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ESCAPE FROM THE HALL OF MIRRORS
Part 1
Nitai Das
2005
In the last issue, I said I would describe my
departure from ISKCON and some of my
experiences both before and after leaving.
The beginning of the end occurred when Dr.
Kapoor dropped his bombshell on me, informing
me that Bhaktisiddhanta was not
properly initiated. When, after several days,
the shock finally subsided somewhat, I began
to consider my options. I had by then left
Prabhupad’s traveling entourage where I had
for almost three years been the Sanskrit
editor, and had settled in Vrindaban. In
addition, I was then serving as the head
pujari for the Krishna-Balarama Mandir. Krishna
and Balarama are particularly beautiful
images and it was a great pleasure to serve them.
I got to live in a nice room in the new guest
house, eat good prasada, teach some of the
evening classes, attempt to educate the
Gurukula kids in Sanskrit, and take my two-hour
turns in the twenty-four hour kirtan.
I was a respected, senior member of the
community. Living in Vrindaban was great for
someone with even a little facility with the
languages. In the afternoons, when the rest of
the bhaktas were coming out of their siestas,
I would occasionally sneak out and attend a
class on the Harinamamrta-vyakarana, the
Sanskrit grammar composed entirely of the
names of Krsna written by Sri Jiva Goswami,
at Haridas Shastri’s ashrama not far from
the temple. Haridasa Shastri was a
wonderfully learned Vaisnava with nine tirthas after
his name, each tirtha representing an above
average expertise in an area of Sanskrit
philosophy and literature. A Bengali educated
in the traditional system (the Pathsala or
Tol system) in Benares, he apparently had
assisted Krsnadas Baba of Kusumasarovara in
his efforts to edit and publish all of the
major works of the Gaudiya tradition. He had also
been a siksa disciple of the great Vaisnava
scholar and saint, Pandit Ramkrishna Das
Baba. At the time that I began attending his
classed he was engaged in reprinting all of
the works previously published by Krsnadas
Baba and some others besides. In the
afternoon, he offered free classes on any of
the Goswami works to anyone who showed
up. There were usually a half a dozen men
young and old, probably from various
surrounding ashramas, there to study with
him. Unfortunately, my Hindi and Bengali
27
were not at that time strong enough for me to
make much of his detailed explanations of
the text, so I was an infrequent student.
Occasionally I succeeded in sneaking out in
the evenings, usually when someone boring
like the then temple president, Aksayananda Maharaja,
or some other foolish visiting
sannyasi gave the evening lecture. Instead I
went to hear the enthralling Nrsimha
Vallabha Goswami read and elaborate one of
Visvanatha Cakravartin’s short poems. His
lectures were then being given in the Radhadamodara
Temple. There I sat among the
white-clad little old ladies and men
listening as the great Goswami teased out the rasa of
every line, sometimes of every word, of
Visvanatha’s beautiful Prema-samputa. His
language, though Bengali, was so Sanskritic
that even I could follow it. What a master! I
will never forget how on one particular
evening, in a particularly emotionally charged
part of the text, I heard a loud honk and a
thud a couple of rows behind me. A bhakta
had keeled over in a faint and one of the
neighboring ladies was fanning him. Goswami
looked up, paused for a bit to be sure that
the man was alright or at least being cared for,
and then continued reading. Such eruptions of
bhava were not uncommon at the readings
in Vrindaban and they happened fairly
frequently in Nrisimha Vallabha’s readings. All in
all things were pretty good. The place was
brimming with interesting people and it was
Vrindaban.
Still, I could not get past the
disappointment. I felt like I had been scammed. It was as if I
had been sold something very valuable and
suddenly it turned out to be a fake. All those
years we had been told, and in turn told
others, that ISKCON was the only real
descendent of the religious movement of Sri
Caitanya, and that turned out to be a lie. I
had given up everything and devoted myself to
following and serving Prabhupad in
whatever way I was able. My family had cut
itself off from me and I from it; my father had
even pronounced me dead; and for what? I
really felt cheated and angry. I decided that I
had come too far to give up then, and
besides, although living in Vrindaban was
wonderful, there were some irritants that
came along with living in the ISKCON complex.
I had developed a desire to chant 64 rounds
of Hari-nama and it was hard to find time to
do that in the temple context, especially in
a culture that did not value such practices. I
was constantly subjected to suspicion because
of that and because of my excursions into
the town in the evening to hear readings.
Eventually, I was told that I was no longer
allowed to visit the town in the evenings.
Worse, however, was the sense of spinning my
wheels that I felt at the Krsna-Balarama
temple. I had the feeling that none of us were
making any advancement. There was something
corrupt and corrupting in the
atmosphere and I couldn’t quite put my finger
on what it was. I could tell a couple of
stories that would illustrate this
corruption, but that would carry us too far afield. Suffice
it to say that I felt a disease while staying
there.
The next time I visited Dr. Kapoor I
expressed a desire to get properly initiated. I may
have even asked him if he would initiate me.
He had already told of his emotional
meeting with Gauranga Das Baba. He politely
declined and recommended instead, and
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in extraordinary terms, a baba who lived way
out in the bush, He said this baba was a
siddha-mahapurus. a, a great one who had
realized Krsna-preman, one of only a few alive
in the holy abode at that time. Dr. Kapoor
said that this baba was known by different
names, Maunibaba because he observed periodic
vows of silence, Bangali Baba because
he was a Bengali, Tinkudi Baba from his
nickname as a child, but that his initiation name
was Kisori-kisorananda Baba. He also told me
that this baba was quite unusual because,
although he came from a highly respected
family of caste Gowsamis tracing back to
Nityananda Prabhu, he had left family life
behind and had adopted a life of deprivation
and solitary worship. He warned me that
getting initiation from him would be difficult,
because he led an extremely austere life,
living out in the wildest parts of the Vrajamandala
where few people dared to go. Dr. Kapoor
spoke of others, too, who occupied
very high places in the climb towards
Krsna-rati. He mentioned, in particular,
Krsnacarana Das Baba, who eventually became
the guru of my friend and colleague,
Jagannath Das.
The name ”Tinkudi Baba” operated like a
powerful mantra in my mind. It kept returning
to me again and again. I had no idea where he
was and how I would ever meet him,
though. My only choice was to wait. I don’t
recall how I met them, but I had become
friends with a couple of Vrajavasis, a young
man name Parimal Bishwas and his
grandmother Vinaparni. They had settled in
Vrindaban and lived in a small rented house
near the Ranganath temple. Occasionally, I
visited them and joined them for dinner.
Vinaparni was an excellent cook and I knew
them both to be Vaisnavas. It was perhaps
only a couple of days after first hearing the
name of Tinkudi Baba from Dr. Kapoor that I
asked Parimal about this Baba. He looked up
with surprise on his face and blurted out:
”He is my guru! How did you hear about him?”
I told him about my conversations with
Dr. Kapoor and repeated the good doctor’s
praise for the baba. I also asked him what he
knew about the initiation of Bhaktisiddhanta.
Parimal was the first of those I talked with
about it to confirm it. He had learned of it
from his grandmother, who it turned out had
formerly been a disciple of the Gaudiya Math,
and who was among those who left
somewhat after the time of Puridas. When I
asked her later, she, too, confirmed Dr.
Kapoor’s statement. She had been closely
connected with Haridas Sarma who had acted
as Puridas’s secretary towards the end of his
life. Haridas Sarma had helped Puridas
publish the later volumes of the wonderful
set of editions of the Gaudiya Vaisnava texts
that Puridas is famous for. Haridas’s name is
given as the publisher of the Puridas
editions beginning sometime in the 1950s.
I asked Parimal if he would help me meet the
baba. He responded with an enthusiastic
affirmative and a few days later came to tell
me that Baba was in Cakleswar on the bank
of the Manasasarovar near Govardhan. He was
there to celebrate the ceremony of the
feeding of the sixty-four saints (cau-sasti
mahant seva) to honor a great Vaisnava who had
just passed away. Parimal agreed to take me
there and introduce me. A few days later I
was on a bus to Mathura and from Mathura out
to Cakleswar with Parimal by my side.
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When I first met Baba, tears did not begin
flowing from my eyes like Dr. Kapoor’s did
when he and his wife met their guru, Gauranga
Das Baba. I didn’t feel like I had met an
old friend again after a very long time.
Instead, I was a bit surprised at Baba’s
appearance. It was only slowly, after
watching him move about giving directions to his
disciples and others on how to celebrate the
entrance of a fellow devotee of Krsna into
eternal sport that I began to get a sense of
who he was. I first noticed the way he dressed.
He wore only a kaupin or loincloth over his
genitals and a cloth over his shoulders and his
hair was long, stringy, and uncombed, hanging
down to his shoulders. Around his neck
were some of the largest tulsi beads I had
ever seen and on his forehead was the tilak
(sectarian mark) typical of
Nityananda-paribar (associates of Nityananda), made not out
of the white, powdery gopi-candana that was
typical of ISKCON and Gaudiya Math, but
out of the dark, thick, greyish mud which, as
I later found out, came from Radhakunda.
Except for the tilak, he looked more like a
Sakta than a Vaisnava. I suddenly realized that
I had seen his picture a year or two before
in a tiny stall in one of the markets of
Navadwip where I had gone to buy a copy of
the classic book on the Holy Name (Sri Sri
Nama-cintmani by Kanupriya Goswami. The stall
owner, after bringing out the book,
brought out a picture of Tinkudi Baba
thinking I would also want one of those. I took one
look at the picture and thought to myself why
does he think I want a picture of that mad
tantric? I had no idea who I was looking at
at that time.
As I watched him I began notice how genuinely
jovial he was and how humble. He
seemed thoroughly happy. He had next to
nothing and yet he was happy. All of his
clothes were made of burlap. Even his
slippers were made of burlap. Apart from that he
had nothing else but his beads. I couldn’t
imagine Prabhupad walking on such cloth with
his bare feet even once, let alone wearing it
constantly. What a difference there was
between the really humble, simple lifestyle
of this poor servant of Krsna, who depended
for everything on Krsna, and that of
Prabhupad, who lived like a king wearing silk and
gold and complained if his food wasn’t
prepared just right. It was as if at some point
Krsna had offered these two devotees of his a
choice. Prabhupad had chosen Krsna’s
wealth, his army so to speak, and Baba had
chosen Krsna himself. A whole new world of
Vaisnavism began to open up before me in the
presence of Tinkudi Baba, a world strange
and beautiful and, truth be told, also
somewhat terrifying, especially to someone like me
who had not fully surrendered to the will of
Krsna. How much easier it appeared to be to
be a Prabhupad and sit on a fancy lion-throne
surrounded by thousands of doting and
adulating disciples. Bba sat out in a lonely
kutir in the distant reaches of Vraja, wild
snake-infested places where few people dared
to go. He ate whatever could be begged
from the local villagers, and if they gave
nothing, that is what he had.
Reflecting back on my first experience of
Baba a couple of things stand out. The first is
the realization that part of the shock of my
first meeting with Baba was contributed by
the sense of having come face to face with
something very ancient in India. His
nakedness, his simplicity, his
possessionlessness, his austerity, and as I later discovered
later his ecstatic madnesses, all point to a
kind of religious lifestyle and experience that is
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quite ancient in India. One need only recall
the naked philosophers that Alexander the
Great encountered when he came to India,
three centuries before the common era. One
of these gymnosophists accompanied Alexander
back to Greece and displaced Aristotle
as the conqueror’s teacher. Even in the time
of Alexander, however, such asceticism was
ancient. The hymn of the Rig Veda called ”The
Long-hair” (10.136) indicates similar
practices at least seven centuries before
Alexander. The second verse of that hymn reads:
The ascetics, swathed in wind, put dirty red
rags on.
When gods enter them, they ride with the rush
of the wind.
(O’Flaherty, p. 137)
Certainly much has changed in the intervening
thirty centuries. Then it was Rudra; now it
is Radha and Krsna. Still, much remained the
same. I felt like I had arrived in the
company of Rupa and Sanatana. Certainly, they
lived much like this.
The second thing is that in Baba I am
reminded of the belief in the ”righteous man” in
the Jewish mystical tradition called
Kabbalah. The righteous man or tsaddiq is like a
pillar that extends to heaven and upholds the
entire world. It is said in the tradition: ”the
righteous one is the foundation of the
world.” If it weakens, the world cannot endure. If
the world contains just one righteous person,
that person sustains the world. (Matt, p. 78)
I wonder if it is similar with the siddha-
mahapurus. a, that they are the foundation of the
world. Without them the world would collapse.
The other thing about the tsaddiq is that
often it is impossible to recognize one.
There is a wonderful story from the Zohar called
”The old man and the ravishing maiden” in
which the righteous one appears as an old
donkey driver who seems rather cracked.
Similarly, I wonder if the siddha is often to be
found in unlikely places. Perhaps, he is not
to be found on the simhasana in front of the
lights and cameras, but out in the darkness
lit up only by the dim glow of a kerosene
latern and perhaps it is only because of him
that Krsna has not smashed the whole world.
ESCAPE FROM THE HALL OF MIRRORS
Part 2
Nitai Das
2005
After I met Tinkudi Baba, sometime in 1975,
the world seemed like a different place
altogether. The despair I felt when I
discovered the absence of authentic initiation in
ISKCON turned into hope. I was filled with a
new enthusiasm. I went back to my normal
life at the Krsna Balarama temple in
Vrindaban where I had settled after leaving
Prabhupada’s traveling party.
For about two years I had travelled with
Prabhupada as his Sanskrit Secretary. During
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that time we circled the earth at least four
times. I had joined the party in 1973 because
the editors at the Press were worried about a
slow down in the pace at which my
predecessor, Pradyumna Prabhu, was working.
At that time Prabhupada was translating
the Bhagavata Purana, Cantos Four, Five, and
Six. It was the Sanskrit Secretary’s job to
collect the tapes that Prabhupada made each
morning, get them typed, check them over
for typos or uncertainties, add the
diacritics to the transliterated Sanskrit verses and
quotations (sometimes hunt for those
quotations, too), and make any minor editing
changes that were needed. If there was any
question about a translation or citation, the
editor went straight to Prabhupada to ask
about it. Pradyumna had travelled with
Prabhupada for about a year or two, but after
a while he began to lapse into periods of
inaction or at best ineffective action during
which the typed manuscripts, hot off the holy
Dictaphone, so to speak, began to pile up.
Eventually even Prabhupada became
frustrated. He once affectionately referred
to Pradyumna Prabhu as a “dead horse” and
pointed out that it was useless to try to
beat a dead horse into action. At last, Prabhupada
agreed to adding another member to the party
to help Pradyumna get caught up. At that
time I was the head of the Sanskrit Editing
Department at the Press which was then in
Brooklyn and, well, I jumped at the
opportunity to travel with Prabhupada. Naturally,
neither my wife at the time, Rastrapalika,
nor my chief assistant, Jagannatha Das, were
very pleased, my wife, because of the
separation involved, and Jagannatha because he felt
it should have been him, since he had no
family ties. Perhaps he was right.
My time traveling with Prabhupada was a
magical time. At first Pradyumna and I
travelled together with Prabhupada working
jointly to diminish the backlog. Then at
some point Pradyumna dropped off the
travelling party for a while, I forget why. That left
me to handle the editing alone. At some
points I was the only traveling secretary,
handling the duties of all the others in the
traveling party: cooking for Prabhupada, giving
him his daily massages, seeing to his
laundry, and helping him with correspondence, and
editing his manuscripts. Perhaps in a later
installment I will recount some of my
experiences as one of Prabhupada’s traveling
secretaries. For now, however, suffice it to
say that after nearly nearly two years of
nearly ceaseless wandering around the globe with
Prabhupada, I was happy to settle down in
Vrindaban, edit the tail end of the Bhagavata
backlog, teach Sanskrit to the new Gurukula students
(Gurukula was the name of the
ISKCON school in Vrindaban) and, at
Prabhupada’s request, work on a curriculum for
the Gurukula that would get the school
accredited by the government of India. Those
were the tasks I returned to, somewhat
reluctantly, after meeting Baba.
Working on the Gurukula curriculum was fun
and interesting, however. My plan of action
was to find a curriculum that was already
accredited by the government of India and
reproduce it, but using books from within
Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. I decided to check
into the traditional Sanskrit school system
to see what they used as a curriculum. I visited
some of the local Vrindaban Pathasalas
(schools) and even enrolled in one for a time.
Working from a copy of the curriculum they
used, which was established and supported
by the respected Sampurnananda Samskrta
Visvavidyalaya in Benares, the primary
32
Sanskrit institution in India, I began
replacing the texts with comparable ones belonging
to the Caitanya tradition. I visited several
of the leading Caitanya Vaisnava scholars in
Vrindaban to ask for advice on texts to
incorporate in the curriculum. I visited Sri
Nrisimha Vallabha Goswami, Dr. Achyut Lal
Bhatt Goswami, Haridas Shastri, Vanamali
Das Shastri, Dr. O.B.L. Kapoor and many
others who were learned in the
Caitanya tradition. Based on their advice I
created a curriculum that had everything the
traditional curriculum had, except that most
of the texts were written by the great
Vaisnava teachers in the tradition of
Mahaprabhu. The areas of study included in the
traditional curriculum were Sanskrit grammar
(vyakarana), literary criticism (alankarasastra),
ritual (smrti), philosophy (darsana),
literature (sahitya), astrology/astronomy
(jyotisa), arithmetic/ mathematics (ganita),
and an optional choice of modern languages
(Hindi, Bengali, English, etc). The course of
study generally lasted eight years and
concluded with the bestowing of the degree or
title Sastri on those who successfully
passed the exams. The first set of exams, one
in each of the eight areas, was administered
after three years, the second set after
another three years, and the degree exams two
years after that. There were higher degrees
like Acarya and Vidyavaridhi comparable to
the Master’s and Doctoral degrees, but I didn’t
worry about those then. Those generally
required an original piece of research. There
were a few texts from outside the Caitanya
tradition that my informants thought were so
fundamental that they recommended they
be part of any Vaisnava’s education. These
were texts like the Vedanta-sara of
Sadananda, the Vedanta paribhasa of
Dharmaraja Adhvarindra, the Tarkasangraha of
Annambhatta, and a few others. The curriculum
I developed then has more or less
become the basis for the curriculum of the
Caitanya Sanskrit Tol currently operating
through Nitai’s Bhajan Kutir.
Apart from my work on the curriculum,
editing, and teaching in the Gurukula, I would
often go in the afternoons to visit Dr.
Kapoor. He would offer me some prasadi (offered)
sweets from his household deities and we
would talk for hours about points of philosophy
and practice. Dr. Kapoor was very kind to me
and took some risks with me that I hope he
never came to regret. As we sat together in
the small sitting room of his house which was
part of the compound of the Radharamana
Temple, his hand was always in his bead bag
and the Mahamantra was always being repreated
just beneath his breath. He told me
much about his own religious life, his
conversion, as a young philosophy professor, from
the aridity of monistic Vedanta to Caitanya
theism at the hands of Bhaktisiddhanta
Sarasvati, his first meeting, much later,
with Gauranga Das Baba, the power of the line of
Bodo Baba (Sri Radharamana Carana Dasa Baba)
who was the guru of the guru of Sri
Gauranga Das Baba, the wonderful ability of
both Bodo Baba and Ram Das Baba
(Gauranga Das Baba’s guru) to create kirtans
spontaneously that answered unspoken
questions in the minds of those who happened
to be listening. He explained a great deal
about the meaning and power of the famous
chant that has become the trademark kirtan
of the tradition following Bodo Baba:
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bhaja nitai gaura radhe syama
japa hare krsna hare rama
Worship Nitai and Gaura (Caitanya),
Radha and Syama.
Utter Hare Krsna Hare Rama
Dr. Kapoor claimed that the short Bhaja Nitai
Gaura chant compressed the whole of
Caitanya Vaisnava practice into a few sweet
and rhythmic words, easy to remember and
easy to chant. He said it had extraordinary
powers, that apart from inducing powerful
religous ecstasy it could cure the sick and
even raise the dead. He also told me of how at
various times in his life when he was in some
kind of difficulty or confusion, Bodo Baba
himself had appeared to him in his dreams and
shown him his mercy by giving him help
and guidance. Since the first of those
experiences the Bhaja Nitai Gaura chant had been
a source of solace, protection, joy for him.
Though Dr. Kapoor didn’t tell me about how
this chant came about during those talks, I
recently looked up the account of how it was
revealed in the biography of Bodo Baba called
Nectar of the Acts [of Bodo Baba]
(Carita-sudha) compiled by Ram Das Baba. Here
is a paraphrase of the biography’s
account of that event.
This extraordinary chant was revealed by Bodo
Baba in the midst of an intense kirtan he
led during a prolonged stay in Krishnagar.
While singing a particular kirtan song Bodo
Baba went into a deep trance. Tears began to
flow from his eyes in streams and his body
was covered with goose-bumps. An instant
later his body shook violently like a tree in a
powerful wind and he fell unconscious on the
ground. The devotees surrounded him and
began to chant the Holy Name. Seeing in his
body the rising and falling of waves of
powerful emotions, the devotees became
astonished. When he became paralyzed with
emotion, it seemed as if his body was devoid
of life. Then in an instant he would laugh, in
the next moment he would cry, a moment later
he would shiver and a moment after that
he would be covered with goosebumps. After a
while he came halfway to consciousness
and stutteringly uttered:
bhaja nitai gaura pabe radhe syama
japa hare krsna hare rama
The meaning here is a little different from
the form above:
Worship Nitai and Gaura (Caitanya)
and you will get Radha and Syama.
Recite Hare Krsna Hare Rama
Some of the devotees who surrounded him began
to sing these words and that grew into a
kirtan that lasted long into the night. One
group would sing the first line and another
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group would respond with the second, each
group seemingly trying to overpower the
other. Some time later during the kirtan Bodo
Baba, leaning against a wall, his eyes half
open, his body drenched in tears and covered
with goose-flesh, a smile on his face, raised
the pointing finger of his right hand and
swayed back and forth in intense emotion. At
some point, too, a wonderful, mind-attracting
aroma filled the place, but none of the
devotees could find its source. Around about
midnight, the kirtan began to wind down,
but Bodo Baba continued to be overwhelmed
with feeling.
At the time that Bodo Baba fell into his
ecstasy, he was singing a song which apparently
he composed. The short Bhaja Nitai Gaura
chant seems to have condensed out of that
longer song as its essential meaning. As
such, the longer song is a kind of commentary on
the short one. That longer song is this:
Nitai and Gaura dance like Radha and Krsna
Everyone sings ”hare krsna hare rama.”
If you really want this Gauranga,
become a servant of Nityananda.
Even one who says only with his mouth:
”I am a servant of Nity¯ananda”
will perceive the true form of Gaura.
The love of the gopi as in the Bhagavata
one will get only from Nityananda in this
world.
Nityananda is the giver of love;
Gauranga is his greatest treasure.
In the pleasure of the Rasa dance,
one will meet Sri Radharamana.
Climbing aboard the boat ”hare krsna hare
rama,”
cross over the ocean of rebirth to Vrndavana.
My Nitai frolics, my Nitai plays,
All who are maddened with love he makes his
own.
Here my Nitai dances, overwhelmed with
emotion.
Whomever he finds, even a Candala, he takes
on his lap.
Dr. Kapoor told me that contrary to the
misinterpretations of various ISKCON and GM
members, the juxtaposition of Nitai-Gaura and
Radhe- Syama is not meant to imply the
identification of Nityananda with Radha. Such
an identification is never made in the line
of Bodo Baba. Only someone completely
ignorant of the history and meaning of the song
would make such a claim. This song is clearly
about the power of Nityananda as the one
who can conduct one to the feet of Gauranga
who is in turn the joined form of Radha
and Krsna. The power and influence of
Nityananda is so much a part of the teaching of
Bodo Baba that those who knew him and those
who are initiated in his line consider him
to be a saktyavesa avatara or empowered
incarnation of Nityananda. The idea that one
must approach Mahaprabhu through Nityananda
is not an uncommon one in the
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Caitanya tradition.
