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The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki and an important part of the Hindu canon. The Ramayana consists of 24,000 verses in seven cantos and tells the story of Rama, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon king of Lanka, Ravan.

Like its epic cousin Mahabharata, the Ramayana is not just an ordinary story. It contains the teachings of the very ancient Hindu sages and presents them through allegory in narrative and the interspersion of the philosophical and the devotional. The characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharat, Hanuman and Ravana (the villain of the piece) are all fundamental to the cultural consciousness of the world.

Morals in Ramayana

The brief narration of the entire Ramayana story by the sage Narada to Valmiki, forms the first sarga of Valmiki Ramayana. Narada lists the sixteen qualities of the ideal man and says that Rama was the complete man possessing all sixteen of these qualities. Although Rama himself declares “he is but a man”, and never once claims to be divine, Rama is regarded by Hindus as one of the most important avatars of God Vishnu and an ideal man.

The story of Rama is divided into four parts:

1. Early life of Rama
2. Rama’s exile
3. Abduction of Sita (Rama’s wife) and
4. Slaying of Ravana, the abductor of Sita, and Rama’s coronation.

Main Characters

1. Rama is the hero of this epic tale. He is portrayed as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. He is the eldest and the favorite son of the King of Ayodhya, Dasharatha. He is a popular prince loved by one and all. He is the epitome of virtue. Dasaratha, forced by one of his wives Kaikeyi commands Rama to relinquish his right to the throne for fourteen years and go into exile by his father. While in exile, Rama kills the demon king Ravana.

2. Sita is the wife of Rama and the daughter of king Janaka. She is the incarnation of Goddess Laxmi (Lord Vishnu’s wife). Sita is the epitome of womanly purity and virtue. She follows her husband into exile and there gets abducted by Ravana. She is imprisoned in the island of Lanka by Ravana. Rama rescues her by defeating the demon king Ravana.

3. Hanuman is a vanara belonging to the kingdom of Kishkinda. He worships Rama and helps find Sita by going to the kingdom of Lanka crossing the great ocean.

4. Lakshmana, the younger brother of Rama, chose to go into exile with him. He spends his time protecting Sita and Rama. Ravana and Maricha deceive him into believing that Rama was in trouble while Sita gets abducted.

5. Ravana, a rakshasa, is the king of Lanka. He received a boon from Brahma that he will not be killed by either gods, demons or by spirits, after performing a severe penance for ten thousand years. He was also the most intelligent and erudite living being of his time. He has ten heads and twenty arms. After getting his reward from Brahma, Ravana begins to lay waste the earth and disturbs the deeds of good Brahmins. Rama is born a human to defeat him, thus overcoming the boon given by Brahma.

6. Dasharatha is the king of Ayodhya and the father of Rama. He has three queens, Kousalya, Sumitra and Kaikeyi, and three other sons, Bharata, Lakshmana and Shatrughna. Kaikeyi, Dasharatha’s favourite queen forces him to make his son Bharata heir apparent and send Rama into exile. Dashatara dies heartbroken after Rama goes into exile.

7. Bharata is the second son of Dasharata. When he learns that his mother Kaikeyi had forced Rama into exile and caused Dasharata to die broken hearted, he storms out of the palace and goes in search of Rama. When Rama refuses to break his exile to return to the capital to assume the throne, he requests and gets Rama’s sandals and places them on the throne. Bharata then rules Ayodhya as a representative of Rama.

8. Vishvamitra is the sage who takes Rama into the forest at the behest of defeating the demons destroying his Vedic sacrifices. On the way back he takes Rama into Mithila where Rama sees and falls in love with Sita.

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Ratha yatra is the celebration of when Lord Krishna (Lord Jagannatha) left Dvaraka and attended a religious function in the holy pilgrimage site, Kuruksetra, around 5,000 years ago. He was traveling on a big opulent chariot along with His sister, Subhadra, and elder brother Balarama, to Vrindavan. In remembrance of that incident, Ratha Yatra, the Festival of the Chariots is celebrated every year at Puri, the temple town in Orissa, on the east coast of India, where Lord Jagannatha eternally resides.

The presiding deities of the main temple, Sri Mandira, Lord Jagannatha, Lord Baladev and Lady Subhadra, with the celestial weapon known as Sudarshana are taken out from the temple compound in a grand ritual procession to their respective chariots. The massive, beautifully decorated chariots, are drawn by hundreds and thousands of devotees on the bada danda, the grand avenue that leads to the Gundicha temple, about two miles away to the North. After staying there for seven days, the deities return to where they are eternally worshipped, in the Sri Mandira.

Each year in Jagannatha Puri, Lord Caitanya, an incarnation of Krishna who appear as a devotee some 500 years ago in the district of West Bengal, India, took part in the chariot festival of Lord Jagannatha, manifesting symptoms of the mood of separation from Himself, as if Radharani, Krishna’s consort, was taking Krishna back to Vrindavan. So this Ratha-yatra festival is a festival based on emotions, as far as the Vaisnavas are concerned. Lord Caitanya taught us by his own examples of how to feel separation from Krishna. Lord Caitanya never taught us that He had seen God, but that He felt the separation of God very severely.

Every year in Jagannath Puri, three enormous chariots are constructed anew for Lord Jagannatha, Balarama and Subhardra. Over 1,000 logs are are cut down and brought from the Dasapalla and Ranpur forests, and more than 100 carpenters work for two months constructing these three giant chariots. A local mill provides around 2,000 meters of radiant cloth each year to drape the chariots. The devotees pull the chariots along the procession route using very strong coconut fiber ropes, 8 inches in diameter. The nails, brackets and fixtures are locally made, and the smiths work for a month on them. The carts’ main structure contains eighteen pillars and roofs. Each chariot holds nine subsidiary deities; two doorkeepers, one charioteer and one presiding deity of the crest banner and all are made of wood.

Today, this same Ratha Yatra festivals, nondifferent from Puri, are performed in cities around the world, organized by the Hare Krishna Movement. It’s one of their main festivals because such events revive our God consciousness, or Krishna consciousness. Srila Prabhupada, the founder-acharya of the Hare Krishna movement, was very fond of Ratha-yatra. At five years old he began celebrating Ratha-yatra, using a small home-made cart and pulling it around the neighborhood with his friends. Later in life, from 1967 until his passing away in 1977, Srila Prabhupada assembled thousands of disciples in cities around the world as they celebrated the Ratha-yatra chariot festivals in the streets of London’s posh Hyde Park Lane, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and on New York’s prestigious 5th Avenue.

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The Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, is a conversation from the Mahabharata, comprising of 700 verses and 18 chapters. It is the essence of Vedic knowledge and one of the most important Upanisads, The Gitopanishad. Krishna, as the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita, is referred to within as Bhagavan, or The Supreme Personality of Godhead. The verses themselves are written in a poetic form that is traditionally chanted; hence the title, which translates as “the Song of God”. The Bhagavad Gita is revered as sacred by followers of the Hindu traditions, and especially so by Vaishnavas (worshippers of Krishna or Vishnu). It is commonly referred to as The Gita.

The content of this scripture is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna taking place on the battlefield of Kurukshetra just minutes before the start of the Kurukshetra war. To dispell Arjuna’s confusion and responding to moral dilemma, Krishna explains to Arjuna his occupational duties as a ksatriya, or warrior. It is generally said that the conversation lasted about 45 minutes. In Sanskrit editions of the Gita, the Sanskrit text includes a traditional chapter title naming each chapter as a particular form of yoga.

The scripture is divided into 18 chapters with bhakti or devotional service, as the goal of every chapter. At the end of chapter six Lord Krishna says: ” And of all yogis, the one with great faith who always abides in Me, thinks of Me within himself, and renders transcendental loving service to Me - he is the most intimately united with Me in yoga and is the highest of all. That is My opinion.” So one who thinks of the Supreme Lord always is the greatest yogi, the supermost jnani, and the greatest devotee at the same time. The Lord further tells Arjuna that as a ksatriya he cannot give up his fighting, but if Arjuna fights remembering Krsna, then he will be able to remember Krsna at the time of death. But one must be completely surrendered in the transcendental loving service of the Lord.

BG 18.55: ” One can understand Me as I am, as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, only by devotional service. And when one is in full consciousness of Me by such devotion, he can enter into the kingdom of God.”

There are three classes of transcendentalists, namely the jnani, the yogi and the bhakta, or the impersonalist, the meditator and the devotee. These are great personalities who distribute the Vedic knowledge as it is accepted by all acharyas. Therefore Arjuna tells Krsna that he accepts whatever He says to be completely perfect. Sarvam etad rtam manye: “I accept everything You say to be true.” Arjuna also says that the personality of the Lord is very difficult to understand and even the great demigods cannot know that He. This means that the Lord cannot even be known by personalities greater than human beings. So how can a human being understand Lord Krsna without becoming His devotee?Therefore Bhagavad-Gita should be taken up in a spirit of devotion.

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The Srimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhagavad Puran, is considered the main Puranic text of Vedic literature. Its main focus is on the process of bhakti yoga (loving devotion to the Supreme Lord) in which Krishna is understood as bhagavan, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

Brief Scientific Overview:

Known as ‘the ripe fruit of the Vedic literatures’, Srimad-Bhagavatam is the most complete and authoritative conclusion of Vedic knowledge. It covers vast subject matters from the nature of the self to the creation of the universe, and touches upon different other fields of knowledge. The Third Canto gives calculations of time, from the shortest unit, to the interval needed for atomic combinations, and the elaborate details of the entire duration of the material universe.

An example of Time Dilation, a concept of modern physics, appears in the Ninth Canto, wherein King Kakudmi travel to the highest planetary system in this universe, Brahmaloka, with his daughter Revati to meet the demigod Brahma. After spending a short time there, King Kakudmi and Revati discover that during their short stay there, many thousands of years have passed on earthly planet and all the people he once knew have died long ago, and even their names were no longer remembered, as if disappeared in the mist of time. The Third Canto describes in a few details the development of the embryo in the womb, starting from the time of conception to the time of delivery.

How to approach this holy scripture:

The Tenth Canto is distinct from the first nine cantos because it deals directly with the transcendental activities of the Personality of Godhead, Lord Sri Krsna. One will be unable to properly understand the Tenth Canto without going through the nine previous cantos. The book is complete in twelve cantos, each independent, but it is advised to read them in order to understand the relationship of the Lord with His devotees.

Introduction

The Srimad Bhagavatam is a narration of a conversation that took place on the bank of the Ganga. King Parikshit, grandson of Arjuna, who has been cursed by a Brahmana boy to die in seven days decides to leave his kingdom and learn about the goal of life. As he awaits his death, the most axalted of all sages, Sukadev Goswami, who happens to pass by, is requested by the sages present there to enlighten the King. Sukadev Goswami answers the king’s questions for seven days uninterrupted, during which the king does not eat, drink or sleep. During this time the saint explains that one’s goal in life is understanding the supreme absolute truth, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krishna.

The Pinnacle of this Scripture:

The 10th Canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam is the cream of this literature, for it describes Krishna’s childhood pastimes as that of a child raised by Mother Yashoda and Nanda Baba in Vrindavan, near the river Yamuna. As a child, Krishna performs extraordinary pastimes, such as stealing butter or playing in the forest with his cowherd friends. He also performed acts of bravery by protecting the town from demons. Most importantly, however, is that He steals the hearts of the simple cowherd girls, known as the gopis. Through His internal potency, He expands Himself to give each gopi the attention needed to allow her to be absorbed in love for Him. This love, represented by the seperation they feel when Krishna is called away on a mission to Mathura, and the intense longing they experiene is the summit of unalloyed devotion to the Supreme Lord.

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The Chaitanya Charitamrita is one of the three main biographies detailing the pastimes of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the incarnation of Krishna as a devotee, and revivor of the Gaudiya Vaishnava culture. It was composed by Srila Krishna Das Kaviraja Goswami (1496), in Bengali language, but also includes some Sanskrit verses within the composition. Twining together with the pastimes of Mahaprabhu’s life are deep philosophical teachings detailing the process of Bhakti Yoga, with focus given to the chanting of Krishna’s names, mainly the Hare Krishna mahamantra. It is accepted as a holy scripture by practitioners of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.

In composing this great peotry-form literature, Srila Krishna Dasa Kaviraj Goswami also got many details from the diaries of Murari Gupta and Swarupa Damodara, both of whom were personal associates of Lord Chaitanya. The words chaitanya-charitamrta may be translated as “the character of the living force in immortality.”

Sri Caitanya inaugurated a great social and spiritual movement in Bengal, Puri and in other places while He traveled South India after taking to the renounced order of life over five hundred years ago, which today the Hare Krishnas continue to spread throughout the world. While man in the West was sending shuttles outward in the physical universe, in India Sri Krishna Caitanya was diving inward, exhibiting unparalleled spiritual potency, and teaching the truths of about consciousness and transcendental reality. As a young boy he defeated renowned scholars and establishing his own school at the age of sixteen. Within his lifetime, Sri Caitanya transformed India in four respects: philosophically, by defeating the greatest philosophers of his day who were against vaishnava philosophy; socially, by opposing the blindly rigid caste system devoid of devotion; politically, by organizing India’s first civil disobedience movement against repression by the Muslim government; and spiritually, by distributing to oeveryone nonsectarian pure love of God. Sri Caitanya-caritamrta presents Sri Caitanya as the Golden Avatar, the incarnation of Krishna in this age as a devotee.

Lord Caitanya instructed the mass of people in the philosophy of acintya-bhedabheda-tattva, which explains that everything is simultaneously one and different. Lord Caitanya taught this philosophy through the chanting of the holy name of the Lord. He taught that the holy name of the Lord is the sound incarnation of Krishna in this age and that since the Lord is the absolute truth, there is no difference between His name, form, qualities and pastimes. Thus by chanting the holy name of the Lord one can directly associate with the Supreme Lord through the Hare Krishna Mahamantra. As one practices this sound vibration, one progresses through three stages of spiritual development: the offensive stage, the clearing stage and the transcendental stage. In the offensive stage one may still want different types of material happiness and in the second stage one becomes purified of all material contamination. But when one is situated on the transcendental platform, one attains the most exalted position–the stage of pure love of God. Lord Caitanya taught that this is the highest perfection of life.

In the 1970’s His Divine Grace Srila A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada translated and published a deluxe 17-volume English edition of the work through the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust with his own commentary which is in line with those of the previous spiritual masters of the Gaudiya parampara. This edition has been distributed in mass worldwide by ISKCON and is arguably the best-known and most influential English-language edition of Chaitanya Charitamrita today.

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Millions of people all over the world are finally taking interest in the Bhagavat Gita. In this article, we shall take a closer look at the recent, enlivened edition titled “Bhagavad Gita As It Is” with commentaries and translations by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupad.

Text 23 Nainam chindanti sastrani nainam dahati pavakah
Na caiman kledayanty apo na sosayati marutah.

Translation: The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.

Here, the living entities are described as separated parts and parcels of the Supreme. So, even after liberation from illusion, we the living entity remain as a separate identity. As the book describes in commentaries, the modern scientist considers that the body is a combination of physical elements, and at a certain stage the life, symptoms develop by interaction of the physical and chemical elements. Therefore, even by modern scientists, it is agreed that change of body of the atomic individual soul is an accepted fact.

Although modern scientists do not believe in the existence of the soul and cannot explain the source of energy from the heart, they have to accept the fact that continuous changes of body which appear from childhood to boyhood and from boyhood to youth and from youth to old age, continue to occur throughout the lives of all people. Bhagavad Gita introduces also, the concept of reincarnation. That is, the change of the atomic individual soul to another body after death, which is made possible by the grace of the Supersoul. The Supersoul fulfills the desire of the atomic soul, just as one friend fulfills the desire of another.

In the Mundaka Upanisad, compare the soul and the Supersoul as two friendly birds sitting on the same tree. One of the birds (the individual atomic soul) is eating the fruit of the tree, and the other bird (Krishna) is simply watching his friend. Of these two birds, although the same in quality, one is captivated by the fruit of the material tree while the other is keeping watch only. Although they are friends, one is the master and the other is the servant. Forgetfulness of this relationship by the atomic soul is the cause of one’s changing his position from one tree to another, or similarly from one body to another. The Jiva, or individual soul, is struggling very hard on the tree of the material body, but as soon as it agrees to accept the other bird as the Supreme spiritual master, as Arjuna agrees to do by voluntary surrender unto Krishna for instruction, the subordinate bird immediately becomes free from all lamentations.

According to the Gita, one has to take birth according to his Karma. And after finishing one’s term of activities, one has to die before taking birth again in the next body. In this way, one is going through one cycle of birth and death after another without liberation. This cycle of birth and death does not however, support unnecessary murder, slaughter and war. At the same time, violence and war are inevitable in human society for keeping law and order.

From the beginning of mankind we have always followed the teachings of the Lord. Let it be from the Bible, the Gita or the Guru Granth Sahib, but it all comes down to a similar concept — attaining liberation or Muksha. These days we see that the teachings of the Lord are actually being misunderstood due to irreligion prevalent in this age of Kali. Thankfully, by the kindness of Acharyas like Srila Prabhuada, we have come to know the truth in its orginal form, Bhagavat Gita As It Is.

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