Bhakti and Embodiment

by Barbara A Holdrege

  This sādhana has two parts: external and internal. External is the performance of śravaṇa and kīrtana with the body of the sādhaka [sādhaka-deha]. In their minds [these sādhakas] mentally construct their own perfected bodies [siddha-dehas], and day and night they serve Kṛṣṇa in Vraja.… Following after one who is beloved of Kṛṣṇa,…in their inner minds they serve him eternally.61

  This passage presents the difference between the sādhaka-rūpa and the siddha-rūpa in terms of different forms of practice: the physical body utilized in external bodily practices, and the meditative body constructed through internal mental practices. However, in other contexts the distinction between the sādhaka-rūpa and the siddha-rūpa is presented as an ontological distinction between two categories of embodiment: the material (prākṛta) psychophysical complex that is subject to the binding influence of Kṛṣṇa’s māyā-śakti in the material realm of prakṛti; and the eternal, nonmaterial (aprākṛta) body that participates in Kṛṣṇa’s svarūpa-śakti in the transcendent Vraja-dhāman. In this perspective every jīva possesses a siddha-rūpa, an eternal body, which is an aṃśa of the self-luminous effulgence (jyotir) of Bhagavān and, like the absolute body (vigraha) of Kṛṣṇa himself, is constituted of cit and ānanda.62 Due to the binding influence of the māyā-śakti, the jīva becomes deluded by ignorance (avidyā) and mistakenly identifies with the material psychophysical complex and forgets its true identity as an aṃśa of Bhagavān. Moreover, the jīva forgets its unique inherent nature (svarūpa), which determines its distinctive role as an eternal protagonist in the aprakaṭa līlā and the corresponding form of its siddha-rūpa in the transcendent Vraja-dhāman. The goal of rāgānugā-bhakti is to awaken the jīva from the sleep of ignorance so that it can realize its svarūpa, unique inherent nature, and the particular form of its siddha-rūpa, nonmaterial body, which is eternally gendered in relation to the male Godhead, Kṛṣṇa, as either female—a female lover or maternal elder—or male—a male friend, paternal elder, or male attendant.

  The Gauḍīya discourse of human embodiment emphasizes the role of the guru and of meditative practices such as līlā-smaraṇa and dhyāna as two critical components in the rāgānugā sādhaka’s realization of the siddha-rūpa. The realized guru, who has attained the status of a samprāpta-siddha, perfected bhakta, and continually delights in the aprakaṭa līlā of the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, Goloka-Vṛndāvana, is ascribed a role in revealing or confirming to the sādhaka the identity of his or her particular siddha-rūpa.63 The practice of līlā-smaraṇa—contemplative recollection of the līlā of Kṛṣṇa and his eternal associates in Vraja—along with other forms of smaraṇa and dhyāna then serve as the means through which the sādhaka can gain direct experiential realization of the siddha-rūpa and reclaim his or her distinctive role as an eternal protagonist in the aprakaṭa līlā.

  Rūpa provides the basis for the practice of līlā-smaraṇa by instructing practitioners of rāgānugā-bhakti to dwell continually in Vraja by remembering (root smṛ) Kṛṣṇa and his beloved companions.64 Jīva elaborates on Rūpa’s instruction by providing an extended analysis of smaraṇa, which he defines as contemplative recollection of the names (nāmans), forms (rūpas), qualities (guṇas), eternal associates (parikaras), service (sevā), and playful activities (līlās) of Kṛṣṇa. He distinguishes five stages of smaraṇa: (1) smaraṇa, thinking about Kṛṣṇa in any manner; (2) dhāraṇā, withdrawal of the attention from external sense objects and focusing the mind on Kṛṣṇa; (3) dhyāna, meditation on the forms and other aspects of Kṛṣṇa; (4) dhruvānusmṛti, a more advanced stage of meditation in which consciousness flows in an unbroken stream towards Kṛṣṇa; and (5) samādhi, the most advanced stage of meditation in which the sādhaka attains a state of complete absorption that culminates in a direct cognition of Kṛṣṇa and his aprakaṭa līlā.65 In his analysis of the five-stage meditative practice of smaraṇa, Jīva deploys the principle of superordination by appropriating three terms that are central to the practice of yogic meditation in aṣṭāṅga-yoga—dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi—and embedding them in a devotional framework that reinscribes them as stages in the Gauḍīya practice of meditation on Kṛṣṇa. He explicitly distinguishes his understanding of the highest form of samādhi, in which the bhakta attains a direct cognition of the self-luminous absolute body of Bhagavān, from the yogic ideal of asamprajñāta samādhi, which he frames as a lower form of samādhi in which the yogin attains an objectless state of absorption in the impersonal, formless Brahman. Moreover, he suggests that those yogins who take up the purely meditative form of bhakti, śānta-rasa, in which they are intent on experiencing Kṛṣṇa as an object of meditation but do not desire an intimate emotional relationship with him, do not attain the highest form of samādhi in which direct experience of Kṛṣṇa’s aprakaṭa līlā is attained. Direct experiential realization of Kṛṣṇa’s vigraha, absolute body, and his aprakaṭa līlā is available only to rāgānugā sādhakas who seek to realize one of the four modes of passionate (rāga) loving relationship with Kṛṣṇa as pūrṇa Bhagavān: dāsya-rasa, sakhya-rasa, vātsalya-rasa, or mādhurya-rasa.66 Jīva allots a pivotal role to the meditative practices of smaraṇa and dhyāna as means to attain the highest stages of realization in rāgānugā-bhakti, as I will discuss further in Chapter 6.

  Building on the insights of Rūpa and Jīva, Kṛṣṇadāsa and later Gauḍīya authorities developed the practice of līlā-smaraṇa into complex meditation techniques in which the rāgānugā sādhaka visualizes in elaborate detail the aṣṭa-kālīya-līlā, the eight periods of Kṛṣṇa’s daily līlā that goes on eternally in the transcendent domain of Vraja. As part of these meditation techniques, the sādhaka visualizes the svayaṃ-rūpa, the beautiful two-armed cowherd form of Kṛṣṇa’s absolute body; the eternal forms of the gopīs, gopas, and other residents of Vraja; the spatial arrangement of the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, Goloka-Vṛndāvana, including the specific locale of each līlā activity; and the time of day in which the līlā activity occurs. The sādhaka also constructs a mental image of his or her own siddha-rūpa and visualizes this meditative body interacting with the eternal residents of Vraja in particular līlā activities. For example, if the guru has revealed or confirmed the identity of the siddha-rūpa to be that of a particular gopī, then the sādhaka visualizes his or her gopī body in all its particularity, including the gopī’s name, age, appearance, dress, place of residence, mode of service, and so on.67 The implication of the Gauḍīyas’ analysis is that regular meditation involving visualization of the mentally constructed siddha-rūpa serves to catalyze an awakening in which the jīva re-members (smaraṇa) its eternal siddha-rūpa and reclaims its distinctive role as an eternal participant in the aprakaṭa līlā. Established in the highest state of realization as a member of Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent entourage, the jīva savors the exhilarating sweetness of prema-rasa in eternal relationship with Bhagavān.

  Contending Bodily Identities

  The early Gauḍīya authorities, like contemporary feminist advocates of social constructionism, thus recognize a distinction between sex and gender, with the sādhaka-rūpa corresponding to the sexed body and the siddha-rūpa corresponding to the gendered body. However, whereas contemporary proponents of the sex/gender distinction essentialize the sexed biological body as a “natural” datum and relegate gender to the secondary status of a sociocultural construction, the Gauḍīya formulations reverse this hierarchical assessment in their ontological framing of the two categories: they essentialize gender as intrinsic to the eternal, nonmaterial siddha-rūpa and relegate the sexed material body to the secondary status of a karmic construction.

  In imagining the sex/gender distinction, the Gauḍīyas have grappled historically with the potential dilemmas posed by contending bodily identities in the state of realization. For example, consider the case of a Gauḍīya practitioner whose sādhaka-rūpa, sexed material body, is that of a male brahmin but who c
laims to have realized his siddha-rūpa, eternally gendered nonmaterial body, which is that of a female gopī. In other words, he/she is male outside but female inside. Does such a person transgress the heterosexual imperative and qualify as “transgendered”? Or would a more appropriate designation be “metagendered,” since we are dealing with an alternative bodily state that is simultaneously physical and meta-physical? How does such a person contend with these competing bodily identities? Does he/she continue to engage in external devotional practices as a male brahmin while internally identified as a female gopī, or does he/she adopt the dress and behavior of a gopī on the external plane as well?

  Although Rūpa Gosvāmin, Jīva Gosvāmin, and Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja do not directly address such matters, these issues were actively debated by later Gauḍīya authorities between the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. As Haberman has discussed, Rūpa Kavirāja and Viśvanātha Cakravartin are the two central protagonists in the debate. Rūpa Kavirāja (seventeenth century CE), in his Sanskrit works Rāgānugāvivṛtti and Sārasaṃgraha, claims that the sādhaka-rūpa is not the ordinary material body (taṭastha-rūpa), which Jīva glosses as the “body as it is” (yathāvastitha-deha), but rather it is the reconstituted material body that has been ontologically transformed through initiation and therefore is exempt from normative socioreligious injunctions. He interprets Rūpa Gosvāmin’s instruction that the sādhaka should emulate “the residents of Vraja with both the sādhaka-rūpa and the siddha-rūpa”68 to mean that a male practitioner whose siddha-rūpa is a gopī should cease to think of himself as a male and should adopt the identity of a gopī in thought, speech, and behavior on the level of the sādhaka-rūpa as well as the siddha-rūpa. He insists that the betwixt-and-between state in which “I am a male outside and a gopī inside” must in the end give way to a singular identity in the supreme state of realization: “I am a gopī, outside and inside.” The teachings of Rūpa Kavirāja expounded in his two works were condemned by a Gauḍīya council in Jaipur in 1727.69 However, despite this official condemnation by the normative Gauḍīya tradition, the positions articulated by Rūpa Kavirāja have persisted and have found expression up to the present day in the living practices of bābās in Braj who assume the identity of a gopī both internally and externally, adopting dress, ornaments, and mannerisms appropriate to their gopīhood. There are even reports of bābās who claim that their female siddha-rūpas have gradually transformed their male sādhaka-rūpas from the inside out—for example, by spontaneously manifesting breasts.70

  The normative Gauḍīya position in the debate over Rūpa Kavirāja’s teachings is represented by Viśvanātha Cakravartin (seventeenth to eighteenth century CE), an authoritative Gauḍīya theologian in the lineage of Jīva Gosvāmin’s disciple Narottama Dāsa, who composed original works as well as influential Sanskrit commentaries on the works of Rūpa Gosvāmin and other early Gauḍīya authorities. He is credited with resolving the debate by positing a two-model solution in which he interprets Rūpa Gosvāmin’s statement that the sādhaka should emulate the residents of Vraja with both the sādhaka-rūpa and the siddha-rūpa as operating on two distinct levels referring to two types of Vraja residents. On the one hand, in the case of a male practitioner whose siddha-rūpa is a gopī, he should construct in meditation a meditative body in the form of a gopī and should identify internally with the devotional mode of the eternally perfect gopīs who reside perpetually with Kṛṣṇa in the transcendent Vraja-dhāman and who are the paradigmatic exemplars of mādhurya-rasa. On the other hand, with the sādhaka-rūpa he should emulate the external devotional practices of Rūpa Gosvāmin, Jīva Gosvāmin, and the other Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana who resided in the earthly Vraja and who are the paradigmatic exemplars of sādhana-bhakti.71 In the final analysis the Gosvāmins are celebrated by Viśvanātha and his lineage as doubly paradigmatic, for their sādhaka-rūpas are male, while their siddha-rūpas are female gopīs, and they thus possess “bodies that matter”72 on both the physical and meta-physical planes.

  The Physical Signs of Enraptured Devotion

  Irrespective of the gender of the siddha-rūpa and the sex of the sādhaka-rūpa, the samprāpta-siddha, perfected bhakta, is represented in the Gauḍīya discourse of human embodiment as enjoying an embodied state of realization in which he or she remains inwardly identified with the siddha-rūpa, while outwardly the sādhaka-rūpa manifests as a transformed material body that is marked with the physical signs of enraptured devotion. The internal ecstatic state saturates all the senses and the organs of action and erupts in spontaneous bodily manifestations such as perspiration, trembling, bristling of body hair, tears, faltering voice, and change of color, which are termed sāttvika-bhāvas in the rhetoric of bhakti-rasa theory.73

  It is the nature of prema to agitate the body and mind.… By the nature of prema the bhakta laughs, and cries, and sings and being mad he dances and runs here and there. Sweat, trembling, thrilling, tears, choking, pallor, madness, sadness, composure, pride, happiness, humility—in all these bhāvas does prema cause the bhakta to dance; he floats in the sea of the nectar of ānanda of Kṛṣṇa.74

  The early Gauḍīya authorities emphasize that while the realized bhakta’s consciousness, immersed in the ocean of Kṛṣṇa’s ānanda, reverberates with the exhilarating waves of the nectar of prema-rasa, the physical body also thrills with the “divine madness” (divyonmāda) of devotion. The transformed material body, infused with bliss, manifests an array of involuntary physical symptoms, sāttvika-bhāvas, that are considered the externalized manifestations of the internal ecstatic state.75 This brings us back full circle to the passage from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with which we began our analysis and which we can now re-vision, from the perspective of the Gauḍīya discourse of human embodiment, as the paradigmatic expression of the embodied aesthetics of bhakti:

  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.76

  The Gauḍīya Challenge to Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala YogaRevisited

  In the Gauḍīya Sampradāya the human body is thus a site of central significance that is ascribed a pivotal role on three levels: first, as the material psychophysical complex that is to be cultivated on the path to realization; second, as the eternal, nonmaterial body that is to be attained in the highest state of realization; and, third, as the transformed material body that is the external counterpart of the eternal body of bliss. In Chapter 1 I discussed how the Gauḍīya discourse of divine embodiment challenges, both implicitly and explicitly, the ontologies, paths, and goals advocated by Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala Yoga. The Gauḍīya discourse of human embodiment discussed in this chapter poses additional challenges to the perspectives on embodiment and personhood promulgated by the exponents of these two philosophical schools by ascribing a critical role to the human body at every phase of the path and, more importantly, as part of the goal of realization.

  As discussed in the Introduction, in both Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala Yoga the human body is regarded as a fundamental problem intrinsic to the human condition because it is inextricably implicated in the bondage of the material realm. The root cause of bondage is not the human body in itself but rather ignorance (avidyā), which causes the empirical self to assume a false sense of atomistic personal identity by mistakenly identifying with a particular material psychophysical organism. In both schools the goal of human existence is to attain a state of liberation in which the jīva, empirical self, casts off its false sense of personal identity and realizes its true nature as the eternal Self—Ātman-Brahman in Advaita Vedānta or puruṣa in Pātañjala Yoga—that in its essential nature is beyond the material realm and the fetters of emb
odiment associated with saṃsāra, the endless cycle of birth and death. The exponents of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, in contrast, ascribe central importance to both the body and the person in their constructions of the path as well as the goal of realization.

  I would suggest in this context that the early Gauḍīya authorities, in developing their discourse of embodiment, have deliberately chosen terminology to designate human bodies and persons that is intended to distinguish their formulations from those of Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala Yoga. More specifically, they have chosen to use the terms rūpa and deha to designate the two principal categories of human bodies, with Rūpa Gosvamin using the designations sādhaka-rūpa and siddha-rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmin and Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja using sādhaka-deha and siddha-deha. I would argue that in both cases they have deliberately eschewed the term śarīra—which is the term that is generally used to designate the body in Pātañjala Yoga and Advaita Vedānta—because of its association with material bodies, whether gross material bodies (sthūla-śarīras) or subtle material bodies (sūkṣma-śarīras). They have chosen instead to use the terms rūpa and deha, which are not as burdened with the semantic baggage of materiality and thus can be used to designate not only material bodies, sādhaka-rūpas or sādhaka-dehas, but also perfected nonmaterial bodies, siddha-rūpas or siddha-dehas. Similarly, the early Gauḍīya authorities have chosen to use the term jīva to designate both the empirical self in bondage and the realized self that has awakened to its true identity. In this case I believe that they have eschewed the terms that are employed by Advaita Vedānta and Pātañjala Yoga to designate the eternal Self—whether Ātman-Brahman or puruṣa—because these terms are implicated in the notions of absolute unity and absolute separation, respectively, that the Gauḍīyas abhor. By using the term jīva to designate the realized self, they invest it with a distinct personhood in the form of a unique essential nature (svarūpa) and a unique nonmaterial body (siddha-rūpa) that distinguish it from all other realized jīvas while at the same time allowing for a personal relationship of union-in-difference with the supreme personal Godhead, Kṛṣṇa.