A Country Fair For Those Mad With Love

by - Ramprasad

www.poetseers.org/spiritual_and_devotion...

Namashkar and pranaam Gangajal,

I had never heard of this poet before.

In which era was he from?   But whatever,

his poems are so beautiful.  We can

feel his divinity. 

We never had his poems either in

school or college.

Asha

 

Dear Asha,

             I have posted 4 examples of english translation of Sri Ramprasad songs.Tradition claims that he wrote 100,000 poems. Only about 250 poems are extant. They are still sung in Bengal.

Gangajal

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Song 1:
       How are you trying, O my mind, to know the nature of God?
       You are groping like a madman locked in a dark room.
       He is grasped through ecstatic love, how can you fathom Him without it?
       Only through affirmation, never negation can you know Him;
       Neither through Veda nor through Tantra nor the six Darshanas.

       It is in love's elixir only that he delights, O mind;
       He dwells in the body's inmost depths, in everlasting joy.
       And for that love, the mighty yogis practice yoga from age to age;
       When love awakens, the Lord like a magnet draws to Him the soul.

       He it is says Ramprasad, that I approach as Mother;
       But must I give away the secret, here in the market place?
       From the hints I have given, O mind, guess what that being is!

Song 2:
       Who is there that can understand what Mother Kali is?
       Even the six Darshanas are powerless to reveal Her.
       It is She, the scriptures say, that is the Inner Self
       of the yogis; who in Self discovers all his joys:
       She, that of Her own sweet will, inhabits every living being.

       The macrocosm and microcosm rest in the Mother's womb;
       Now do you see how vast it is? In the Muladhara
       the yogi meditates on Her, and in the Sahasrara:
       who but Shiva has beheld Her as She really is?
       Within the lotus wilderness She Sports beside Her Mate, the Swan.

       When man aspires to understand Her, Ramprasad must smile;
       To think of knowing Her, he says, is quite laughable
       As to imagine one can swim across the boundless sea.
       But while my mind has understood, alas! my heart has not:
       Though but a dwarf, it still would strive to make a captive of the moon.

Song 3:
       Once for all, this time, I have thoroughly understood.
       From one who knows it well, I have learnt the secret of
bhava(spiritual mood).
       A man has come to me from a country where there is no night,
       And now I can not distinguish day from night any longer:
       Rituals and Devotions have all grown profitless for me.

       My sleep is broken: how can I sleep any more?
       For now I am wide awake in the sleeplessness of Yoga.
       O Divine Mother, made one with thee in yoga-sleep at last,
       My slumber I have lulled asleep evermore.

       I bow my head, says Prasad, before desire and liberation;
       Knowing the secret that Kali is one with the highest Brahman,
       I have discarded, once for all both righteousness and sin.

Song 4:
       I drink no ordinary wine, but wine of Everlasting Bliss,
       As I repeat my Mother Kali's name;
       It so intoxicates my mind that people take me to be drunk!
       First my Guru gives molasses for the making of the wine;
       My longing is the ferment to transform it.
       Knowledge, the maker of the wine, prepares it for me then;
       And when it is done, my mind, imbibes it from the bottle of the
mantra,
       Taking the Mother's name to make it pure.
       Drink of this wine, says Ramprasad, and the four fruits are yours.

Feb 23, 2011 -- 9:32AM, gangajal wrote:

I doubt that this is a poem of Ramprasad.

On what basis do you doubt this is a poem by Ramprasad?

 

Can you provide some kind of testimony from a Ramprasad scholar that indicates this is the case?

 

Can you provide some information about the Poetseers website providing false information?

 

I do not think you can provide any such information, because I think the poem is indeed by Ramprasad.

 

Here are two more websites which quote the same exact poem:

 

eternalfeminine.wikispaces.com/Sri+Rampr...


forum.yogananda.net/index.php?/topic/567...

 

Are all three websites wrong? 

 

I doubt it.

 

 

thank you for taking the time to express your point of view.

 

I appreciate you expressing your evidence and beliefs.  I don't know about the poet you mentioned, so I can't comment as to that.  That certainly could be possible. 

Generally, when assessing the credibility of a source, getting two secondary points of confirmation is a good basic way to confirm information.  For example, professional journalists function in this manner...getting confirmation from other sources.  For this poem to have been falsely accredited to Ramprasad, three independent people would not only have had to make a mistake, but make the same exact mistake.  That is unlikely.  However, if some well known poetry anthology made this mistake, then yes, three independent sources could have confirmed information from a false source.

I disagree with your assertion that Indians were unaware of Christ or Christian teachings prior to some recent date.  There has been a constant exchange of trade (and information) between the Middle East and India for many years prior to Christ's birth.  Caravans have been going back and forth to these two areas dating long, long back into history...maybe even into ancient Egyptian empires.

There is even an ancient Tibetan account of the life of Christ.  It is not fully confirmed by Western scholarship, but is quoted by one of the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Abhedananada in his book "Journey Into Kashmir and Tibet."

Rather than debate this here, this is very easily resolved.  We can, each, contact a professor of Hindu poetry from this era and get an accurate answer.

I am sure a poetry professor at any major university in India could either answer the question or direct someone to one who could answer the question.

 

I am really not interested in ascribing authorship to some work of poetry, but if someone else is...

Here's a link to the Academic Departments for the University of Calcutta:

 

www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/academic_fram...

 

there is a poetry professor listed under the category of "Hindi"