers. This beautiful concept was also invented by an Indian - Vishnu Sharma, the author of the Panchatantra, in the story of the Weaver and the Chariot Maker.
The story of the weaver and chariot maker is one of the Panchatantra stories that usually doesn't make it to primary school textbooks or Amar Chitra Katha, mostly because it's full of sex, war, and moral hazard. Since you probably haven't read it, here's a quick summary.
A weaver sees a princess during a festival and falls in love with her. As a weaver, he has no chance of marrying her, so he sinks into depression. His friend, a chariot maker decides to help him out. He designs a flying chariot in the shape of Garuda, dresses the weaver up as Vishnu, and tells him to fly the chariot into the princess's room, tell her that he is Vishnu and wants to marry her Gandharva style. That is, the wedding is kept a secret from everyone except the princess and the faux-Vishnu. The princess agrees, and the weaver comes back every night to consummate the marriage.
Eventually, the maids notice that the princess is spending her days in total bliss, suspect that she's in love, and tell the King. The King asks her what's going on, and she tells him that she's married to Vishnu himself. The King is absolutely delighted, and decides that there's no point in paying tribute to the Chakravarti now that Vishnu himself is on the kingdom's side. The next night, he catches the weaver as he enters the princess's room and asks him to fight the Chakravarti's army.
The weaver is horrified. Pretending to be Vishnu was fine when it allowed him to make sweet, sweet love to the princess, but taking on the role of Vishnu to face an imperial army single-handed is another thing altogether. On the other hand, if he confesses to the King that he is not actually Vishnu and has been boinking the princess under false pretences for the past month, he will have his head chopped off. So he decides to get on to the battlefield and do the best job he can, while the King is whipping up enthusiasm in the population by telling them that Vishnu himself is going to do all the fighting.
By this time, Garuda (the real one, not the mechanical one) has tipped off Vishnu about what's going on, and warned him that if the fake Vishnu doesn't win the battle, the people of the kingdom will lose all faith in him. Vishnu doesn't want to see this happen, so on the battlefield he enters the weaver's body and annihilates the Chakravarti's army. The entire army. Every single soldier. After this, the weaver marries the princess, everyone goes on worshipping Vishnu, and the king becomes the new Chakravarti.
The moral is that you should conduct your affairs in such a way that if you fail, it will lead to someone or something even bigger or more powerful failing too. This lets you get away with anything. The weaver got away with having sex with the princess on false pretences (this is rape under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code), pretending to be a god (awesomely enough, this too is a criminal offence under Section 508), and annihilating an entire army that was fighting a just war - after all, it was the king who broke the treaty (you could make a case for this being genocide under Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).
American banks and financial institutions were very good at absorbing this lesson, and leveraged themselves up to such an extent that if they failed they would take the global economy down with them. And just as the weaver lived happily ever after with the princess, banks have lived happily ever after with taxpayer-funded bailouts.
But no matter how hard American investment banks try, Indians still remain the masters of this art. If the whole truth surrounding Lalit Modi is revealed, big politicians might be trapped. Modi is, thus, likely to get away lightly -- as is A Raja, who might have given away spectrum at bargain basement rates, but whose sacking would lead to the government collapsing. All this goes to show that no matter what the anguished elderly gentlemen who write letters to the editor feel, Indians are still in touch with our ancient and glorious culture.
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