Preface

Preface

samuddhṛtaṃ bhāgavatābhidhānadugdhāmbudheryannavanītapiṇḍam । kṣrīśaṃkareṇācyutakiṃkareṇa buddhyā juṣadhvaṃ śitayā sudhīrāḥ ।।2।।samastaśāstrasatsāramuddhṛtya vidadhe adhunā । bhaktiratnākarākhyaṃ tat saṃgrahaṃ śaṃkaraḥ kila ।।3।।

sarbba-śāstra-sāra āni                   karilā śaṅkara dewe

mahāgrantha bhakti-ratnākara .

mahā mūrkha huẏā ma-i karilom̐ ihāra pada

anugrahe īśbara kṛṣṇara ..

‘Bringing the essence of all primary texts (śāstras), Sankaradeva had authored

this great book entitled Bhakti Ratnakara.

I, a great fool, have now rendered it into verse,

by means of the grace of Lord Krsna.’

This is an attempt to translate into English Ramacarana Thakura’s (Assamese) verse rendering of Sankaradeva’s Bhakti Ratnakara.

Sankaradeva, the propagator of pure devotion (bhakti) in Assam and the founder of the Eka Sarana school, had extracted key passages from the Bhagavata Purana and such other seminal texts as the Bhagavad Gita, and these excerpts were arranged, according probably to a plan, by the saint-scholar, along with the commentaries of Sridhara Svami (on the Gita and the Bhagavata), into chapters known as “mahatmyas,” in a compilation entitled Bhakti Ratnakara (literally, The Mine of the Gem of Pure Devotion).

The book was rendered later on into Assamese by Ramacarana Thakura who was the nephew of Madhavadeva, the foremost disciple of Sankaradeva, and a key personality of the Eka Sarana Movement in the post-Sankaradeva period.

The Bhakti Ratnakara has been termed as a “compilation of the essence” (sara samgraha) of all scriptures by Gopalacarana, another prominent personality of the Sankaradeva movement (who also rendered the work into Assamese but this time in prose[1]). It has been referred to as a “book having very deep meaning” (parama gudha grantha) by the same author and as “scripture” (sastra). Ramacarana also had called the Ratnakara a “great book” (maha grantha). All these statements attest to the tremendous importance accorded to this book by the scholar-devotees of the Eka Sarana faith. 

There are altogether thirty-five chapters in the text of Ramacarana available to us. Thirty-five also appears to be the correct figure with respect to the number of chapters in the original (in Sanskrit). We must warn the reader that there have occurred several additions and interpolations of spurious nature to the manuscripts of the original work, resulting, unfortunately, in many of these spurious additions getting conveyed in modern printed editions. Text-critical studies of this unique work of Sankaradeva by scholars endowed with sufficient understanding of the import of the text would perhaps set to rest all speculation in this regard. In the opinion of this author, the number of chapters in Ramacarana’s translation is the same as that of the original Bhakti Ratnakara.

The edition brought out by Dattabaruva and Co. has been utilized in this translation.

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[1] In all probability, after Ramacarana, in the 17^th century CE.