Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 11

Bhakta Jim's Soap Box: An Explanation

I got my second review for The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim:

The Life and Times of Bhakta Jim is an account of the Jim's experience within the Hare Krishna cult. The story is informative, but dry at times as some true stories can be. I learned a lot from his account though.

My only issue was Jim's dig at Republicans on several occasions. This was both unnecessary and off topic. I found that when he threw this in he took away from the story and got on his soap box.

This is a fair comment. I know exactly what part of the book she is talking about: the chapter about my own deprogramming. It is the least interesting chapter in the book. If I paid to have the book edited the editor would certainly have pointed that out, but whether he could have suggested any way to improve it is questionable.

Deprogramming is not done much anymore. Back in 1980, it was about the only effective way to get someone out of a cult. It involves holding someone against his will for several days (usually three) and arguing with him about his life in the cult. Usually the arguing is done by people who have been in cults themselves. The arguments do not involve threatening the cult member with hell, or telling him about Jesus, or anything like that. They are pretty much just arguments. This is what you thought life in the cult would be like. This is what you actually spend your time doing. And guess what, the same damned thing goes on in the Moonies, the Divine Light Mission, the Children of God and the Scientologists. And you know they're nuts, don't you?

At some point in this argument, often the third day like it was for me, the fog clears all at once and you're out. After that you need to spend time with others in the process of getting out, otherwise there is some danger of going back in again. The problem is that the cult way of thinking is comforting on some level, and you miss it.

To explain the cult way of thinking I do compare cultists to Republicans, however making it clear that the cultists take this kind of thinking to an extreme that the Republicans do not approach.

Yet.

Of course not all Republicans don't accept the evidence that evolution is real, that the world is millions of years old, that global warming is real, and so is Barack Obama's birth certificate. There are even Republicans who believe that the New Deal was beneficial (like Ronald Reagan, who voted for FDR four times).

Here is the conclusion of an article by a well known Republican who clearly accepts the evidence of science:

Such is the history of it. Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

Mark Twain wrote that.

In 1903!

Bhakta Jim's Transcendental Bookstore now open!

In addition to selling my books on Amazon I have my own site:

https://sites.google.com/site/bhaktaj...

Currently I'm selling two books, but I'm working on a third. This will be a full color book of photographs taken by Misrani devi-dasi back in 1979 when she was a pujari at the Evanston Hare Krishna temple. The working title is Transcendendal Photographs but we may come up with something better.

Bhagavata Purana now on Amazon.com!

My new edition of A Study of the Bhagavata Purana or Esoteric Hinduism is now on Amazon.com and Amazon sites in Europe.

http://www.amazon.com/Study-Bhagavata...

There is also a Kindle version.

The book looks really nice. I don't think a professional could have done a better job designing this book than I did. I may be fooling myself, of course.

This is the least expensive English translation of the Bhagavata Purana and one of the best.

Mother Pashupati: An Appreciation

When I was working on The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim I frequently tried to do Google searches on the names of devotees I used to know, to see what had become of them. Of all of those names there was none I Googled more than Pashupati devi-dasi. The only thing I could find out about her was that she was still married to Chaturatma and she was living in a Hare Krishna community called New Ramen Rati in Florida. Yesterday I did a search for her name and found this:

http://www.dinkypage.com/143821

They make a nice couple, don't they? In a way, I am responsible for bringing them together.

For the whole story you'll need to read The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim but I'll give the broad outlines here.

The first time I visited a Hare Krishna temple I met Mother Mishrani devi-dasi. In a very short time I developed a love for her of the kind rarely seen outside of South Korean TV dramas. It was the kind of love that inspires men to do things they would not ordinarily do. Like join the Hare Krishna movement, for instance.

Mother Pashupati was Mishrani's friend, maybe her best friend. It was inevitable that I would meet and become friends with Pashupati.

I really liked Pashupati. She was good company. I can't put it any better than that. If she was around the world seemed to make more sense than it normally did. She was more level-headed than Mishrani, but no less devoted to Krishna. I used to cut vegetables for the two of them on Saturdays in the temple kitchen. Being with them made me want to be a better devotee.

Most of my time with the Hare Krishnas was very pleasant, but in time the Evanston temple would have a guru move in and everything would change and get ugly. My parents saw what I was going through, knew that I wanted to get out but could not manage to get out on my own, so they hired deprogrammers.

I talk about deprogramming in the book.

After I left the movement I missed both Mishrani and Pashupati terribly. I tried to stay in contact with them, wrote them letters, etc. I told Mishrani how I felt about her, and she sent me a valentine and a letter indicating that she would be willing to marry me if I returned to the movement. She had made a vow to never get married, but perhaps the attention I paid to her convinced her that she needed a husband after all and if I wasn't going to do the job somebody else should. She moved to the Houston temple and got engaged to Chaturatma.

I had been planning her deprogramming for some time, and her engagement gave that new urgency. I tell the story of how I kidnapped and deprogrammed Mishrani in the book.

After her deprogramming Mishrani (now Mary) received a letter from Pashupati which used her real name, Pat. The letter represented Pat as Mary's old friend who had found out about her leaving the movement and wanted to hear from her. The idea was no doubt to give Mary an opportunity to come back to the movement without her parent's knowledge. Mary was not interested in going back.

Some time after that Chaturatma and Pashupati found each other and got married. At the time Chaturatma looked a bit like a young Robert Redford and Pashupati looked mostly like she does in the picture. The years have been harder on him than on her.

Mary and I never got married. Chaturatma and Pashupati are still together. This would speak well for devotee marriages if it was more common. Unfortunately, it isn't. Quite a few devotee marriages crash and burn.

New Ramen Rati's website makes it sound like a nice place. It sounds like the Hare Krishnas have gone more mainstream even if their beliefs have not.

It sounds like place I'd like to visit. But I know I'll never go there.

Cover Design For The Bhagavata Purana

This is my second attempt at a book cover for this book:



The first attempt used full color pictures and the Chunk Five font. It was a little garish. The current attempt ran those same photos (taken in 1979) through a GIMP filter called "Old Photo" and gave me something that in my opinion looks more appropriate for a reprint of a book originally published in 1901.

There is a quick and dirty reprint of this book currently sold on Amazon which uses a stock photo of railroad tracks as its cover image. At the very least I've done better than that!

Another try at an Introduction

I am not happy with my first attempt at an introduction, so let's throw it out and start over.

Special Introduction: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavata Class

The Srimad Bhagavatam (AKA Bhagavata Purana) and I have a bit of a history. Back in 1978 I first came in contact with the Hare Krishna movement. The improbable story of how that happened and what it led to will be found in my book The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim.

I was quite familiar with the Bhagavata Purana before I became seriously involved with the Hare Krishnas. My college library had a complete set of the books of the Hare Krishna movement, plus it had many other books on the subject of Indian religion and philosophy. I spent a lot of my free time in college reading these books. I found them compelling reading even though I couldn't fully believe in them. My first exposure to the Bhagavata Purana was through what we in the movement called Krishna Book, which was a summary of the tenth canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam. This book was all about the life of Krishna.

Back then Krishna Book came in three volumes and was lavishly illustrated. It had an introduction by George Harrison which promised that if you chanted the Hare Krishna mantra you would one day not only see God but would get to play with Him.

I also remember being surprised reading one of the chapter titles in the first volume, "Stealing the Garments of the Unmarried Gopi Girls". This turned out to be more of a childish prank by Krishna than anything else, but it did indicate that Krishna was a different concept of God than anything I had encountered before.

A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana Or Esoteric Hinduism is a translation of most of the Bhagavata Purana. It was published in 1901, apparently for the Theosophical Society, and was dedicated to one of its leaders, Annie Besant. I know very little about Annie Besant, but the idea that a woman could be a leader of a spiritual movement and be praised as the "Bhagavata of Bhagavatas" back in 1901, when Srila Prabhupada was only five years old, is quite remarkable. Women do not have leadership positions in the Hare Krishna movement and are not generally praised for their spiritual advancement.

I dedicated The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim in part to the women I knew at the Evanston Hare Krishna temple. That honor, such as it is, is more than they are likely to get from the movement.

This translation by Narayana Sinha is a worthy alternative to reading the complete one published by the Hare Krishna movement. That version is very expensive, has more volumes than an encyclopedia, and has elaborate (and frankly, repetitive) commentary on every verse. On the other hand this book benefits from commentary by Sridhara Swami and the thoughts of its translator, which for most readers should be more than enough. If after reading this you feel that anything important has been left out you can check out the online version of the full translation that the Hare Krishna movement provides.

The Hare Krishna movement considers the Bhagavata Purana to be five thousand years old and infallible. I consider it a work of literature that is not nearly that old. While I think this book does as good a job of justifying God's ways to man as anything human minds have created, I know that it is absolutely wrong on many points, and might be wrong on many more.

I remember my reaction on reading the Fifth Canto of Srimad Bhagavatam in the college library. It describes the universe in a way that cannot be reconciled with reality. The Earth is flat, the Sun goes behind an enormous mountain at night, the Moon is farther away from the Earth than the Sun is, the Sun is the only source of light in the universe (the stars being planets that glow with reflected light), etc. It disturbed me that Srila Prabhupada believed the moon landings to be a hoax because the Fifth Canto described the Moon as a heavenly place where demigods lived, not the barren place the astronauts landed on.

The Bhagavata Purana is the book that introduces the character of Srimati Radharani. An earlier book, the Harivamsa describes most of the same events in Krishna's life that occur in the Bhagavata Purana, but while Krishna is described dancing with the Gopis no single Gopi is given special attention.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Gopis in the mythology of Krishna, and among the Gopis Srimati Radharani is supreme. She is worshiped alongside Krishna in every Hare Krishna temple.

Having said that, there is reason for me to believe that the authors of the Bhagavata Purana never intended her to be such an important character. Why do I say this? It is because she is never named in the story.

I cannot emphasize the importance of this detail enough. I am in a good position to recognize just how significant not giving her a name is.

I transcribed this book from page images from the Internet Archive. My donation to Project Gutenberg consisted of a plain text document and a web page, both automatically generated from a common source file. There are many, many family tree tables in this book. For the plain text version of the file I had to convert these diagrams into what is known as "ASCII art" and it was not fun.

When I prepared my submission to CreateSpace I wanted to add an index to the book, something the original book never had. To make an index you need to first make a list of all the words you want to index. I used a series of Linux commands to scan the plain text document looking for words that were not in the English spell checking dictionary. Another command counted how many times each of these words was used in the text and a third command sorted the list so the most used words came first. When I was finished I had a list of over four thousand words, the majority of them names. I got this list down to 435 names and technical terms that were used enough to be worth indexing. There is no shortage of names in the Bhagavata Purana. Even women's names are well represented. We can only assume that the authors of this book deliberately avoided naming Krishna's most favored Gopi.

To put this in Biblical terms, imagine that the part of the Bible that my mother refers to as "The Begats" ran on for hundreds of pages and the Blessed Mother was not referred to as Mary but only as "Jesus' Mom." That may give you some idea.

For an example of how strange it is that the Gopis are never named, imagine a New Testament where none of the twelve disciples is named.

Many of the Gopis would eventually be given names: in other Puranas, in the poetry of Jayadeva and Vidyapati, and in the plays of Rupa Goswami.

The Chaitanya movement (which the Hare Krishna movement is based on) considers the Gopis the most exalted worshipers of Krishna. They abandoned their husbands, their families, and their worldly duties to be with Krishna.

There is a story in the Gospel of Luke where a man wants to follow Jesus, but only after he buries his father. Jesus tells him that he must abandon such worldly duties and follow him immediately. The Gopis did not need to be told.

The Bhagavata Purana contains more than the life of Krishna. You will read of the origins of the Universe, the spiritual evolution of all living beings, the other avataras of Vishnu that incarnated themselves before Krishna, and much much more. There is plenty to interest the student of mythology, of philosophy, or anyone who enjoys high fantasy or just a good story.

This book is not simply a transcription of the original book. The original was very badly proofread and inadequately typeset. Names were not always spelled consistently either: Hiranyakasipu was spelled three different ways, sometimes on the same page. As for the typesetting, the author clearly wanted to use the macron to indicate a longer than usual vowel sound but was forced to settle for a combination of circumflexes for lower case characters and accents for upper case characters. This combination made an already error-filled book look even worse.

I have spent many hours correcting these errors and consider it a labor of love, even if the love fell short of actual bhakti.

While I am at best a lapsed Vaishnava I do have the desire to make the Bhagavata Purana more widely read. My donation to Project Gutenberg has been downloaded for free 703 times as I write this. That's a lot more transcendental literature than I ever distributed in the movement.

I cannot promise you that reading this book will make it possible for you to one day play with God. I left that path thirty years ago and can't imagine returning to it. But I can promise you some very interesting reading!

Rough draft of the "Special Introduction" for the Bhagavata Purana

I am currently preparing the Bhagavata Purana for publication using CreateSpace. My edition will include a new introduction by myself. This is my first draft of that introduction. I'm not entirely happy with it, but that's what first drafts are for:

Special Introduction – Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class

A little over thirty years ago I was a devotee in the Hare Krishna movement. They called me Bhakta Jim because I was still in the probationary period prior to initiation as a disciple of a spiritual master. I left the movement before that could happen. I have few regrets about leaving, but there is one in particular.

I am a computer programmer by profession. I also have a talent for public speaking, which I am rarely able to use. Speaking in public is not an ordinary part of a computer programmer's duties. About the only time I get to do it is when I have a service anniversary at my company, which happens every five years. On my twenty-fifth year anniversary I gave a speech that went on for forty minutes and was so well received that people who were not present to hear it came up to congratulate me afterwards. My boss made me promise to never do anything like that again.

Now if I had stayed in the movement there is no doubt I would have been allowed to use my talent for public speaking to give Bhagavatam classes. I feel very strongly that I would have been a great Bhagavatam-class-giver. This introduction will give you a taste of the sort of class I could have given.

When reading this introduction you must imagine yourself to be in the temple room of the Evanston, Illinois temple, which was a remodeled gymnasium from a former YMCA. It is about six in the morning and the devotees have already been up for three hours. The men and women sit separately. The women are in the back of the room. Some of them are sewing Deity clothing, others are stringing garlands. The men sit closer to the altar and aren't doing anything but trying to stay awake. I am sitting on a very thin cushion, which is more than anyone else in the room has. I am doing my best to sit cross-legged but my knees still hurt. As always, the class begins by chanting a verse, or in this case a whole passage, first in Sanskrit and then in English. The passage is this one, from the Fifth Canto:

“Priyavrata reigned for 400,000,000 years. The Sun-god Aditya moves round the Sumeru Mount and sends his rays up to the Loka-loka range, illumining half the regions while the other half remains dark. King Priyavrata in the exuberance of spiritual power determined to illuminate the dark regions and to make it all day and no night. He followed the Sun-god seven times with a chariot as swift and bright as that of the Sun-god himself even as though he were a second Aditya. Brahma appeared saying 'Desist, O Son, this is not thy assigned duty in the universe.' The ruts caused by the wheel of Priyavrata's chariot are the seven oceans, which gave rise to the seven Dvipas: Jambu, Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Paka and Pushkara.”

I then read what Srila Prabhupada has to say about this passage, which isn't much, and then the class proper begins:

“For some time now we have been reading the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam, which gives a description of the material universe, also called the Three Worlds. These Three Worlds are of course the higher heavenly planets, the lower hellish planets, and the earthly realm. We know from this book that the authors of the Bhagavatam believed in a universe very different from what we know it to be. They believed in a flat Earth with an enormous mountain called Meru in the center of it and another enormous mountain surrounding the rim of it called Sumeru. They believed that the Earth experiences night because the Sun goes behind mount Meru. They believed that the long nights in the winter are caused by the Sun god driving his chariot faster at that time of year. They believed in seven concentric rings of the Earth with different kinds of oceans between them. These oceans contain not just salt water but also clarified butter, liquor, sugarcane juice, milk, etc. As this passage states, these ring-shaped oceans are created by the ruts of the wheels of King Privavrata, who wished to become a second Sun god and make the Earth have daylight everywhere all the time.

“What are we to make of this passage, or indeed of all the similar passages we have been reading in this Canto? Clearly they describe a universe very different from the one we live in. We all know that Srila Prabhupada believed the moon landings to be a hoax on the basis of the Fifth Canto. The Fifth Canto concludes that the Moon is a heavenly world that is much farther away from the Earth than the Sun is. The Moon takes a whole month to cross the sky, whereas the Sun does so every twenty-four hours. Therefore the Moon must be much farther away. That's what the authors of the Bhagavatam believed.

“The Bhagavatam also tells us that the stars all circumambulate around the pole star because the sage Dhruva lives there. The Earth itself is stationary. We also learn that the Moon appears to wane not because of the shadow of the Earth but because it is being devoured by the head of a demon named Rahu. The demon Rahu is just a disembodied head, so of course the Moon comes out of where his neck would be every month.

“Now the story of Genesis in the Bible is no more believable. It speaks of a flat Earth with waters above and below, a greater light in the day and a lesser light (the Moon) at night. It tells a story where all the plants and animals were created first and finally man and woman were created at the same time and given dominion over all of them. Then it immediately contradicts itself by telling a second creation story where Man is created first, from the dust of the Earth, and then all the plants and animals are created afterwords. Man looks at all the beasts and gives them names, but finds none of them suitable to be a helper for him. Only then does God create woman from one of man's ribs.

“This contradictory story is believed by many Christians and if you wish to run for office as a Republican you are pretty much required to believe it. Even Democrats have to believe it is an allegory of something, though perhaps not literally true. But we must not confuse the Republican belief in the literal truth of Genesis with our belief in the truth of the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavatam. For a Republican believing in Genesis is just a way of telling someone 'I am one of your tribe. I, too, feel uncomfortable around blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and gay people. I, too feel that women should not be allowed to do whatever they want. I, too, am as dumb as a bag of hammers. You can trust me with your vote.'

“Now this sort of belief will not do for us. We are seekers of the Absolute Truth. We know that we are not our bodies. We know that we are eternal and blissful by nature, and that our goal is to develop the love of Krishna and render loving service to Him.

“At the same time we spend a great deal of time at airports and on airplanes and we know for a fact that there is no mount Meru, no mount Sumeru, no seven concentric islands. We know that the Earth is an oblate Spheroid and that there is no such thing as “higher” or “lower” in the universe. But we also know that many stories of the Bhagavatam only make sense if the universe is the one described in the Fifth Canto. The churning of the ocean. The boar incarnation of Vishnu. The fish incarnation. Pretty much every story in every Purana takes place in what we can only conclude is an imaginary universe.

“As truth seekers we must consider the question of what the Bhagavatam is, and what purpose the authors had in writing it. An atheist might suggest that the Bhagavatam was written to separate fools from their money. Certainly there are books meant for that purpose. The writings of L. Ron Hubbard and Sung Myung Moon. All those books about the Rapture. Yet you can't put the Bhagavatam in that category. You can't build much of a business around the Bhagavatam.

“The cop-out some use for the Bible is to say it was written by humans but inspired by God. That doesn't really work for any scripture. If God inspired someone to write a book He would not allow that person to write a chapter full of lousy astronomy.

“So we have to conclude that the Bhagavatam is the work of humans, probably male, with no direct help from God. Yet it has the power to move us in ways that ordinary books do not. How many of us are here because we read Krishna Book, Srila Prabhupada's summary of the Tenth Canto of the Bhagavatam? Remember how you felt reading those stories for the first time? Some of you no doubt compared them to the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. A few of you have told me as much. One friend I gave the books to called them 'Pure Sword and Sorcery!'

“Yet this book has a power that stories about Hobbits do not. The authors of this book looked at every big question there is and answered every one of them with every answer they could think of.

“Some of the big questions are:

“If God is powerful enough to create this world, why didn't He do a better job of it?

“What reason would God have to create an imperfect world?

“Is there a perfect world in addition to this one? Can we go there, and if so how?

“Why are some people born in wealthy families are others born in poverty? Is it because of pious or sinful activities in previous lives? If those born in wealthy families were pious in a previous life, why are so many of them so sinful in this life?

“Can you have a better existence in your next life if you deliberately suffer in this one? Could you become a god in your next life if you did that?

“How does the soul enter a newly born body? Does it come through a man's seed? Is it sinful for a man to ejaculate if it doesn't make a woman get pregnant? Do you really need a woman to make a baby? Suppose a man ejaculated on a leaf and the leaf got swallowed by a fish. Could a baby develop inside that fish body? Would anything good happen if I could go through a whole lifetime and not ejaculate at all?

“Is the soul of an animal the same as the soul of a man? How about the soul of a god? Do plants have souls? Is it better not to eat meat?

“Wouldn't it be great if there was a world where men and women could make love all the time and the woman only got pregnant in the last year of her life? Is that what the worlds of the gods are like? If so, is there a better world than that? If so, how is it better?

“Is the world gradually getting worse as time goes on? If so, what was it like to begin with? What will it be like at the end? What happens after that? Does it just get destroyed and re-created at that point?

“If there is a perfect world, why aren't we in it? What did we do to deserve being where we are? Can we be forgiven for doing it?

“If God is infinitely powerful, then is any part of Him also infinitely powerful? What about His form? His name? What does God look like? What are His names? If I make a statue that looks just like God is worshiping that just as good as worshiping God Himself? What about saying His name? If I say God's name over and over again will I be forgiven for my sins? Will I start loving God?

“If God was born on Earth what would that be like? What would it be like to be His father? His mother? His friend? His wife? His lover? Which of these would be closest to Him?

“If there is a perfect world where God lives how is it different from this world? How is it similar? Does God want us to love Him? Is loving God like loving a human being? If not, how is it different?

“It is the Tenth Canto of this book where Krishna's life is described that makes this book like no other. When we read it we are like John Wayne in the movie The Greatest Story Ever Told. Witnessing Christ on the cross, he says “Truly He was the son of God.” Reading Krishna Book, we think 'God must be like this.' We think, 'Here is a God we could love.'

“In the whole Tenth Canto the most profound chapters are those dealing with Krishna and the gopis, the cowherd girls of Brindaban. It is the love of the gopis that inspires this movement. I am not qualified to describe the activities of Krishna and the gopis when they are together. Perhaps nobody in this movement is that spiritually advanced. What I can do is talk about what happens when They are separated.

“The gopis give up everything to be with Krishna. They are married to others, so they can expect nothing in return. They are the greatest lovers of Krishna. Yet He abandons Them to live as a prince in Mathura and Dwaraka. In Dwaraka He marries 16,108 princesses and lives in a separate palace with each one. He expands Himself into 16,108 bodies so every princess feels that He is with her alone. He can expand His body without limit. If it was His desire He could expand His body to be with the gopis at the same time as He is with the princesses. If He does not do so it is because He wants to abandon the gopis, in spite of Their great love for Him. Yet the gopis continue to love Him.

“This class started out with a ridiculous story about a mythical King that wanted there to be daylight all the time. We then considered the motives of the authors of the Bhagavatam, and the great questions they wanted to answer. We finish by considering their answer to the most important question of them all: 'Does it make sense to abandon everything and love God?'

“This concludes this morning's class. Hare Krishna!”



Needless to say, nobody ever gave a morning class like this in any temple of the Hare Krishna movement.

This book, A Study of the Bhagavata Purana; or, Esoteric Hinduism, is the only public domain translation of the Bhagavatam I could find. It has been a popular download at archive.org (which has e-books made by scanning pages of printed books) and I felt that Project Gutenberg needed this book in their collection so it could be read by those with Kindles and Nooks. Once I had donated the etext to Project Gutenberg I wanted to create a bound and printed book to bring this book to a new audience.

I did a very poor job getting people to read spiritual literature when I was in the movement. Perhaps making this book available will in some way make up for that.

While I am a lapsed Vaishnava at best, I still feel that the story of Krishna needs to be better known around the world. May my humble efforts help make that happen.

Bhakta Jim

Stealing the Bhagavata Purana from Project Gutenberg

This is a big peeve of mine. When I'm not writing my own books (which is most of the time) I donate e-books to Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, I have mentioned before, is where you can get A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana Or Esoteric Hinduism for free.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39442

The Amazon Kindle Store regularly takes Project Gutenberg books and puts their own generic covers on them, then offers them as free Kindle books. There is nothing illegal or immoral about this and the customer still gets the book for free.

HOWEVER there are reprobates who take newly released PG books, slap a quick and dirty cover image on them, and SELL them on the Kindle Store. This has been done no less than three times to the book I donated:

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

http://www.amazon.com/Bh%C3%A2gavata-...

Putting my donation together took me months of work, and very tedious work it was too. It would be incredibly easy for Amazon to reject these crap artists but they don't bother.

Selling what PG offers for free can't be a lucrative business. In a few days Amazon will have its own free version of the book in its catalog so the crap artists don't have much time to get money from their marks.

In the mean time my donation is up to 571 free downloads on the PG website. This is a lot more books than I ever distributed when I was in the Hare Krishna movement. Tripurari Swami, the "Incarnation Of Book Distribution", can't match these numbers.

Of course Tripurari Swami actually sold the books, and made lots of money doing it. If he sold you a book at the airport he left no money on the table. After making your "donation" you'd be fortunate if you had money left for cab fare.

On the other hand, my free downloads will end up being read while his sales generally ended up in the airport trash bins, where the janitors would collect them and sell them back to our book distributors. Or they would end up in a landfill somewhere. Thousands and thousands of books were "distributed" by the movement but you never see them in used book stores or other places where used books can be found.

But Tripurari has retired, so the bane of my life are these Project Gutenberg repackagers. I hope that someday Amazon will realize that it is in their own best interest to clean this crap out of their catalogs. I'm not holding my breath, though.

My review of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


According to this excellent biography Steve Jobs and I have something in common. He used to visit his local Hare Krishna temple for the free Sunday feasts. I can't help thinking that if he had met the girl on his first visit that I met on my first visit we'd all be living in a very different world today.

This biography shows Jobs warts and all, and the man had a lot of warts. Before reading this I was more inclined to give Steve Wozniak credit for the early success of Apple than Steve Jobs, although I did admire the NeXT computer and its operating system and gave him credit for leading the company that produced it (and also blamed him for the business decisions he made that made it a failure). This book made me want to give Jobs a lot more credit. He had a lot of ideas and many of them failed, but the ones that worked changed our world. iTunes, the iPod, Pixar, the Apple Store and of course the Macintosh: you could build a whole career on one idea as good as those were.

With all his faults and personal habits I could identify with Jobs. If you took Bhakta Jim's talents, flaws, etc. and cranked them up to 11 (from whatever much lower value they have now) you might end up with something like Bhakta Steve.

The book made me want to work for someone like Steve. He could be hell to work for and often was, but there are different kinds of hell. There is the hell of mission statements, team building exercises, beginning with the end in mind, and other soul killing crap (or if you believe that the soul cannot die, stuff that makes the soul want to die). And midpoints, whatever the hell they are. Compared to that being asked on a job interview if you'd ever tried LSD (and being criticized because you hadn't) isn't so bad. Maybe I could have made up for that by telling him I joined an ashram. I might actually have gotten points for that.

While I admire the man, until recently I had no use for his products. I'm a Linux guy and I considered Steve's products (other than the NeXT) to be appliances, not real computers. Even the latest Macintosh seems lackluster as a programming environment. (I write programs for them at work). But the world needs appliances too, I guess. My wife loves her iPhone.



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My review of Project Gutenberg's "A Study Of The Bhagavata Purana or Esoteric Hinduism

A Study of the Bhagavata Purana or Esoteric Hinduism by Purnendu Narayana Sinha

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the only public domain English translation of the Bhagavata Purana in existence. Because it is in the public domain there is no need to buy the Kessenger edition to read it. You have two choices to read it for free:

1). On Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39442

2). The original page images at the Internet Archive:

http://archive.org/details/astudyofthebhaga00sinhuoft

The PG version is preferable unless you need to cite page numbers. The proofreaders of the original book, published in 1901, did such a horrible job that I feel that they and the typesetters are working off their karma in the hellish planets, or possibly have been reborn as one of the lower animals. The PG version, which I transcribed myself, fixes most if not all of that. I don't know that Krishna will necessarily reward me for the months I spent cleaning up the text, but I won't go to hell for it.

Once you get past the lousy proofreading you have a pretty good translation of the Bhagavata Purana. True, Sinha does leave a lot of stuff out, but this is somewhat balanced out by including parts of Sridhara Swami's commentary plus excerpts from other scriptures, including one memorable one which describes how Arjuna (the prince who heard Arjuna speak the Bhagavad Gita) temporarily becomes a woman so he can experience loving Krishna as a Gopi. We never got to hear that one in the Hare Krishna movement!

Other interesting parts are Sinha's belief in the lost continent of Atlantis (not part of Hare Krishna dogma, but considering some of the other things we were asked to believe I wonder how we missed it.) and the dedication of the book to a woman, Annie Besant, who was quite an interesting character herself.

This book will be interesting to anyone who enjoys mythology, high fantasy, philosophy, comparative religion, etc. It is largely the story of Krishna, the Supreme Lord Himself, who came to earth five thousand years ago and brought the kingdom of God with Him. I find it a far more convincing description of that kingdom than what you will find in the Left Behind books, to give a ridiculous example.

As I am writing this the book has been downloaded 28 times, which is more books than I managed to sell when I was in the Hare Krishna movement.




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