Gopala-puja manuscript
I am glad to announce the discovery of an unpublished
and unknown manuscript entitled “Gopala-puja.” According to the colophon, this text
was composed by Srila Sanatana Gosvami. As the name suggests, it is a concise
description of the method of worship of Gopala’s deity, with the mantras,
mudras and so on. The manuscript was found in the middle of a single collection
of Gaudiya manuscripts that include several well-known texts as well as rare
and unpublished ones. At the end of the bundle, there is a note stating that
these texts were transcribed between 1919 and 1920 from the original
manuscripts in possession of Brindavana Chandra Panigrahi, Parlakamedi, Odisha.
Several decades later, this transcribed collection ended up in the Government
Oriental Manuscript Library in Chennai, amidst more than 70,000 manuscripts.
Recently, I’ve gone through the first research
expedition in Bangladesh, which proved to be very rewarding. Although in the
last century fanatic Muslims burnt large numbers of Sanskrit manuscripts in
East Bengal, there are still many thousands of them left, albeit in precarious
condition. On the contrary of what one may think at first, I was cordially
received in the libraries I visited and promptly given access to the
manuscripts. At Dhaka University I was even offered a proposal to work in the
manuscript section, which hosts a vast collection of Gaudiya texts and has
thousands of unsorted manuscripts. Many of them could be the very same copies
dispatched from Vrindavan by Srila Jiva Gosvami more than four centuries ago. Besides copies of several of Srila Baladeva
Vidyabhusana’s works, I also brought copies of some rare texts.
In the middle of a hectic schedule of expeditions and
research, I have also been working on the translation of Vidyabhusana’s “Siddhanta-ratna,”
which he composed as a comprehensive introduction to the Govinda-bhasya and is
one of the most important treatises on Gaudiya philosophy.
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