Celebrating Shravan with Shiva -26

 

Shiva Day Twenty-Six

The Concept of God in Hinduism by Swami Krishnanada

1.  To the saints like Tulasidas, God is Rama; to those like Surdas, He is Krishna. To those like Kabirdas, He is the Impersonal, Attributeless One, known by various names for purposes of worship and meditation.

All the Vaishnava saints worship Him as either Rama or Krishna, Narayana or Vishnu. The Saiva saints worship Him as Paramasiva. The Saktas worship Him as Adi-sakti. The philosopher-saints worship Him as Brahman, the Absolute, as Isvara, Hiranyagarbha, and Virat or the Cosmic Being.

2.  Kalidasa, in his Raghuvamsa and Kumarasambhava, points out that God is the Supreme Being, is prior to the forms of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, who are three aspects or phases of God, and that Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, being three forms of one and the same Reality, are equal to one another in every respect, without inferiority or superiority among them.

3.  Bhartrihari prays to that Infinite Consciousness, which is Peaceful Effulgence, which is undifferentiated by the interference of space, time and causal relation, etc., and whose essence is Self-Experience alone.

4.  Madhusudana Sarasvati blends Advaita Vedanta and Bhakti-Rasa, and he is the author of the most polemical and authoritative Advaita text, known as the 'Advaitasiddhi', and of an unparalleled compendium of the various processes and stages of devotion to God, known as 'Bhaktirasayana'. His commentary on the Bhagavadgita is a monument of a fusion of knowledge of the Impersonal Absolute with devotion to the Personal God.

Tulsidas was a legendary Indian poet and philosopher he was the author of the 'Ramcharitmanas', Tulsidas's driving force was his immense "bhakti" to Rāma,

Surdas Hindu devotional poet and singer, who was known for his lyrics written in praise of Krishna,

Kālidāsa was a Classical Sanskrit writer, widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language of India. His plays and poetry are primarily based on the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas. Kālidāsa’s time, Rāma was unequivocally worshipped as anavatāra,

Bhartrihari, Hindu philosopher and poet-grammarian, Of noble birth, Bhartrihari was attached for a time to the court of the Maitraka king of Valabhi After a long self-struggle with family life, Bhartrihari became a yogi and lived a life of dispassion in a cave in the vicinity of Ujjain until his death.

Madhusūdana Saraswati was born in Bengal and was originally called Kamalanayana. He was educated in the Navya-Nyāya tradition, but became an Advaita sannyāsi, and moved to Varanasi in order to study Advaita. One of the works of Madhusudana Saraswati, the Gudhartha Dipika (an annotation revealing the true import of the Gita) is probably the greatest of his many literary works.