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Sri LakshmiNrusumhaya Namaha.

Sri Vedanta Desika GuravE Namah.

 

Salutations to bhagavatas.

 

Vijay Triplicane's comments on "paripurna saranagathi" reminded me of

Draupadi's predicament as described by U.Ve.Mukkur Lakshminarasimhachariar

in one of his discourses I attended many years ago in Madras.

 

Her modesty being outraged in the court of Dhritarashtra, her husbands

simply paralysed into inaction by a folly of their own making and even the

likes of Bhishma forsaking her, she instinctively turned her thoughts to

Krishna. It is said she prayed to him in utter desperation. The Lord didn't

show up. Meanwhile her disrobing in the assembly went on with no one to

raise a whisper of protest.

 

Finally the moment came when Draupadi's last vestige of modesty would be

whisked away even as she clung to the last piece of tattered fabric that

covered her noble self. She kept calling out pathetically for the Lord as

she thrashed about and grabbed at the last remnants of her fabric .There was

still no sign of the Lord.

 

She couldn't hold out any longer against her tormentors.

 

And then there was a moment of revelation in which she saw she was indeed a

truly and utterly helpless soul --- a moment of cosmic loneliness that fills

one with "holy terror".

 

It is said that it was only at such an elemental moment when Draupadi, in an

act of supreme renunciation just voluntarily let go off the one last piece

of fabric she believed was everything to her at that moment in life, and

made one last plaintive cry to the Lord to save her, did Krishna come to her

rescue.

 

I think there is indeed an experiential difference--- symbolised by the

fabric Draupadi clung to till the very last and which the Lord wanted her to

give up first as a condition for his rescue --- there is a difference

between a soul's renunciation of 'upaya' and 'paripurna saranagathi'.

 

Sri LakshniNrusumhaya Namaha

Sri Vedanta Desika GuravE Namaha

Srimate Srivan Satagopa Sri Narayana Yateendra Maha Desikaya Namaha.

 

Most Humbly,

 

Sudarshan