"Information Transfer and the Disciplic Succession" (SB 2.9.45)

TRANSCRIPT:  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Canto 2, Chapter 9, Text 45. “Information Transfer and the Disciplic Succession.” Alachua – 1994-08-26 / (072)

[Text 45]:

In succession, O King, the great sage Nārada instructed Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, unto the unlimitedly powerful Vyāsadeva, who meditated in devotional service on the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the Absolute Truth, on the bank of the river Sarasvatī. 

[Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda]:

In the fifth chapter of the first canto of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Nārada instructed the great sage Vyāsadeva as follows:

atho mahā-bhāga bhavān amogha-dṛk

Śuci-śravāḥ satya-rato dhṛta-vrataḥ

urukramasyākhila-bandha-muktaye

samādhinānusmara tad viceṣṭitam

O greatly fortunate, pious philosopher, your name and fame are universal, and you are fixed in the Absolute Truth with spotless character and infallible vision. I ask you to meditate upon the activities of the personality of Godhead, whose activities are unparalleled.

So the disciplic succession of the Brahmā sampradāya, the practice of Yoga meditation is not neglected. But because the devotees are bhakti-yogīs, they do not undertake the trouble to meditate upon the impersonal Brahman; as indicated herein, they meditate on brahma paramam, or the Supreme Brahman. Brahman realization begins from the impersonal effulgence, but by further progress of such meditation, manifestation of the Supreme Soul, Paramātmā realization, takes place. And progressing further, realization of the Supreme Personality of Godhead is fixed. Śrī Nārada Muni, as the spiritual master of Vyāsadeva, knew very well the position of Vyāsadeva, and thus he certified the qualities of Śrīla Vyāsadeva as fixed in the Absolute Truth with great vow, etc. Nārada advised meditation upon the transcendental activities of the Lord. Impersonal Brahman has no activities, but the personality of Godhead has many activities, and all such activities are transcendental, without any tinge of material quality. If the activities of the Supreme Brahman were material activities, then Nārada would not have advised Vyāsadeva to meditate upon them. And the paraṁ brahma is Lord Kṛṣṇa, as confirmed in the Bhagavad-gītā. In the 10th chapter of the Bhagavad-gītā, when Arjuna realized the factual position of Lord Kṛṣṇa, he advised Lord Kṛṣṇa in the following words:

paraṁ brahma paraṁ dhāma

pavitraṁ paramaṁ bhavān

puruṣaṁ śāśvataṁ divyam

ādi-devam ajaṁ vibhum

[Bg. 10.12]

āhus tvām ṛṣayaḥ sarve

devarṣir Nāradas tathā

asito devalo vyāsaḥ

svayaṁ caiva bravīṣi me

Arjuna summarized the purpose of the Bhagavad-gītā by his realization of Lord Sri Kṛṣṇa and thus said, "My dear personality of Godhead, You are the Supreme Absolute Truth, the original person in the eternal form of bliss and knowledge. And this is confirmed by Nārada, Asita, Devala and Vyāsadeva, and above all, your personal self has also confirmed it.

When Vyāsadeva fixed his mind in meditation, he did it in bhakti-yoga trance and actually saw the Supreme person with māyā, the illusory energy, in contraposition. As we have discussed before, the Lord's māyā, or illusion, is also a representation because māyā has no existence without the Lord. Darkness is not independent of light. Without light, no one can experience the contraposition of darkness. However, this māyā, or illusion, cannot overcome the Supreme Personality of Godhead but stands apart from him, (apāśrayam).  

Therefore, perfection of meditation is realization of the personality of Godhead along with his transcendental activities. Meditation on the impersonal Brahman is troublesome business to the meditator, as confirmed in the Bhagavad-gītā, 12.5: kleśo 'dhikataras teṣām avyaktāsakta-cetasām.

oṁ ajñāna-timirāndhasya 

jñānāñjana-śalākayā

cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena

tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ

Śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale

Svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam

[5:02]

Translation: 

In succession, O King, the great sage Nārada instructed Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, unto the unlimitedly powerful Vyāsadeva, who meditated in devotional service on the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the Absolute Truth, on the bank of the river Sarasvatī. 

The disciplic succession, you find that Lord Brahmā meditated on the Supreme Personality of Godhead. He did this on the basis of his intuitive knowledge and on the basis of hearing the command “tāpa” at the time when he was first bewildered upon waking up alone in the universe and wondering what his purpose was in existence. So, Brahmā was the first person in the universe to realize the Supreme Personality of Godhead. And he came to that stage of attainment after a long period of meditation for a thousand celestial years.

Brahmā produced various sons and thereby he populated the universe. He is the origin for all the bodies of living entities within the universe. And initially, since there was no question of reproduction in the sexual fashion, since he was alone, he produced sons by the power of his mind. So Brahmā's mind was so powerful that he could visualize form and form will actually be manifested, which is a little bit different from the situation in our minds. 

One of his sons was Nārada Muni. And it's described here that he instructed the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam to Nārada Muni. And then later on, Nārada instructed the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam to Vyāsadeva. And Vyāsadeva, in turn, instructed this knowledge to many different personalities that followed him starting with his son, Śrī Śukadeva Gosvāmī. And so the Bhāgavatam is coming down to us. So this is the process of disciplic succession, whereby knowledge of the Supreme Personality of Godhead is transmitted to people living in the material world. The version that is presented here in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam is that knowledge of the Supreme Personality of Godhead was always central in the affairs of the universe. Now this is a rather novel conception to the point of view of what is generally taught. 

Typically, what you hear is that historically speaking, primitive people worship powers of nature and they personify them by imagining that the thunder and lightning have a personality behind them and things of this nature. And so, as a result, in the end they worship many gods. But then in certain cultures a more refined philosophical idea of those and monotheism, which is the worship of one God – well this came about at a certain point in history. But here what we see is that monotheism was there right in the beginning. This was actually central, and furthermore, you see that the word monotheism can apply to quite a number of different concepts, including different impersonal conceptions of the Supreme. Although it speaks of the one God, Brahman could be the one God. In fact, many people think of God in that way. When they speak of God they think of some kind of impersonal absolute.  

[9:52]

It's interesting to see then, according to the description given here, that understanding of the Supreme Personality of Godhead was there right from the beginning. And in fact, the process of creation was personal, right from the beginning. So we start with Garbhodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu generating the form of Brahmā, then Brahmā awakens to consciousness in his body that has been generated by Garbhodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu. And when Brahmā was prepared through this process of meditation, then Lord Viṣṇu directly appeared before him and he was able to directly receive instructions from Him. So as a result, information was transmitted to Brahmā.

The creation of the universe, then, involves two things. There is the adjustment of the material elements in the universe and this ultimately involves the production of different living bodies. And then there is the transmission of instruction, which is then received by the living beings which inhabit those different material bodies, at least those bodies with a higher level of consciousness, which is suitable for receiving instructions. So that is the arrangement of the universe.

One feature of this is the idea of information. There is a whole science called information theory, which basically came about after the invention of the telephone, and radio, and so forth. Engineers dealt with the problem of how to quantify information, so a whole mathematical theory has been developed along those lines.

Basically, that theory takes it for granted what information is, and it concerns itself with loss of information. In other words, if you send a message across some channel, such as a radio beam or telephone line, then information can be lost due to static and different defects from the transmission. So information theory deals with the loss of information and how to minimize it. But there's no real definition of what information really is. And that is what one would suggest here, that is because information obviously depends on personalities. In other words, you can't have information unless you have persons who are communicating the information.

Therefore to really understand what  information is, you have to really understand what persons are, because without persons you can't have information. You could have marked up a piece of paper for example. Like you take one of these books – let's say all the people who are around disappear and cease to exist, and the books are still there. Well then we just have paper and little marks of ink on the paper and that will last for some time and then gradually decay away. But you don't have information anymore because there are no people around to understand it. So that's the basic thesis. 

In the description given in the Bhāgavatam, the concept is that information about the Absolute Truth is being transmitted, and that comes through an original source. So the Bhāgavatam is quite consistent because it's saying that the original source is a person. That's the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So from that original person information is being transmitted to Brahmā and then it's being transferred to Nārada and Vyāsadeva and so on. 

[14:11]

Another conception would be that the Supreme Absolute Truth is something impersonal. But then, where's the information going to come from? So, one is presented then with a problem, that knowledge and information has to arrive from something non-personal. So how does that come about? So this is difficult to comprehend. This is especially true if you consider Brahman is supposed to be non-dual. There's no differentiation in Brahman. But we see that when information is transmitted there are lots of words. For example, in the Bhāgavatam we have 18,000 slokas. So, that's a lot of words. So, how does that fit in consistently with the idea that the absolute original source is non-dual, has no variety in it. You can see that lots of words are coming out of something that has no variety. How could that be? It doesn't really make a great amount of sense. But, the idea of the original Supreme Personality of Godhead is that: first of all, personality has variety. The original Supreme Personality of Godhead has oneness and variety simultaneously. That is the ultimate paradox. But that can nonetheless be accepted as an axiom, describing the nature of the Absolute Truth. So, given that initial starting point, you have the information being transmitted to different personalities within the material world. 

One feature of information transmission is you have to have reliability in transmitting the information. This is where modern information theory comes in, because they consider loss of information. And another feature is this whole emphasis on truth. You have to have truth in information transmission, otherwise, the meaning becomes lost. So our emphasis in the whole description of the disciplic succession is, first of all, that the personalities translating information are totally truthful. So Brahmā is totally truthful, Nārada also, Vyāsadeva had the qualification that he was totally truthful. So therefore he can transmit the information reliably. That's the basic conception.

So the basic underlying principle of disciplic succession is that the information is transmitted in a very truthful way without being monetized or pushed around in any way. As long as this takes place, then disciplic succession can go on successfully. But as soon as duplicity is introduced into the system, then there's a problem. The real message becomes obscured. And then there’s, of course, the question of trust that comes in connection with transmission of information. If someone is transmitting information to you then that means typically they have something to tell you that you don't know. Otherwise, why bother going through the exercise of transmitting information. If you already know then you don't have to be told, there's no necessity for it. So if they're transmitting something to you that you don't know, that means you can't really check things fully on what they're saying, because, after all, you don't know. So therefore you have to be able to trust them and if you don't trust them, then it doesn't matter if what they're telling you is 100% true because you don't trust it. It may be the truth but it is all in vain at the point where the trust is lost.

This is an essential issue then for the disciplic succession as there has to be development of trust in the matter of transmitting information from one person to another. And of course the problem is, there's a certain amount of false information that can cause an erosion of trust. So then even if there's real information also being transmitted, then everything becomes lost. So the key feature then in transmission of the disciplic succession is that there has to be a very great emphasis on truth.

 [19:29]

Of course, we see in the modern day and age that one of the problems with the acceptance of religion is that, because in fact in many different traditions there have been a lot of introductions of false ideas. Therefore people who used to have trust in religious information, generally they tend to think that old scriptures and so forth are not to be trusted. And so they turn away from all that information and try to figure things out by themselves. So that's one of the basic problems. In any case, we have this concept of the transmission of information by great personalities. Śrīla Prabhupāda cited verses from the Bhagavad-gītā, which describe… well, Arjuna's realization of the supreme position of Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead; and Arjuna cites the names of all these various great sages, Nārada, Asita, Devala, Vyāsadeva and so forth, who have given this information about the Supreme Absolute Truth.

It's very interesting to consider what human society was like in the pre-Kali-yuga days. In fact, if we go back even to the time of Dvāpara-yuga, in those days you had a human society in which there were very great sages who were personally present in that human society. And these great sages had exceedingly large lifespans, great mystic powers, and so forth. And they were understood to be particularly truthful, that is, one could totally rely on what the great sages had to say. So you can see the kind of stability that human society would have had. First of all, even the fact that people lived so much longer than they do now, would indicate that the society was much different in its basic mode of function than what we have today.

Today people live for an extremely short time, and the result is that there's a lot of change that goes on in human society. Because people don't perfectly learn from their elders and generations are so short, the change can quickly accumulate. We even see languages changing. For example, we're speaking English, but if you go back a 1000 years, English didn't exist as we know it today. The ancestor of English, well, a thousand years ago, go back to 994 A.D. What they were speaking in England? It was a language called Anglo-Saxon, which is somewhat like German, you might say, but different from German also. If you heard that language you couldn't understand it at all. So, in Dvāpara-yuga the lifespan of human beings was about a thousand years. So just consider, for us a thousand years is a period for which the whole language can change totally. But, in Dvāpara-yuga it is just like the lifespan of one individual. So presumably in that time language would not have changed perceptively. So then, in addition to that factor, you have the presence of these great sages.  

Typically, of course, for example Nārada Muni, who knows how long Nārada Muni lived? Actually I do not know how long he lived… certainly… he probably lived for a complete kalpa, I would presume. He was born in the beginning of this kalpa as a direct son of Brahma. Then of course Vyāsadeva was still living. The interesting point is that these sages were still there, but nowadays they don't come out in human society, visibly, at least not generally speaking. I've only heard that Nārada Muni came to see Śrīla Prabhupāda at one point. But certainly Vyāsadeva, for example, was openly present in human society back in the time of Kṛṣṇa's pastime. But those sages nowadays do not come out openly. Of course, our own particular disciplic succession is coming down through Madhvācārya, and the description is that Madhvācārya personally met Srila Vyāsadeva and that was around 10th century AD, roughly about a thousand years ago, could have been less than that. So it is actually possible to meet Vyāsadeva, but due to the situation with Kali-yuga, the sages generally aren't directly visible nowadays. So in any case, any questions or comments? Yeah. 

[25:16]

Question:  [unclear]

Answer:  I'm saying information in the context of the person who understands it. You could say that it's data or something like that, some other terms where nobody is there to read it. Yeah. After all, this information in this book could be encoded in many different ways. For example, by arrangement of pebbles or so many different ways of doing it. So if you coded the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam in terms of arrangement of pebbles on a very large flat surface, then if nobody was there we would just have pebbles on the surface. And if somebody came and he didn't know the code then, you would still just have pebbles. If somebody was able to understand the code, they could read the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and then they will be getting that understanding. Yeah. 

Q:   [unclear]

A:  Yes. These are all definite factors involved in the transmission of information. Yes, because these factors are there, you have, I would suggest, the centralization of the key information. That is, the idea is to have a central depository from which the information can reliably radiate.  Now it radiates out from that central repository, then naturally there are various defects which interfere. As you say, the speaker may not understand properly what he is saying, in which case there is gonna be some distortion, and the people may not understand what he said. Plus, of course it’s a bit unpleasant if the speaker has come with a motive to actually distort what he is saying. And it becomes even worse if the motive is subconscious, then he doesn't even know that he is distorting it. So all these kinds of things can be there. So, since that is almost inevitable… what are you going to do? People are imperfect. Therefore, the idea of the disciplic succession is, you have a central source from which the information is radiating, and the ideal situation is that in the central source you have truly reliable transmission.

For example, Vyāsadeva is a highly qualified person with a very elevated consciousness. So he'll properly understand what is being said and he won't distort the idea and so then this is transmitted to different great ācāryas and so forth. However, inevitably you see distortions. So for example, Kṛṣṇa said to Arjuna about the Bhagavad-gītā, the message of the Bhagavad-gītā has been lost and now I have to give you that message again. So these distorting factors are always operating and it would appear that periodically the whole message of disciplic succession is lost in human society. Then it has to come down again from the central source. So… any comments on that? Yeah.

 [29:38]

Q:  [unclear]... One might make the argument that, just like you can have two liquids and they're liquid, and when mixed, a solid precipitates out. So Brahman within itself is a mixture, which is the perfect idea, but somehow or the other by interaction with itself, even though it is non-dual, now precipitates Brahmā.

[30:21–35:04]  Recording repeats

A:  Well, you started with two liquids though so you started with duality. Yeah. I'd like to see an example of that, in which you start with one thing – truly one thing – and then to make it even worse. After all, the way chemists understand the way in which two liquids come together and a product precipitates out is there's all these little molecules in there, and they hook up in certain ways and that's even more duality. You've got Avogadro's number. The number of molecules in, let's say, 2 grams of substance would be about 6 x 1023, that is 6 followed by 23 zeros. So that's how many molecules you've got in that amount of substance. So that's a lot of duality. So it would be nice to have a non-dual example I don’t [unclear]... because the scientists also have their own impersonal theory and they're not against duality. They are the ones that proposed all these molecules in there. So they'll say you start with the molecules all disconnected from each other to sort of bump into each other at random. You let that go on for a while under the right conditions and then living cells come out. And then they grow and divide and then an evolutionary process takes place and they gradually turn into fish, lizards and primal monkeys.

Then they stand upright and turn into people and then you've got all this information. And Darwin rightly said, you know I am proposing this theory of evolution but then I must consider that according to that same theory, my own mind has evolved from the mind of an ape. And how could one in any [unclear] to the conclusions arrived at with such a mind… [laughter]. Darwin was quite perceptive in many ways. But anyway, so how does the information come out of something impersonal? By the way our concept of Brahman is not exactly that Brahman is non-dual because it is the effulgence from the body of Kṛṣṇa. So Brahman must also have radiation from the real Brahman as opposed to the philosophical Brahman. All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.