sampradAya vihIna ye mantras te niSphala mataH - versona non grata?

On an Indology list Jagat once posted the following:



I came across it when looking at online material for the four sampradayas. I assume the problem is with the verse not/no longer being found in the Padma Purana? I know Baladeva quotes it in Prameya-ratnavali. Does anyone else? Where are the 16th C. interpolations?

Such a practical verse. Kinda sad.

I have heard from various sources that it is either an interpolation or just simply got "left out" whenever later rescensions were transcribed.

There are supposedly two rescensions of the Padma Purana; the southern and the northern. The Southern rescension is the one that we all know and which is available at any good bookstore. The Northern rescension - I have heard that Bhaktivinoda was in possession of this manuscript but it as yet unpublished. It would be interesting to read if it ever gets published.

The least we can say is that this verse was bona fide at the time of Baladeva Vidyabhusana, otherwise he probably would never have quoted it.

Interesting.

I did find more on Jagat's site, along with mention in Tripurari Swami's Tattva-sandarbha.

Seems that if Baladeva accepted the authenticity of the verse, that might be another reason why he was keen on linking the Gaudiyas to the Madhvas.

Also interested in Bhaktivinode's statement in Navadvipa dhama mahatmya:


So much to digest on Jagat's site. Munch, munch...

Oh, and plenty to drink too

Bhaktivinoda Thakur did in fact publish the Bengali edition of Padma Purana, which has the section on namaparadha that is not found in the other editions.

I studied for a while with Kanailal Adhikari, another GM "dropout" who had worked with Sundarananda Vidyavinoda and was a member of the Kanupriya Goswami group in Nabadwip. He told me a story about Sundarananda that had impressed him very much. He said that once Sundarananda had specifically told him to look up this verse in the Padma Purana, which left Kanailal baffled, because there was no index or table of contents to help him. Sundarananda apparently told him to just open the book, which Kanailal did--to find the verse on that very page! Anyway, he told me that only the first line of this set of verses was found there.

I have an electronic version of the PP, which has neither this verse nor the section on the namaparadhas. But it is, I believe, based on the fine Venkateshwar Press edition of the 1880's. The Padma Purana presents a number of problems with interpolation that I have not seen thoroughly investigated as of yet.

Which line was that? Only sampradaya vihina ye mantras te nisphala matah? Or also the mentioning of the 4 sampradayas that follows?

Yes. But I could not, if memory serves me right, find even this line in the Padma Purana version that I have.

Could it be interpolated then in both Bhakti Ratnakara and Prameya Ratnavali? Seems a bit far-sought conspiracy theory to me.....

Those two appear around the same time, rather late. The conspiracy is in the Gaura-ganoddesa-dipika and Navaratna of Harirama Vyasa. The problem is--we cannot find this verse in any other tradition, what to speak of the Padma Purana!

That means that Baladeva and Narahari have taken over this interpolation in good faith afterwards?

Google gives 59 entries to the text, of which one link to the site ramanuja.org and one to radioramanuja.com. I did not search in these sites, but Google did list them, so the text must be known to other sampradayas too....

Unfortunately the reference at ramanuja.org is a post to an email discussion list, apparently by someone in the engineering dept at UConn.

The second is a Q&A session at University Of Illinois. Note the Western university connection. Fish out of water, white guy in an orange dhoti...

This Sri Vaisnava site quotes the verse in an article about panca samskara: AhobilaMutt

Dvaita.org has this to say about ISKCON:

And my last googling for the night: Jan Mares on VNN quotes the verse and gives a reference: "Padma Purana, quoted in Sabda-Kalpa-Druma Sanskrit-Sanskrit dictionary."

OK, one more:

Ekanath Das :

I did not get the impression from the Ramanujaite site links that this phrase was quoted by anyone else but Ramanujaite bhaktas. Where is the white guy in saffron for instance? As for the other lines in the text (atah kalau bhavisyanti, predictions are always treated with suspicion), Ekanatha das seems to make a valid point here. But still, the text is quoted in so many Gaudiya granthas. Could they all be interpolated then?

Interpolation may not have been as difficult as all that. Dissemination of manuscripts was not as widespread as you might think. Before the 19th century and the arrival of printing presses, it would have been rather easy, I think.

These verses are inevitably followed in Gaudiya works by the listing of the Madhva sampradaya's acharyas, a list that has been shown to have certain problems--problems that are more understandable if one is 200 years away from Chaitanya rather than contemporaneous (like Karnapur or Hariram Vyasa).

However, it is a contentious issue and though this is what I believe, I must admit that this is indeed a reasonable point of doubt.

An interesting issue in this regard is Baladeva's use of the verse and the linking to a Madhva lineage that few seem to accept vs. his writing Govinda-bhasya, which was an apparent attempt to validate the Gaudiya sampradaya, i.e. on the one hand he presents that there are four sampradayas and provides a link to the Madhvas and on the other he seems to substantiate a fifth sampradaya.

Is the explanation of him writing Govinda-bhasya as a means of "validating" the Gaudiyas not correct?

I've often found myself puzzled by the oxymoron of simultaneously linking us with Madhvites and proving our validity as a sampradaya with our own bhasya.

So maybe somebody from the GM, perhaps BSS himself, just pasted these verses into Bhakti Ratnakara, Gaura Ganoddesh Dipika and Prameya Ratnavali just to prove a link with Madhva? Or are there also other sects that are eager to connect us to the Madhvaites? Why was that so important to the interpolators?

Bhaktivinod seemed to be very persistent on that point. He even went so far as to call those who disagree with the Madhva-link as enemies of Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Given his history with the "three books", I wouldn't be surprised if the verses in his edition of Padma Purana would have been inserted as something "belonging to the eternal, uninterpolated Padma Purana", like the Caitanya Upanishad was from the eternal Atharva-veda.

Can you quote him on that? And still the question remains: Why? Why it was so important to some that we are supposed to be Madhvaites?

Some have attributed Jiva Goswami's praise of Madhva in Tattva-sandarbha to him wanting to use Madhva's verses of dubious origin without having seen them himself. Others assume that he trusted Madhva's sources.

Here is a Nimbarka site quoting the verse, or at least part of it. Which leads to the another question, is only the 4 sampradaya part under question?

And this from Madrasi Baba's site:



Along with the Ramanujites quoting it earlier, seems that it is too widespread to have been the work of the GM, no?

No conspiracy can be that widespread. The Nimbarka site also mentions the 4 sampradaya-verse, below the 'sampradaya vihina' verse......

I don't think this is a one-man conspiracy theory. I imagine that what happened was some people started seeing all these upstart Vaishnava sampradayas and tried to establish some kind of rationale by which to judge them. They tried to figure out what was authoritative and what not. They probably wanted to exclude the Gaudiyas. I suspect that the Vallabhis were in on it, as there is really nothing related to Vishnuswami anywhere preceding Vallabha. This gave a cachet of belonging to a tradition.

Of course, the Madhvas and Ramanujas were around so nobody could deny their traditions. The Nimbarkis also had an established tradition. The Gaudiyas were the odd men out and, as I say, were probably the ones specifically being attacked, along with others like the Radhavallabhis. So it is unlikely that the Gaudiyas were the source of these verses. Rather than fight it, they accepted it and simply claimed adherence to the Madhva line. The Radhavallabhis, on the other hand, claimed special status for Harivams and thumbed their noses. Some Gaudiyas have taken this attitude also, and I am somewhat favorable also.

What we need to do is find what the earliest mention of these verses is and in whose texts. There is insufficient scholarship on the Nimbarkis.

William Pinch has an interesting perspective on this:

http://texts.cdlib.org/dynaxml/servlet/dyn...65&chunk.id=ch1

"One important Vaishnava narrative holds that the arming of bairagis was the product of a conscious decision made in 1713 by leaders of the four main Vaishnava sampraday—often referred to collectively as the chatuh-sampraday, namely, the orders organized around the teachings of Vishnuswami, Madhvacharya, Nimbarkacharya, and Ramanujacharya (in which Ramanandis were included). According to this tradition, the major Vaishnava mahants met at Galta, a temple complex and monastic center very near Jaipur, and decided to resort to arms to defend against increasing attacks by Shaiva monks. Significantly, the Galta meeting in 1713 also marked the emergence of Ramanandis (those who look to Swami Ramanand for inspiration) as the dominant force not only among the followers of Ramanujacharya’s teachings, but among Vaishnavas in north India generally...

In the 1720s and until his death in 1743, Maharaja Jai Singh II evinced a strong interest in religious affairs, particularly religious affairs having to do with the Vaishnava institutions in his realm.[20] And, not unlike Warren Hastings a half century later, Jai Singh II apparently looked askance at the phenomenon of armed monasticism and sought to discourage it. To this end, he solicited and received four separate bond agreements containing pledges from prominent Vaishnava mahants, nine of whom identify themselves clearly as “Ramanandi,” to give up the practice of keeping arms and to boycott or otherwise punish those who continued to do so. From separate correspondences it is evident that the Maharaja also solicited opinions from Bengali Vaishnavas regarding the rights of shudras and other low classes, and obtained pledges from Ramanandi mahants and other Vaishnavas not only to maintain strict caste rules in commensal relations but to no longer accept shudra and antyaj (low-born) disciples. The fact that Jai Singh II’s efforts to impose orthodox behavior on Vaishnava monks involved the demilitarization of the armed akharas in tandem with the barring of low-born novitiates suggests that arms and low status were connected not just in the Maharaja’s vision of a neo-orthodox Vaishnavism but in the social-historical reality of Ramanandi monasticism...

Footnotes 19 & 20:

See Monika Thiel-Horstmann, “Warrior Ascetics in Eighteenth-Century Rajasthan and the Religious Policy of Jai Singh II” (unpublished essay, no date).
In addition to Thiel-Horstmann, see Gopal Narayan Bahura and Chandramani Singh, Catalogue of Historical Documents in the Kapad Dwara [royal warehouse], Jaipur (Amber-Jaipur: Jaigarh Public Charitable Trust, 1988), v–vii, on Jai Singh II’s growing attraction—which, in part, accounts for his interest in Vaishnava affairs—to the Bengali Vaishnavism of Chaitanya and the Gauriya Vaishnava Goswamis of Vrindaban."

- So according to Pinch, the uniting of the Vaishnavas was motivated by a desperate need for self-defence against Shaivites, while Gaudiyas were pacifists and conservatives who had the ear of the Maharaja.