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EDITORIAL January 15, 1999 VNN2851 See Related VNN Stories In Response To Gauridasa Pandita BY SYAMASUNDARA DASA EDITORIAL, Jan 15 (VNN) — The last posting of yours led me to the conclusion that you will never change your mind, as I will never change mine, unless you offer sound reasoning and prove to have a dynamic and organic understanding of the Gaudiya (not gaudiya math) siddhanta. That you thought you were dealing with some "Gaudiya Math Vaishnavas" (??), that you used Srila Sridhara Maharaja and his words according to your convenience, making him appear at first as totally bogus, and then calling him His Holiness after finding one reference that appears to support your theory (please, now that you've come across the "Sermons of the Guardian of Devotion," go ahead and read it, and then you can read "Sri Guru and His Grace," which contains many answers to the whole guru issue), that I was the sentimentalist, and that in the end you tried to insinuate that I said Prabhupada is not available because of not being physically present, all helped me to reach this conclusion. I also realized that it was violent of me to have agitated your mind with my advice, which is advised against in Sri Gita (na buddhi-bhedam janayed ajnanam). For this I apologize. Furthermore you are senior to me, with over twenty years of devotional practice, in which you have read Prabhupada's books twice, maybe even three times by now. Whereas I am but a young brahmacari, who has not even read them once yet. However, I am involved in this debate not as an individual, rather as an advocate of genuine siddhanta, and thus I have some responsibility to respond. Actually my concern is not the ritvik issue per se, which is just the symptom of a certain understanding of guru, sadhu and sastra. Thus rather than taking part in a debate in which each party tries to to prove how wrong the opposition is, in the future I will just submit passive and non-violent relevant postings, i.e. any devotional material that I come across dealing with topics like guru, understanding of the scripture, etc. These posting will not be aimed directly at convincing you or anyone of your stock. You can stay at the level you are on forever, but I would like to offer information to innocent and openminded persons, as to the fact that there is a viable scripturally sound alternative to the two sided coin of the so called ritivik debate. I came to this decision after reading Swami Tripurari's article "On Faith" from Sanga, that recently appeared on VNN as well. For the discerning reader, this gem is full of insights related to the issues we touched on in our debate. Had VNN not wisely posted on their own as they did, it would have been near the top of my list article to post. Excerpts from the above mentioned Sri Guru and His Grace would be a close second. I am sure such postings will do more to clear the air than anything I could say to a person who has reached the conclusion that you have, and that after reading Prabhupada's books two plus times. Indeed, at the cost of repeating myself it is worth underscoring just how well acquainted you are with the vapuh of Prabhupada's vani. This is the best I can do to put an end to our embarassing debate. As I said, this is a passive approach, therefore you can twist and rebut all the points touched so far if you want. Learned as you are, I don't need to remind you who Srila Prabhupada associates with pedantry. In any case, I won't respond. Syamasundara dasa See Related VNN Stories | Comment on this Story This story URL: http://www.vnn.org/editorials/ET9901/ET15-2851.html
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