2 The Embodied Aesthetics of Bhakti
Fashioning Devotional Bodies
Among the various forms of Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions, we find a broad spectrum of modes of devotion. On one end of the spectrum we find more intellectual, contemplative, and meditative forms of bhakti, as expressed, for example, in the Bhagavad-Gītā (c. second century BCE), the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (c. fourth to fifth century CE), and the Śrīvaiṣṇava teachings of Rāmānuja (1017–1137 CE). On the other end of the spectrum we find intensely emotional, passionate, and ecstatic forms of bhakti, as expressed, for example, in the devotional hymns of the Āḻvārs (c. sixth to ninth centuries CE), the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. ninth to tenth century CE), and the Gauḍīya tradition inspired by Caitanya (1486–1533 CE). I would argue that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Vaiṣṇava traditions that favor more passionate and ecstatic expressions of devotion is that they share a concern for the human body as a site of central significance. In this chapter I will focus in particular on the new form of embodied bhakti that is expressed in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and on the ways in which this embodied bhakti is appropriated and reimagined in the Gauḍīya tradition as a distinctive new discourse of human embodiment that I term an “embodied aesthetics of bhakti.”
Erotic-Ecstatic Devotion: The Embodied Bhakti of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa
A number of scholars have noted that the passionate and ecstatic bhakti expressed in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa constitutes a distinctive new form of devotion that is markedly different from the more intellectual and contemplative forms of bhakti that find expression in different ways in the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, and Rāmānuja’s teachings. What these scholars have not noted, however, is that one of the critical dimensions of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s portrayal of bhakti that sets it apart from these other forms of bhakti is its embodied nature. In the Bhāgavata’s representations of bhakti the bhakta’s internal ecstatic state is often described as manifesting through the external body, overflowing into the senses and limbs and erupting in spontaneous bodily manifestations such as the bristling of body hair, stammering speech, weeping, laughing, singing, and dancing. The following passage is representative:
Without the hair of the body bristling, without the heart melting, without being inarticulate due to tears of bliss (ānanda)—without bhakti how can consciousness be purified? He whose speech is stammering, whose heart melts, who weeps repeatedly and sometimes laughs, who unabashedly sings and dances—such a person, united by bhakti with me [Kṛṣṇa], purifies the world.1
J. N. Farquhar was one of the first scholars to suggest that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa presents a “new theory of bhakti,” which he characterizes in terms that are reminiscent of the Bhāgavata passage just cited:
What distinguishes it [the Bhāgavata Purāṇa] from all earlier literature is its new theory of bhakti; and therein lies its true greatness. Some of its utterances on this subject are worthy of a place in the best literature of mysticism and devotion.… Bhakti in this work is a surging emotion which chokes the speech, makes the tears flow and the hair thrill with pleasureable excitement, and often leads to hysterical laughing and weeping by turns, to sudden fainting fits and to long trances of unconsciousness.… Thus the whole theory and practice of bhakti in this purāṇa is very different from the bhakti of the Bhagavadgītā and of Rāmānuja.2
Jan Gonda similarly suggests that the “passion and emotionalism” of devotion in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa constitutes a “new stage” of bhakti that differs from the “more speculative description of the earlier texts”:
Bhakti has entered here a new stage…[and] displays here aspects which in the older texts did not…become manifest, and these aspects were illustrated and stressed with a fervour and a conviction which can amaze the unprepared Western reader. Particularly in the life of the young herdsman god Kṛṣṇa a theory and practice of bhakti is developed in a very emotional and sensual poetry, which differs in its passion and emotionalism from the more speculative description of the earlier texts. Bhakti is here an overpowering, even suffocating emotion, which causes tears to flow and the voice to falter, and even stimulates hysterical laughter, loss of consciousness, and trance.3
S. N. Dasgupta, in his discussion of bhakti as a form of “devotional mysticism,” distinguishes three progressive levels, from (1) self-abnegation, self-surrender to God, and contemplative union with God, as taught in the Bhagavad-Gītā and reflected in the teachings of Rāmānuja, to (2) the desire for contemplative union combined with the longing to taste God’s love, as expressed by the devotee Prahlāda in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, to (3) the intoxicating, sensual, blissful, and ecstatic love of God that is celebrated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Dasgupta notes:
This bhakti…is no longer the old contemplative meditation of God, stirred by a deep-seated love. It is the ebullition of feelings and emotions of attachment to God. It manifests itself in the soft melting of the heart and expresses itself in tears, inarticulate utterances of speech, laughter, songs and dances, such as can only be possible through a mad intoxication of love. This kind of bhakti is entirely different from the calm contemplative life of complete self-abnegation and self-surrender to God and a mind wholly immersed in God and the thought of God.… They [the bhaktas] come to experience such intense happiness that all their limbs and senses become saturated therewith and their minds swim, as it were, in a lake of such supreme bliss that even the bliss of ultimate liberation loses its charm.… The bhakta who is filled with such a passion does not experience it merely as an undercurrent of joy which waters the depths of his heart in his own privacy, but as a torrent that overflows the caverns of his heart into all his senses. Through all his senses he realizes it as if it were a sensuous delight; with his heart and soul he feels it as a spiritual intoxication of joy. Such a person is beside himself with this love of God. He sings, laughs, dances and weeps. He is no longer a person of this world.4
Paul Hacker, through a comparison of the portrayals of the devotee Prahlāda in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, has demonstrated the differences between the representations of bhakti in the two Purāṇas. The more contemplative bhakti of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa is characterized by Prahlāda’s remembering, thinking about, or meditating on Viṣṇu, whereas the more emotional bhakti of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is characterized by Prahlāda’s ecstatic weeping, laughing, singing, and dancing while immersed in the bliss of Kṛṣṇa’s love.5
Hardy, in his study of the early history of Kṛṣṇa devotion, emphasizes that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is the first work in Sanskrit to express this new type of “emotional Kṛṣṇa bhakti,” which he characterizes more specifically as an “aesthetic-erotic-ecstatic mysticism of separation.”6 By adopting the canonical form of a Purāṇa, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa provided a brahmanical Sanskritic framework for this mysticism of love-in-separation, viraha-bhakti, which has its roots in the South Indian devotional traditions of the Āḻvārs. This viraha-bhakti—which finds consummate expression in the devotional laments of the Āḻvārs Nammāḻvār and Āṇṭāḷ and in the impassioned yearnings of the gopīs, the cowmaiden lovers of Kṛṣṇa, in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa—involves a dialectic of union and separation that is never fully resolved. Charlotte Vaudeville remarks:
The theoricians of Bhakti entertained, from the time of the Āḻvārs, a dynamic conception of Bhakti, whose highest state is less a repose than a tension, an unquenchable thirst even in the possession of God, a continual yearning and stretching for a fuller apprehension of the divine Lover, who unceasingly draws all souls to Himself. There can be no satiety in divine Love; and so it was the pathetic character of the virahiṇī, the faithful wife forever tormented by the pangs of separation from her Lord and longing for Him even when she enjoys the bliss of His presence, which remained for the Āḻvārs, as well as for their spiritual descendents, the most adequate symbol of Love divine.7
In the tenth book of the Bhāga
vata Purāṇa, which celebrates Kṛṣṇa’s festival of love with his cowmaiden lovers, the gopīs are represented as the paradigmatic exemplars of erotic-ecstatic viraha-bhakti, who in their insatiable yearning for their divine lover alternate between the agony of separation and the bliss of union. Moreover, the viraha-bhakti of the gopīs is embodied bhakti, in which the gopīs’ surging passion for Kṛṣṇa erupts in an array of involuntary bodily manifestations. Their body hair bristles, their eyes overflow with tears, their voices falter, and their breasts tremble as their bodies thrill with the intoxication of devotion.8
Bodies of Devotion, Bodies of Bliss: The Embodied Aesthetics of Bhakti in the Gauḍīya Tradition
The early Gauḍīya authorities develop a distinctive new discourse of human embodiment in which they appropriate and reimagine the embodied bhakti of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa in a system of discursive representations and practices that can be characterized as an embodied aesthetics of bhakti. The Gauḍīyas interweave three categories—bhakti, devotion; rūpa or deha, body; and rasa, aesthetic enjoyment—in order to generate this distinctive new discourse in which the human body is ascribed a pivotal role not only on the path but also as an integral part of the goal of spiritual realization. In his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and Ujjvalanīlamaṇi, Rūpa Gosvāmin reframes the authoritative devotional teachings of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa in light of Indian theories of aesthetics and produces a new form of embodied aesthetics founded on the category of bhakti-rasa. In Rūpa’s theory of bhakti-rasa the experience of rasa, aesthetic enjoyment, is reimagined as a transcendent religious experience and the religious experience of bhakti is reimagined as a transcendent aesthetic experience, and it is this transcendent aesthetic-religious experience of bhakti-rasa that is the culmination of the Gauḍīya path. This theory of bhakti-rasa is elaborated by Jīva Gosvāmin in his commentaries on Rūpa’s works and in his Bhakti Sandarbha and Prīti Sandarbha. Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja provides an encapsulation of the key elements of the theory in his Caitanya Caritāmṛta.
The theory of bhakti-rasa is a critical component of the theology of superordination through which the early Gauḍīya authorities accommodate, domesticate, and subordinate the teachings promulgated by rival philosophical schools and bhakti traditions. First, as discussed in Chapter 1, they deploy their discourse of divine embodiment to establish the supremacy of the Gauḍīya bhakti-śāstra over the jñāna-mārga of Advaita Vedānta and the yoga-mārga of Pātañjala Yoga. Second, as I will discuss in this chapter, they deploy the rhetoric of rasa from Indian aesthetic theories to reimagine the bhakti-mārga and establish a hierarchy of modes of devotional relationship that distinguishes the embodied aesthetics of bhakti promulgated by the Gauḍīya Sampradāya from other forms of bhakti propounded by competing Vaiṣṇava schools. Moreover, they articulate a distinctive model of human embodiment and personhood grounded in the embodied aesthetics of bhakti that serves to further secure their claims to supremacy over the contending paths of Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala Yoga.
Gauḍīya formulations of the embodied aesthetics of bhakti are founded on a discourse of human embodiment that is the counterpart of the discourse of divine embodiment discussed in Chapter 1. The notion that jīvas, individual living beings, are parts, or aṃśas, of Bhagavān assumes new significance when understood in relation to the Gauḍīya taxonomy of Kṛṣṇa’s divine forms in which certain classes of avatāras are termed svāṃśas, Kṛṣṇa’s “own aṃśas.” These svāṃśas, as discussed in Chapter 1, are regarded as partial manifestations of the vigraha, the absolute body of Bhagavān, and they are therefore considered part of the svarūpa-śakti and full of sat, cit, and anānda. Jīvas, in contrast, are termed bibhinnāṃśas, “separated aṃśas,” and are considered part of the jīva-śakti and therefore “on the border” (taṭasthā) between the material realm of prakṛti governed by the māyā-śakti and the transcendent domain of the svarūpa-śakti. While jīvas are thus considered aṃśas of Bhagavān, they are at the same time separated from the supreme Godhead because they are subject to the bondage of māyā-śakti. The ultimate goal of every jīva, according to the Gauḍīyas, is to awaken from the sleep of ignorance, throw off the shackles of the māyā-śakti, and realize its true identity as an aṃśa of Bhagavān. In this way the veil of separation-in-bondage will be lifted, and the jīva will enjoy an eternal relationship of inconceivable difference-in-nondifference, acintya-bhedābheda, with Bhagavān.9
The path to this goal, as framed by the Gauḍīyas, involves fashioning a devotional body by means of sādhana-bhakti, an elaborate system of embodied practices that comprises two forms of devotional discipline: vaidhī-bhakti and rāgānugā-bhakti. In vaidhī-bhakti the practitioner, or sādhaka, performs external bodily practices with the sādhaka-rūpa, the material psychophysical complex, and engages in a regimen guided by scriptural injunctions (vidhis) that is designed to purify and transform the psychophysiology, reconstituting the body of bondage as a body of devotion in which the mental faculties, sense organs, and organs of action are all oriented towards one-pointed worship of Kṛṣṇa. In rāgānugā-bhakti, an advanced form of sādhana-bhakti characterized by passionate love (rāga), the bhakta engages in a regimen that combines internal meditative practices with external bodily practices in order to realize a siddha-rūpa, a perfected devotional body that is an eternal, nonmaterial body of bliss.
In the following analysis I will begin with a consideration of Rūpa Gosvāmin’s theory of bhakti-rasa as an embodied aesthetics of devotion. I will then turn to an analysis of the Gauḍīya path of sādhana-bhakti, focusing on the regimens of practice for re-figuring the bhakta’s bodily identities and fashioning a perfected devotional body.
Aesthetics Reimagined as Bhakti-Rasa
The theory of bhakti-rasa is developed by Rūpa Gosvāmin in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and Ujjvalanīlamaṇi as part of his creative appropriation of the rhetoric of rasa derived from Indian aesthetic theories. This theory, which is elaborated by Jīva Gosvāmin and Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, includes a hierarchical assessment of the various modes of devotional relationship (bhāvas) that are cultivated in the bhakti-mārga and that find fruition in the various “flavors” through which the bhakti-rasa of preman, pure transcendent enjoyment of supreme love for Kṛṣṇa, is savored.
The Rhetoric of Rasa
The Sanskrit term rasa encompasses a range of meanings, including “essence,” “juice,” “nectar,” “taste,” and “flavor.” In Indian aesthetics rasa is ascribed central importance as the pivotal term that designates aesthetic enjoyment. The aesthetic theory of rasa first appeared in the Nāṭya-Śāstra (c. fourth or fifth century CE), an authoritative treatise on drama attributed to Bharata. The theory remained primarily within the sphere of drama until the advent of Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka (ninth century CE), which introduced the notion of dhvani (suggestion) and assigned primacy of place to rasa in traditional Sanskrit poetics. The rasa theory attained its classical formulation in the Dhvanyāloka-Locana (tenth to eleventh century CE), the commentary on the Dhvanyāloka by Abhinavagupta, the eminent exponent of Kashmir Śaiva traditions. Abhinavagupta’s reflections on rasa were systematized by Mammaṭa in his Kāvya-Prakāśa (twelfth century CE), the standard compendium of literary theory. Finally, it remained for Viśvanātha to incorporate the science of dramaturgy and the science of poetics into a single work, the Sāhitya-Darpaṇa (fourteenth century CE). This tradition of reflection on rasa, which celebrates Abhinavagupta as its principal spokesman, became the dominant school of Indian aesthetics. A radically different theory of rasa was advanced by a second influential school of Indian aesthetics whose principal exponent was Bhoja, an eleventh-century king of Malwa (Rajasthan). As we shall see, it appears that Bhoja’s school may have exerted a more profound influence on Rūpa Gosvāmin’s theory of bhakti-rasa than Abhinavagupta’s school.10
The theory of rasa, as originally laid out in the Nāṭya-Śāstra, classifies human emotions into eight funda
mental types termed sthāyi-bhāvas, or abiding emotions: rati (love), hāsa (humor), śoka (sorrow), krodha (anger), utsāha (courage), bhaya (fear), jugupsā (disgust), and vismaya (wonder). Eight types of rasa are also enumerated, which correspond to the sthāyi-bhāvas: śṛṅgāra (erotic), hāsya (comic), karuṇa (tragic), raudra (furious), vīra (heroic), bhayānaka (terrifying), bībhatsa (disgusting), and adbhuta (wondrous). Some recensions of the Nāṭya-Śāstra, as well as Abhinavagupta’s commentary the Abhinavabhāratī, add a ninth rasa, śānta (tranquil), which corresponds to a ninth sthāyi-bhāva called śama (tranquillity).
The Nāṭya-Śāstra elucidates the dramaturgic principles through which each of the sthāyi-bhāvas can be reproduced on stage and elicit the corresponding rasa, which will be relished by the audience as aesthetic enjoyment. According to the famous rasa-sūtra of the Nāṭya-Śāstra, “Rasa is produced from the combination of the vibhāvas, the anubhāvas, and the vyabhicāri-bhāvas.”11 The vibhāvas are the stimulants that, when represented in a play, make possible the audience members’ appreciation of the sthāyi-bhāva and savoring of the corresponding rasa. The vibhāvas are of two types: the ālambana-vibhāvas, or substantial stimulants, are the objects towards which the emotions are felt, such as the hero (nāyaka) and the heroine (nāyikā) of the play; and the uddīpana-vibhāvas, or enhancing stimulants, are the factors that serve to foster the emotion, such as the time frame and setting of the play. The anubhāvas are the words, bodily gestures and movements, and other outward manifestations through which the characters of the play indicate the presence of the sthāyi-bhāva. The vyabhicāri-bhāvas are transitory emotions, such as envy, intoxication, and confusion, that often accompany the sthāyi-bhāvas. In addition to the vibhāvas, anubhāvas, and vyabhicāri-bhāvas, Bharata introduces a fourth category, the sāttvika-bhāvas, which are involuntary bodily manifestations of certain emotional states, such as perspiration, bristling of the body hair, and trembling, that indicate the sthāyi-bhāva’s presence in the character. The dramatist is expected to be a highly adept craftsman who skillfully makes use of these four aesthetic components in order to allow the audience members to savor the most delicate nuances of the rasa.
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