By Anastasia Merkulova
The University of Maryland’s Bhagavad Gita Club held its weekly Bhakti Yoga (BYC) meeting in Stamp Student Union on Tuesday evening. A location change and unfavorable weather affected attendance at the meeting, according to the club’s president, Pragya Goel, a junior criminal justice and criminology major. BYC has held official meetings for at least 25 years.
According to its website, the club’s mission is to “share yoga and meditation, delicious vegetarian food, and ancient universal wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita with anyone who desires to learn more about it.” It meets every Tuesday in different rooms inside Stamp.
Goel says that BYC is “a place where students can unwind, destress, connect with spiritual seekers.” Students can explore spirituality, the connection with the divine and have intellectual conversations with all kinds of students.
Chairs were arranged in an inwards-facing circle and each meeting begins with a 20-minute mantra meditation, known as the Hare Krishna mantra. A keyboard, mridanga drum and kartals (hand cymbals) create the melody, and the mantra is sung repeatedly:
“Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare”
According to the club’s adviser, whose spiritual name is Karuna Avatar, these words are found in the Vedas—a large series of ancient Indian religious texts. Karuna said they have been chanted by yogis for centuries, and have a “profound effect on our consciousness.”
He said that Krishna means supreme divinity and God. Hare is a call to the feminine energy of divinity and Rama is another word for God that means “source of all pleasure.”
Karuna’s legal name is Kunal Kathuria, but he prefers to use his spiritual name which derives from the yoga tradition “when one accepts a spiritual teacher, they are given a spiritual name by them.” He became the club’s adviser five years ago when he and his wife were asked to step in and provide this service to students.
After the meditation, the 2024 book, “The Four Questions: A Pathway to Inner Peace” by Vaiśeṣika Dāsa was passed around the circle for each student to read aloud. Once a specific section was over, Karuna led an open-ended discussion.
The theme for Tuesday’s meeting was the fourth question of the book: “Where am I investing my attention?” Each meeting has a different reading or topic of discussion. There is allotted time after the reading for students to reflect and pose questions.
The club’s coordinator, Arya Thakur, a senior information science major, said that she has learned and grown a lot as a person in her past two years of involvement. Being from India, she shares a cultural and religious background with many club members and has felt much less homesick since joining.
According to Thakur, the club is a great place to talk about life because “the more you talk about it, the less of a burden it becomes.”
The Hindu temple International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) of DC provides a free, vegetarian dinner for BYC every week. Tuesday’s meal consisted of rice, vegetable curry, semolina dessert halwa, a cookie and a rose-flavored drink.
“The whole purpose of the club is to invite students to experience the happiness that people in the club experience … It’s a service to the community,” Karuna said. “It’s not a religion, it’s a way of life.”
Featured image: Club Adviser Karuna Avatar passes along “The Four Questions: A Pathway to Inner Peace” by Vaiśeṣika Dāsa. Photo by Anastasia Merkulova, Sept. 24, 2024.