More on cultural specifics

Art by Shyam Nadh
You try to explain or retain the symbolism of Radha Krishna Lila by Jungian archetype theory which does not make any link between the material world and the transcendental world as BVT's theory does. I agree that it has some explanatory power. However, this view requires a different view of rasa theory from that of the Goswamis.

First of all, as I already stated previously, there seems to be a little bit of confusion about the "dustbin of Maya" comment, which is indeed Mayavada. I do not hold that view myself. I am a Vaishnava and I believe strongly that the material world is real, though temporary. Maya means taking temporary phenomena as having ultimate value. They have only reflected value. I am in perfect accord with Bhaktivinoda Thakur here.

Nevertheless, we do have a problem, and I don't see how it can be resolved by taking a purely literalist approach. That may be what Bhaktivinoda Thakur did; it is quite possible, but I do not find that it adequately deals with the problem of cultural relativism and the Absolute Truth, which by definition must be beyond any such relativism. I already mentioned somewhere that Satya Narayan said that the historical accident (historically when?) of the Indian culture at the time of Krishna's incarnation perfectly replicates the spiritual world. As though there is some concrete spiritual world that can be found on Google Earth (leaving aside Bhauma Vrindavan and all that).

In my way of understanding this, the cultural situation represented in the mythical Vrindavan existed only in people's minds as an approximation or ideal, whenever it came into existence. That is why I find it so funny when these Indian scholars try to portray something like the "Bengali society as depicted in the Sri Krishna Kirtan" or whatever. It makes as much sense as trying to reconstruct medieval Europe from Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales or from the legends of the Knights of the Round Table. We may get some idea, but it will only be a subjective ideal with its roots in the time of the author, not a real picture.

Radha and Krishna's lila arises from a composite image that from the very beginning was meant to contrast the real and defective world of human experience in Indian society; it extrapolated an ideal vision of love and then mapped that onto the Supreme Truth as a metaphor. It was never real. In the article "History is Bunk" I quickly jotted down some of my ideas about this.

My tendency, as I have indicated before, is to accept that whether Mayavadi or Theist (broad use of terms), all spiritually minded people are idealists in the philosophical sense, i.e., they believe in the primacy of consciousness. This is what the word chit really indicates. Consciousness contains within it an infinite number of possibilities, and since they all come from the same source, i.e., God, they have, on one level, equal value.

On another level, there is no meaning to variety without hierarchy. Even the Mayavadi "idealizes" his "ideal" of the non-differentiated Absolute. This is philosophically persuasive because God is really the Ideal beyond all ideals, the Archetype beyond archetypes. As soon as we identify God in phenomenal terms, we are immediately restricting Him in some way. This is why the negative path is an essential part of any theological discourse. In Christianity and Islam, this is the constant fight against idolatry or shirk, in Advaita Vedanta, against Maya.

And we too, even as Vaishnavas with our commitment to Nama, Rupa, Guna, Lila, etc., are also engaged in the same process of cutting away material concepts of the Supreme Truth. We simply negate the limitations placed on the Absolute by depriving It of personality, relationship and variety. We validate this by saying that God's glory lies in his accessibility, in his making himself available to an infinity of fragmented consciousnesses, His own separated parts, for the sake of experiencing rasa, which is another way of saying the infinite varieties possible in love. Nearly all religions around the world, as far as I can tell, whether incipiently or as a result of cultural transfusion, accept the idea of love as somehow being central to the idea of God.

Central to the Gaudiya Vaishnava doctrine is the distinction between Mahamaya and Yogamaya. In one sense, all of Krishna's energies are one and non-different from Him. parāsya śaktir vividhaiva śrūyate. Maya for the Vaishnava really means the medium which God uses to relate to the jiva soul. Maya is the illusion of separateness. This applies equally to Mahamaya and Yogamaya, the difference being that the essence of Mahamaya is discovering God as God, whereas Yogamaya is about discovering Love of God. It is something like stepping through the looking glass out of the Bizarro world.

The major theme of Mahamaya is that God is hidden; He is the unconscious center or object (vishaya). Put another way, where the vishaya appears to be something other than God, i.e., where God is not recognized as the object. In one sense, Yogamaya is no different, since a nitya-siddha devotee similarly does not recognize God as God, but accepts an apparently phenomenal manifestation as vishaya. That, we recognize, is God.

Gaudiya Vaishnavas do, however, accept that there is a difference between prakata lila and nitya lila. Sri Jiva and Vishwanath's commentary on 10.14.37 is particularly instructive in this regard. Vishwanath seems to postulate the necessity of a material world in order to show by contrast the value of the transcendental. Jiva says something similar in his comments on UN 1.20. So variety implies hierarchy.

In other words, love is the unrealizable ideal in the material world, and so humans project this ideal onto the spiritual and then try to emulate it in the phenomenal world, according to their distorted sense of Truth.

Now though I keep using the term "projection," and this really is the crux of the matter, it does not mean that "Man creates God" instead of "God creates Man." Actually, I find this opposition to be a real red herring. God and Man create each other together. Or, the Jivatma and Paramatma are engaged in simultaneously creating a lila together. You cannot separate the Jivatma from the Paramatma at any time.

This chicken or egg question is relatively meaningless and we have to look at it in an entirely different way. The infinite God is trying to reveal Himself to finite human beings through their experience of the world. Humans have a natural tendency to see the ideal of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and that is what they call God. And wherever they are, in whatever cultural circumstances they are, they produce artefacts that in some way or another reproduce their perception of that ideal. Even in the most negative moments, e.g. "shock art", they are really saying "see how far we have fallen."

Radha and Krishna, as I keep saying, are a symbol of the ideal. This symbol is Transcendent, even though it appears within a particular culture. Our thinking and meditation on this symbol is and should always be informed by the striving for the highest perfection of Love, which must be reflected by our behaviour and actions in this world. If the "ideal" does not inform the "real", then the ideal is emptied of its reality, i.e., its transformative power.

Then it ceases to be a religious symbol and becomes a mere fable. It ceases to be transcendent and needs to be refreshed by revision.

The error we all make when we are literalist is to see God in linear terms. We think Krishna is literally living on a planet somewhere, expanding physically into various Vishnu forms, etc., etc.

Radha and Krishna are real subjectively (that is what I mean by idealism). There is nothing wrong with saying that they are a projection because the potential for envisioning the ideal comes through God and His representatives, i.e., those who come in parampara, i.e., those who preserve and expand the symbolic tradition through explanation and execution.

The parampara, through its cultural products, through its success in creating community, turns a symbol into a kind of objective reality. When we strive for an ideal, when symbols take on deeper and deeper meaning on multiple levels, they produce individual and collective experiences of rasa. In a sense, that experience itself IS God. That is the way God makes himself known. That is how we enter into communication with him. This is how Yogamaya works. Raso vai saḥ.