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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Begging for God/dess.. What is a legendary Baul ??


There is a huge misunderstanding that Baul's are beggars, they are only beggars for God/dess, mostly spread by modern day Vaishnava from America.

 We are all beggars in this world we are all begging for our survival, we are all begging for money, we all have to support ourselves and our families, it is often easier to pick out a marginalized group and point a finger. 


Baul's are only beggars for Goddess, Baul's of the days long gone would completely forget about their material reality, artha, they relied on Dakshina of the villagers, they never let the villagers bow down and touch their feet. Hari Krishna coming into a village was their wake up call, wake up, come and learn what life is about, come and learn the shastra through their song and dance, wake up. However, today many scholars come to them and offer them a small donation and they take all their songs and mess all up, they do not know who wrote the songs and they attribute them to the wrong people, they are the do gooders, really doing wrong,

The world is rapidly changing, the world has changed, Baul's are extinct,  Bauls have needed to change, unfortunately it is easy for someone from another country, a different ancestry to even understand and I have heard some say Baul's need to stay the way they were. Are you practicing what your ancestors taught, are you dressing the way you ancestors dressed?


The world is not supporting the way they were, they actually are suffering because Baul's are innocent and trusting, today people are so clever, it is easy to use the Baul's, take their music, and pose as a Baul, while the real Bauls suffer. It is easy when you are starving and suffering to take and not give back to the Baul's. It is easy to offer them a few rupee's and take their songs, when they are living through a pandemic.

In the old days Bauls were offered dakshina or offering of gratitude to the Guru. Yes, Bauls were Guru's who dedicated their lives to pass on the most important spiritual knowledge of the Upanishads, Vedas, Yoga and Indian Philosophy. 


They provided deep inspiration to the people living in the rural villages of Bengal. Purna Das Baul was the first Baul who made sure Bauls recieved money for their songs for their performances. Although his father Nabani Das would be have been furious if you gave him money for his singing as he was a Baul Guru, it was automatic that he received Dakshina out of respect for his amazing knowledge and spontaneous healings, it was a way of respect, a way of being grateful. 

Bauls do not build temples or have not written books. This lineage of Bauls is an oral living parampara tradition. They do not preach a doctrine and collect devottee's. In my opionion they are more pure devotee's than the orthodox religious reformers of the past century because they were not as Britishized in their way of thinking. 

To a book educated person the Bauls may have appeared as lower than the reformers but if they understood Bauls were more original than themselves that they actually were the parampara the sampradaya. It is the new age Vaishnava who made up a parampara.

Purna Das Baul being the eldest saw how his mother Brajobala Dasi struggled to feed her children because Nabani Das was off wandering India healing others and feeding other children on his travels. 


Even when Purna Das Baul was 7 or 8 he noticed everybody making money off of the Bauls, and said why should the Bauls not be paid for what they do, they have families and the old ways of survival no longer work. 

Purna was an advocate of lifting the Bauls up. Bauls should be the only ones gaining from Baul, other people are making money by using the Bauls, he felt only Bauls should be profiting off of Baul. 

Bauls are wandering spiritual messengers they were the newspaper before they newspaper, they taught the science of life, how to achieve God while being in the human body, they had to know about all of life, how to be human and still be divine.

Purna Das Baul is the first Baul to sing on the trains in Bengal India. Now we see Bauls singing on trains in Bengal and all the credit for this goes to Purna Das Baul, he was the first before him nobody did this. 

This is history and how Purna Das came to Calcutta, one train stop, next train stop. He got the milk from Gopal Das Baul who married his sister Radharani Dasi, Gopal was the first Baul to play the Dotara and was the son of the Head Pujari of the Nityananda Temple in Ekkchaka. 

Purna Das Baul was given the milk by Gopal Das for free and  served milk to the tea stall attendants, by doing this it was the only way he could enter the train station, otherwise he had no money to purchase a ticket to get in. Purna Das Baul struggled unbelievably to make a platform for the Bauls. He had to help his mother, he was the type of son who would not allow his mother to suffer, so he thought of ways to help her.

His father the Great Baul Saint Nabani Das Baul was of wandering helping to heal and feed everybody but as a Baul he sometimes forgot he had a family.


 Purna Das never asked for money or begged for money, it was his friends that collected for him. Then he sang, this is Baul history this is what legends are...and he did this when he was 7 or 8 years old, he soon realized by singing the songs from his lineage, the more than 5,000 songs he had laboured to learn he could give something back to his mother and his village.

 It is not that he sang songs to beg, he had done his sadhana from birth, he knew his lineage, he had already laboured long years learning sanskrit, learning the oral tradition.

Today we pay for books, newspapers, magazines, TV and the Internet, we pay to get certified in just about every aspect of Indian spirituality, we pay to keep the temples. 

Bauls provided these services through song and dance way before people even had books, they taught lessons in Indian spirituality, in the art and science of life, how to cooperate with nature, how to reach the highest, deep love by removing the shackles that bind us, for this they were given dakshina. Bauls have always been a major part of life in rural Bengal, they an integral part of Bengali culture.

Baul's are the Tantric spiritual Guru bards, spiritual musical mystical Guru minstrels from West Bengal India. They were oral Sanskritists singing their songs in vernacular Birbhum Bengali. 


I can say Babu Kishan is the last who was trained by Nabani and Brajabala, because he had an interest and tendency. He is the eldest and last to be initiated by Nabani Das Khyepa Baul, his brothers and the cousins the eldest child of Laxshman Das Bauls, Bhavani younger than Babu grew up with Nabani too, however Sanskrit and preserving their Baul tradition was not a tendency for Bhanvani, she was like a dear sister to Krishnendu aka Babu Kishan.

Baul's are the magical removers of darkness, they awaken the soul. 

They have been holding the key to the unseen magical world for thousands of years, there is a flow of magical lineage flowing through their blood. Scholars and outsiders can only speculate and their speculations are wrong.

Baul's are simple but it is not simple to just call oneself a Baul, you must have done years and years of sadhana under a Guru, who also has the gift or the key, and can pass the gift on.





Copyright 2011 all rights reserved. Revised November 2021

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