Re: Diary of chanting aspirant

Nityaananda! Gauraanga! Hare Krishna! Thank you Igor and Damodara Svarupa dasa for sharing your practical and intimate realizations regarding chanting of the Holy Names. Such discussions are always useful since they pertain to the important topic of increasing the quality or quantity of our Naama Bhajana. Even if may not be able to reach the standard of chanting 100,000 Holy Names daily with quality (deep meditation) in this life, simply accepting that order of the Supreme Lord Gauranga Mahaprabhu as our ultimate ideal for chanting, will please the Lord, since we will keep His order on our heads with great respect even though we may not be able to implement it due to practical considerations.

Regarding the Sva Likhita Jivani "autobiography" supposedly to be written Shrila Sacchidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura, I personally do not accept all it's contents as authentic. So do some of the Gurus in our line. It is supposed to originally be a 200-page prose letter written to his son, Lalita Prasad Datta, who requested the details of his father's personal life. As we know, Lalita Prasad had more of a conception of Shrila Sacchidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura as his family father than that of an Acharya and Pure Devotee unlike Shrila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Prabhupada who always considered Shrila Bhaktivinoda Thakura as an eternal associate of the Lord. This letter was later obtained from Lalita Prasad and was printed by the Gaudiya Mission after the disappearance of Shrila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Prabhupada so the letter itself and even the publishing of the letter was not directly authorized by Shrila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Prabhupada.

The nature of this letter is anti-hagiographical. Of course, it is possible that Shrila Sacchidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura being extremely humble can write like that about himself and may have wrote parts of this Sva Likhita Jivani letter but if devotees who are not very advanced in understanding Shrila Bhaktivinoda Thakura's eternal constitutional position as Kamala Manjari, read this letter, then they may unwillingly or willingly commit grave offenses against this greatest Mahabhagavata devotee in modern times and put their spiritual lives at risk. For this reason, it is highly recommended that a devotee should never read anti-hagiographical articles or books about great devotees which display them as ordinary human beings with a mundane conception since they are eternal associates of the Lord. The authors of Vaishnava books and especially biographies should be very very careful not to present even a slightest conception of mundanism in the lives of the pure devotees because we cannot understand and thus should never try to interpret the elevated actions of the pure devotees. I am sure that even if Shrila Sacchidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura would have written parts of this letter, he would not have wanted the whole world to read it because it was sent only to his son only on the son's very specific request. Also, all parts of this letter in it's present form cannot be accepted as the bona-fide writings of Shrila Sacchidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura as this letter was never authorized by Shrila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Prabhupada in it's entirety.

We cannot understand the spiritual actions of Pure Devotees so how can we ever understand those day-to-day practical actions by Pure Devotees which may externally look like our own karma-influenced actions which we perform while struggling in this material world. We may end up confusing the pure devotees on our same level. For this reason, the lives of the pure devotees have never been described in an anti-hagiographical manner if any of Gaudiya scriptures written by our Acharyas. I wanted to write about this issue for some time so I am glad it came up for discussion. Thank you.

Daaso'smi, Swami Gaurangapada.

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