According to the Gauḍīya ontology of the name, as we have seen, Kṛṣṇa revels eternally in the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, Goloka-Vṛndāvana, in his own blissful nature as svayaṃ Bhagavān and through this self-referral dynamic reverberates as a primordial vibration, which is his transcendent Kṛṣṇa-nāman that is nondifferent from him, full of sat-cit-ānanda and full of rasa. The transcendent name self-manifests on the gross material plane in an array of nāma-avatāras that serve as means of enlivening and cultivating prema-rasa in the hearts of bhaktas. Kṛṣṇadāsa emphasizes the critical role of nāma-saṃkīrtana in harnessing the name and unleashing its transformative powers:
From saṃkīrtana comes the destruction of pāpa and…the purification of the mind, and the sprouting of all sādhana-bhakti. [In it] is the sprouting of Kṛṣṇa-prema, the taste of the nectar of prema, the attainment of Kṛṣṇa, immersion in the ocean of the nectar.…169
In discussing the mechanisms through which the practice of nāma-saṃkīrtana awakens the sthāyi-bhāva of rati, love for Kṛṣṇa, and causes it to deepen into the bhakti-rasa of preman, Kṛṣṇadāsa suggests that the vibrating name stimulates the bliss that is latent in the heart of the bhakta, which begins to flow in rivulets of bliss. As the nāma-saṃkīrtana performance intensifies and gains momentum, the advanced sādhaka becomes increasingly absorbed in the blissful waves of the name’s ambrosial rasa. The entire psychophysical complex gradually becomes saturated with the streams of prema-rasa, which erupt in torrents of bliss that thrill the mind and senses and organs of action with the intoxicating madness of devotion. The consciousness of the sādhaka, drunk with preman, floats in the ocean of Kṛṣṇa’s ānanda, while his transformed material body manifests an array of involuntary physical symptoms, termed sāttvika-bhāvas in the rhetoric of bhakti-rasa theory, that are considered the externalized signs of his internal ecstatic state.
In Kṛṣṇadāsa’s hagiographic narrative, Caitanya, as the Kali Yuga avatāra who embodies Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā together in one body, is simultaneously the supreme object (viṣaya) of devotion in his essential nature as Kṛṣṇa and the supreme vessel (āśraya) of devotion in his identity as Rādhā. In his bhāva as Rādhā, Caitanya is celebrated as the perfect embodiment of bhakta-bhāva and of prema-rasa. In his accounts of nāma-saṃkīrtana performances, Kṛṣṇadāsa thus regularly portrays Caitanya as the paradigmatic mahā-bhāgavata170 who manifests all eight sāttvika-bhāvas as the involuntary bodily manifestations of his internal enraptured state of prema-rasa: stupefaction, perspiration, bristling of body hair, faltering voice, trembling, change of color, tears, and loss of consciousness.171
In the…dance Prabhu was wonderfully transformed; there arose the eight sāttvika bhāvas at the same time. His body hair stood on end, with gooseflesh, he was like a śimulī tree covered with thorns. And seeing the trembling of each of his teeth, the people were afraid that all his teeth would loosen and fall out. All over his body sweat flowed, and with it blood came forth; and in a choked voice he uttered “jaja gaga jaja gaga.” His tears flowed like a stream of water from a fountain, and drenched the people standing all around him. The lustre of his body seemed sometimes pale golden, and sometimes like the color of the dawn, and sometimes like the color of the jasmine. Sometimes Prabhu was motionless, and sometimes he fell to the earth; his hands and feet were like dried sticks, and would not move. Sometimes, fallen to the earth, he was devoid of breath.… Sometimes the tears of his eyes flowed and the mucus of his nose ran, and there was froth on his mouth, like streams of nectar falling from the moon.172
By repeatedly invoking the rhetoric of the sāttvika-bhāvas in virtually every account of Caitanya’s nāma-saṃkīrtana performances, Kṛṣṇadāsa presents Caitanya’s perfected devotional body thrilling with the name as the consummate paradigm of the realized bhakta.
5 Vraja-Dhāman as Place-Avatāra
From Geographic Place to Transcendent Space
The geographic region of Vraja (Hindi Braj) in North India is celebrated as the dhāman, abode, of Kṛṣṇa, the land where he resided during his sojourn on earth in Dvāpara Yuga. As discussed in the Introduction, Vraja has been a major center of pilgrimage since the sixteenth century and is represented as a maṇḍala, or circle, formed by an encompassing pilgrimage circuit, the Vana-Yātrā (Hindi Ban-Yātrā), that encircles the entire region. The Vana-Yātrā was established in the sixteenth century and schematized as a circular journey through twelve forests that is eighty-four krośas,1 or approximately 168 miles, according to traditional calculations. This encompassing pilgrimage circuit comprises a diverse array of sites, including villages and towns, temples and wayside shrines, bathing places along the Yamunā River, and geographic features such as forests (vanas) and ponds (kuṇḍas). During their circumambulation of the entire region of Vraja as part of the Vana-Yātrā, pilgrims may also traverse the three smaller pilgrimage circuits, or parikrama paths, that unfold from the major nodes of the encompassing circuit: the Mathurā parikrama, Govardhana parikrama, and Vṛndāvana parikrama.
Prior to its establishment as a major center of pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, Vraja existed primarily as a literary construction embedded in narratives of the life of Kṛṣṇa in brahmanical Sanskritic scriptures such as the Harivaṃśa (c. second century CE), Viṣṇu Purāṇa (c. fourth to fifth century CE), and Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. ninth to tenth century CE).2 As mentioned in the Introduction, among the earliest known religious authorities to perform pilgrimages in Vraja are Caitanya and Vallabha, who subsequently directed their followers—the six Gosvāmins of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the leaders of the Puṣṭi Mārga—to carry out the “reclamation” of Vraja. The process of reclamation involved identifying certain locations within the region of Vraja with specific events from Kṛṣṇa’s youth that had been recorded in the Purāṇic narratives of his life. Having “rediscovered” the “lost” līlā-sthalas where particular episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā are held to have occurred, the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, Puṣṭi Mārga, and other Vaiṣṇava schools3 then established temples and shrines to visibly mark these sites as tīrthas. One of the idealized notions of the sacred space of Vraja is thus as scriptural narratives mapped onto a landscape, transforming the geographic region into a place of pilgrimage. This mapping of authoritative scriptural narratives onto specific geographical locales occurred throughout Vraja. Haberman, in his illuminating study of contemporary pilgrimage in Braj, remarks regarding the process of reclamation:
Whether the developments of the sixteenth century were a “reclamation” or amounted to a new creation, vast amounts of work went into the cultural construction of Braj. These developments can be viewed as a process of externalization: that is, in the sixteenth century a world that had existed primarily as an interior world, described in Vaishnava scriptures and realized in meditation, blossomed into an exterior world of material forms, and this culture was expressed physically. The sixteenth century was the time of a great “coming-out” party in which the material forms of Braj culture were “uncovered” and “revealed.” In this regard the activities of Braj in the sixteenth century provide us with a rare glimpse into a process whereby myth directly influences history.4
In this chapter I will begin with an analysis of literary constructions of Vraja found in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, and the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa. I will then turn to a consideration of the contributions of the early Gauḍīya authorities, first, in transforming Vraja from a mythic space into a place of pilgrimage and, second, in providing an analytical framework to support their discursive reimagining of Vraja as a bimodal domain that functions simultaneously as a geographic place in North India and as a transcendent space beyond the material space-time continuum. As we shall see, these constructions of Vraja assume a central role in the Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment, in which on the transcosmic level the transcendent Vraja is repre
sented as an extension of Kṛṣṇa’s absolute body (vigraha) and on the material level the earthly Vraja is celebrated as the body (deha or vigraha) of Kṛṣṇa in the form of a geographic place.
Mythic Space, Pilgrimage Place, and Meditation Maṇḍala: Purāṇic Constructions of Vraja
Maura Corcoran, in her study of constructions of Vṛndāvana and Vraja in Vaiṣṇava literature, has identified three distinctive types of representations: Vraja as a mythic space, represented in narratives as the setting for Kṛṣṇa’s līlā; Vraja as a symbolic space, represented as a maṇḍala or yantra, a geometric diagram that functions as an aid in meditation; and Vraja as a geographic place, which constitutes a center of Kṛṣṇa worship and pilgrimage.5 Although there are problems with Corcoran’s analysis of this threefold model in relation to specific texts, the model itself provides a useful means of differentiating among the principal modes of representing Vraja in Purāṇic sources. My analysis will focus on constructions of Vraja in three major Purāṇas: (1) Vraja as a mythic space in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa; (2) Vraja as a pilgrimage place in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa; and (3) Vraja as a meditation maṇḍala in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa.
Vraja as a Mythic Space
In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa Vraja functions as a mythic space, a literary construction embedded in the Bhāgavata’s narrative that provides the setting for the life and līlā of Kṛṣṇa. The Bhāgavata’s account of Kṛṣṇa’s life in the tenth book presents the paradigmatic scriptural narrative of his līlā on earth, which, as discussed in Chapter 3, is modeled after the narrative of Kṛṣṇa’s life in the fifth book of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa but expands on and reconfigures the earlier material, investing it with its own distinctive valences. The Bhāgavata’s narrative unfolds through time in a linear sequence of events—beginning with Kṛṣṇa’s descent to earth and concluding with his return to his transcendent abode (parama dhāman)—in which the discrete events constitute the syntagmatic units, or episodes, of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā. The narrative is mapped onto space in a twofold configuration of categories: the puras, cities, of Mathurā and Dvārakā where Kṛṣṇa’s life on earth begins and ends; and Vraja, the cowherd encampment and broader pastoral arena where Kṛṣṇa’s life as a cowherd boy unfolds.
The Bhāgavata’s use of the term Vraja differs from the usage of the term that developed later, in the sixteenth century. With the establishment of Vraja as a major pilgrimage center in the sixteenth century by the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the Puṣṭi Mārga, the terms Vraja and Vraja-maṇḍala came to be used interchangeably with Mathurā-maṇḍala as designations for the encompassing rural area that surrounds the city of Mathurā and includes twelve forests, or vanas.6 As has been emphasized by both Alan Entwistle and Corcoran, in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, as well as in the Harivaṃśa and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, the term Vraja is often used in a narrower sense to designate a cowherd encampment or settlement.7 More specifically, in the Bhāgavata the term Vraja is frequently used to refer to the nomadic cowherd encampment across the Yamunā River from the city of Mathurā where Kṛṣṇa’s father, Vasudeva, took him after his birth and placed him in the care of the cowherd Nanda and his wife, Yaśodā. The terms Vraja and Gokula are often used interchangeably to refer to the particular cowherd encampment in which Kṛṣṇa and his brother Balarāma grew up, which is called Nanda’s Vraja (nanda-vraja) or Nanda’s Gokula (nanda-gokula) because Nanda, their foster father, served as its headman.
The Bhāgavata’s narrative distinguishes Vraja, as a nomadic cowherd encampment, from fixed inhabited places such as puras, cities, and grāmas, villages. Nanda’s Vraja, as the setting of the Bhāgavata’s central narrative concerning Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral life as Gopāla Kṛṣṇa, is distinguished in particular from the two cities that are associated with his royal status as Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa and that frame the central narrative: Mathurā, the city where he is born as Vāsudeva, the son of Vasudeva and Devakī; and Dvārakā, the city where, in his post-Vraja life, he establishes his kingdom and carries out his duties as the prince of the Yādava clan. Nanda’s Vraja is represented as a cowherd encampment that moves from one vana, forested area, to another, seeking fresh pastures in which to graze the cows. The term vana is used in the Bhāgavata to designate a large forest that includes woods, groves, and rivers, as well as meadows and hills for pasturing cows. Two forests are of particular importance in the Bhāgavata’s account of Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral life: Bṛhadvana is the “great forest”—called Mahāvana in the earlier account of the Harivaṃśa and in later lists of the twelve forests from the fourteenth century CE onward—where Nanda’s Vraja is located during the first five years of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood, and Vṛndāvana is the forest to which the encampment subsequently moves and where Kṛṣṇa enjoys the later phase of his youth, up to the age of sixteen.
Vraja, as an inhabited cowherd encampment, is thus often distinguished in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa from the vana, uncultivated forest, that surrounds the cowherd encampment and to which the cowherds go forth each day to pasture their cows. However, as we shall see, there are a number of instances in which the Bhāgavata uses the term Vraja in a more general sense to refer to the “land of Vraja” (Vraja-bhū) that is the pastoral arena outside of the city of Mathurā where Kṛṣṇa’s līlā unfolds, encompassing not only the cowherd encampment but also the surrounding forests—Bṛhadvana and Vṛndāvana—where Kṛṣṇa engages in his playful exploits with his cowherd buddies and cowmaiden lovers.
Vraja as the Pastoral Playground of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa
An extended analysis of the terms Vraja and Gokula in the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa reveals that the two terms, along with the term goṣṭḥa (literally, “cow-station”), are often used interchangeably to refer to a station, or encampment, of cowherds and their cows. The terms nanda-vraja, nanda-gokula, and nanda-goṣṭha are also used interchangeably to refer more specifically to the cowherd encampment of Nanda,8 who is celebrated as the lord of Vraja (vraja-pati, vrajeśvara, vrajādhipa, or vraja-nātha),9 while his wife, Yaśodā, is extolled as the mistress of Vraja (vrajeśvarī).10 While the residents of Vraja (vrajaukases, vraja-janas, or vraja-vāsins) are at times distinguished in the Bhāgavata’s narrative from the denizens of the forest (vanaukases),11 at other times they themselves are deemed to be residents of the forest because they live apart from cities (puras) and villages (grāmas) and do not dwell in houses (gṛhas), but rather they move from forest to forest and set up their encampment in the midst of the forest, arranging their carts in a semi-circle.12
The residents of Vraja, as represented in the Bhāgavata’s narrative, are the gopas, cowherds, and gopīs, cowmaidens, who abide in their nomadic pastoral settlement along with their gos, cows. The gopas include the cowherd elders (gopa-vṛddhas), headed by Nanda, who oversee the well-being of Vraja,13 as well as the cowherd boys of Vraja (vraja-bālakas or vrajārbhakas) with whom Kṛṣṇa engages in his boyhood adventures.14 The gopīs are celebrated as the women of Vraja (vraja-strīs, vraja-yoṣits, or vraja-vanitās), who are renowned for their fine-limbed beauty (vrajāṅganās or vraja-sundarīs) and are distinguished from the women of the cities (pura-vanitās or pura-yoṣits) because of their special status as the lovers of Kṛṣṇa in Vraja (vraja-ramaṇīs or vraja-vallabhīs).15 Vraja is adorned by the cows of Vraja (vraja-gos or vraja-paśus), who are the constant companions of Kṛṣṇa and his cowherd friends.16
Although the term Vraja is thus frequently used in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to refer to the nomadic cowherd encampment in which Kṛṣṇa and his brother Balarāma grew up, I would argue that the term is not exclusively used in this limited sense. Entwistle has suggested that compounds such as Vraja-bhūmi, “land of Vraja,” are first used by the early Gauḍīya authorities in the sixteenth century to denote “the general area near or around Mathurā in which Krishna’s adventures took place.”17 However, contrary to Ent
wistle’s assertion, the use of such compounds is not a sixteenth-century development but stems from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa itself, which uses the compound Vraja-bhū three times to refer to the “land of Vraja” where Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Bhagavān, appears in the guise of a human being, a cowherd boy, and unfolds his līlā, divine play.18
How sacred (puṇya) is the land of Vraja (Vraja-bhū) where the primordial Puruṣa—whose feet are worshiped by the guardian of mountains [Śiva] and by Ramā, the goddess of good fortune [Lakṣmī]—wanders about disguised in human semblance (nṛ-liṅga-gūḍha) and engaged in play (vikrīḍā), adorned with a garland of variegated forest flowers, tending the cows along with Balarāma, and playing his flute. What tapas did the gopīs perform by virtue of which they drink with their eyes his form (rūpa), which is the essence of beauty, unequalled and unsurpassed, difficult to attain, self-perfect, ever young, the singular abode (dhāman) of renown, splendor, and divine majesty?19
In this passage and several others, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa celebrates Vraja as a sacred (puṇya) land whose sacrality derives from its special status as the site of Kṛṣṇa’s birth (janman) and manifestation (vyakti) and the abode (nivāsa) where the supreme Godhead dwells during his sojourn on earth.20 Vraja is revered as the sacred place where Bhagavān, the supreme Godhead, appears in human semblance (nṛ-liṅga), in the guise of a cowherd boy (gopāla-chadman), as an object of vision (dṛg-viṣaya) before the eyes (sākṣāt) of the residents of Vraja.21
While the two [Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma] were playing (root krīḍ + vi) in Vraja in the guise of cowherd boys (gopāla-chadman) by means of their māyā, the season came that is known as summer, which is not very agreeable to embodied beings (śarīrins). However, due to the special qualities (guṇas) of Vṛndāvana, where Bhagavān, Keśava [Kṛṣṇa], is present before one’s eyes (sākṣāt) along with Balarāma, it appeared as though it were spring.22
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