--- In tiruvenkatam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Sudarshan K Madabushi" <mksudarshan2002@xxxx> wrote: Dear members and friends, In the "Sri Vishnu Sahasranamam" there are Sanskrit "nAmAs" for the Almighty so euphonious, merely listening to their beautiful sounds is feast enough for both the ear and soul. When you listen to them you don't really even want to know their meaning. Their mere sound is enough. (My own favourites ones are "pradAna- purushEshwarah:", "pushpa-hAsah:" and "devaki-nandana"). There are some "nAmAs" whose sounds are rather intriguing to the ear and mind. They make you wonder what they really mean. They are fascinating to contemplate upon. They make you want to reach immediately for a commentary, either traditional or contemporary, on the Sahasranama. The "nAmAs" soon enough become 'earworms' i.e. they keep ringing in the ears and just won't go away until you have whetted your curiosity about what Sri Sankara BhagavathpAda may have had to say about the "nAmA" or how Sri Parashara Bhattar interpreted it in his famous Sahasranama "bhAshya", the treatise titled "bhagavath-guna-darpana". Due to poor grounding in the Sanskrit language or inadequate understanding of our ancient scriptures, you may not entirely comprehend the full significance of a "nAmA" through mere study of the various commentaries ? the "vyAkhyAna" or "bhAshya-granthA-s" -- on the Sahasranama. Yet the sweet "nAmA" itself will go on haunting you even as you go about your daily life and routine. Such is its power of attraction that it can make part of your mind go "offline" to silently work away, seeking at least some sort of intuitive if not intellectual understanding of its real intent. Not just the superficial, dictionary sense of the term (which any Sanskrit lexicon such as the "amarakOsam" can provide), but, more importantly, its underlying truth and substance, without grasping which one may never relate the beauty of the Vishnu Sahasranama with one's own personal experience and appreciation in life ('svAnubhava'). ************* A couple of months ago I met with a rather strange but nasty accident. I fractured a small bone in my back. I was changing seats inside my car when I plonked down very heavily on the hard metal buckle in the seat-belt contraption. For weeks thereafter I became a semi-invalid. Waves and waves of stabbing pain, like some malevolent tsunami, kept lashing my back. Unable to move normally, sit or sleep in normal postures, I found myself virtually crawling about the house like some giant amoeba in distress. The doctor, a specialist called an orthopaedician, looked closely at my condition. After studying test-reports (which consisted principally of a "digitally created high-resolution X-ray image" of my posterior), he diagnosed my problem to be a fractured "coccyx bone". I had so little idea of human anatomy to imagine I actually possessed a bone with such a distinguished sounding name. And so I asked the "ortho" what it really was. "You should consider yourself lucky", he said to me gravely, "that you did not damage your sacrum, your spinal column. The coccyx is only a small "tail bone" at the southern extremity of the column. It's what you may call a "biological left-over", a bony remnant of man's evolution, a tiny reminder of his earliest biological origins", he said. I do not generally care much for or comprehend medical-speak very well, but I quickly understood the specialist's words to mean, lest I forget, I had actually evolved as a species from the monkey and it was my "coccyx" that was proof of that irrefutably Darwinian fact. "Don't worry", the doctor went on to reassure me, "In a few weeks the fracture will heal by itself and the coccyx will reset. There is really no clinical cure for fractures of this kind. Only complete rest, complete absence of strain or stress for a few straight weeks can set things right. Go home now and rest. Trust your body and in the deep and unseen powers of self-healing it possesses". ********************* I left the doctor's clinic that evening with deep misgivings -- not to mention a duly stamped receipt for a hefty sum of money paid towards "doctor consulting fees". First, the bone-specialist had added insult to my injury by reminding me of my simian ancestry. Next, he had also left me clinically high and dry: abandoned me to the mercy of such airy, mysterious things in life that he had called "self-healing powers of the body". I went home that afternoon severely distressed in body and mind. I was in abject pain; I had no idea of the cure; I had no reasonable basis on which to expect I'd be alright again. I feared I'd just been made victim of an elaborate fraud by modern medicine: instead of clinically treating me, my pain, my misery? my whole medical case instead had just been nonchalantly turned over to some great, invisible and anonymous "faith healer" believed to be residing within me and who had curative powers far greater, far more miraculous than any known to man or medical science! ************* Physical illness is frustrating life-experience especially when it lays you low, down and bed-ridden for prolonged periods of time. But the abject passivity it imposes upon you can at times be a disguised blessing. It urges the patient's mind, even if only very briefly, to turn to spiritual or religious contemplation. In this narrow respect, illness can indeed be said to be a sort of "tapas", a very special and Vedantic form of meditative penance. The inertia of lying in bed with a broken back ? a broken "coccyx" to be more accurate ? and being unable to do anything for a whole fortnight, made me reach for my favourite bedside scriptural book, the Sri Vishnu-Sahasranamam. Desperate to ward off boredom and creeping depression, I kept silently repeating in bed the sacred "sahasranAmAs" when, all of a sudden out of the blue, four specific "nAmAs" that seemed particularly appropriate to my distraught physical condition, caught my attention. As I kept repeating them over and over again I became truly fascinated by them. I could not then wait to learn what exactly the 4 enchanting names of the Lord truly signified. Picking up the standard commentaries of Sankara and Parashara Bhattar, I reflected long and hard upon the 4 divine names, savouring both their sound and substance, again and yet again, in my mind until, finally, I thought I had perhaps intuited, even if it was in the foggiest sort of way, the essential crux of the 4 "nAmA- s". In my fevered mind, I believed I had gleaned some deeper nuance of the truth behind the 4 "nAma-s". ****************** The 4 delightful "nAmAs" in the Vishnu-Sahasranamam, the sacred-4 that kept me constant, soothing company all through my painful illness, are the following: "vaidyah:" "oushadham", "bhEshajam" and "bhishak". We will discuss them in the next posting. Regards, dAsan, Sudarshan --- End forwarded message --- ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Would you Help a Child in need? It is easier than you think. 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