Sampradayas and Vrindavan, Part II

May 1, 2016 Part One was actually written on April 28, 2016 and is included in the memories for that day. This article also has some relation to the reflections I had on Gurus Falling From the Sky. Unfortunately some of the pages linked to in article have been lost. I would kind of like to see them--I think I wrote what I could find out about Vivekananda, Ramkrishna and Sharada Mother's visits to Vrindavan, but for some reason never crossposted to this blog. 

There are several reasons I decided to write about "sampradaya." A confluence of reasons in sort, but it is an issue that has accompanied me ever since I made the decision to leave ISKCON and take initiation from Lalita Prasad Thakur. 

I have often said that if Prabhupada had not made an issue of the "unbroken disciplic succession" I would never have given it that much thought. And that if he hadn’t himself opened the door to Lalita Prasad Thakur, I might never have taken that direction. 

 I wrote several articles about this subject and have presented my way of thinking at different points in my spiritual career. I have been thinking lately of collecting my musings on these and other historical issues and publishing them as a separate volume, but since I am again at a different point in my life and hopefully my capacity for observation has been leavened with a little more wisdom, I need to express my current and hopefully yet more nuanced point of view. 

The sampradaya issues that are raised by the existence of the Gaudiya Math are just some of the many. They include the question of the relevance of teachings versus official adherence or investment with potency (śakti-pāt).

This is added to by historical problems like Baladeva Vidyabhushan and the question of Chaitanya’s adherence to the Madhva sampradaya.

And then, we have to wonder about Madhavendra Puri’s antecedents in terms of orienting him historically.

And then we can go back to the founders of the four so-called authentic Vaishnava sampradayas, and so on.

 And then there are the countless other sampradayas that rise and fall like waves in the ocean of Sanatan Dharma. A good example is the Ramkrishna Mission, which like ISKCON, does a bhedābheda dance around the question of whether to be or not to be a “Hindu.”  

 The other day I visited the Ramkrishna Mission for an event and wrote small article about it for Vrindavan Today [This article was unfortunately lost and irretrievable.] and also found other material about Ramkrishna and Vrindavan and posted that also. But all that also got me thinking again about history and the way that religions are created, grow and flourish, stagnate or die. 

The RKM’s Swami Suvirananda kept emphasizing in his address that Vivekananda had changed the concept of dharma. There is little doubt he was talking to the converted -- the doctors and practical men in the audience -- about the relationship of critique that they as Ramkrishna Mission sadhus have to the old-time concept of dharma as it exists in Vrindavan. 

“Help and service to the poor and needy” is now the base definition of dharma in India, “Serve God by serving Mankind.” And that is the doing of Vivekananda and others who preached the this modified karma-yoga gospel in the age of the Independence Movement, which holds even to this day.

As we heard from the same Swamiji, PM Narendra Modi in his youth wanted to become a RKM monk and even approached the head of the Mission for admission, but was told that his vocation was elsewhere. So Suvirananda Swami was right: the fundamental concept of Hinduism and Sanatan Dharma took a decided turn with Vivekananda, who was the culmination of the so-called Indian Renaissance, which was the reaction of Hinduism to the British presence, to modernity, and to Christianity.

Religion is always serves as the divine justification for Empire, and conquest ultimately means religious  or ideological conquest. Modernity in Hinduism grew up in relation to and in response to the criticisms of Christianity and Secularism. But Hindus liked the emphasis on love they heard being batted about in Christianity; after all they had heard the word prema before, and they could find that message in their own scriptures, and they decided that this was indeed a true religious approach that was most universal and the most befitting of the concept of progress.

 Vivekananda himself argued: Help the poor, the uneducated, the downtrodden, etc., and help them become materially well-situated because one who is suffering or starving has no mental or physical energy to cultivate spiritual enlightenment. I find that argument somewhat limited, because material progress has the tendency to lead one away from spiritual progress.

There are rickshaw wallahs in my neighborhood who live in the most rudimentary and insalubrious conditions, but they are making material progress. Every one of their huts is decorated with a satellite dish next to the bricks and plastic tarpaulins, and they regularly watch all the soap operas and cricket matches.

Money and progress means more consumption, not more religion, not more peace or enlightenment. The propaganda of materialism increases with its progress with the homogenization of media. I don't know how many of the newly blessed TV-owners watch any of the dozens of religious channels that are out there. But there is an insidious materialism even there also: the medium IS the message.

Anyway, my point is that sampradayas rise and fall in the river of history and are a product of a natural urge in man to find meaning in his own individual and collective historical circumstances. Different individuals embody particular ideas for which they find persuasive means of expression; they influence larger groups of human beings to act in accordance with those particular ideals. The way those ideas or memes survive and adapt to changing conditions is the life story of a sampradaya.

In actual fact, Sanatan Dharma is the One Sampradaya, the root and trunk, and all the rest are branches. In the case of the Ramkrishna Mission, the "new concept of dharma" is manifest in the RKM's own cultural ethos. For instance, their promotion (or at least tolerance) of an animal-flesh diet has made them much more attractive to many modernizers and demythologizers and evolvers who think that this is the way of progress.

The monks themselves strike one very much as technocrats in the same way vein as we see in some other modern Indian religious groupings like ISKCON Bangalore and a lot of the other South Indian sects, all founded by men and women who truly belong the modern world -- educated, anglicized, aware, eloquent, cultured, dedicated. They belong to the modern Indian (especially the Bengali) world, but even as that has been globalized, vacuumed into that homogenized world culture that is being created even as I sit here typing and participating in it.

 I don't really want to go into an analysis of the changing forms of religion as they manifest in Indian society. I am really only interested in the various versions of these currents as they are in play in Vrindavan, and I will go into that further in subsequent articles When I was posting the article about Ramkrishna in Vrindavan (Dead link: http://news.vrindavantoday.org/2016/04/ramkrishna-paramahamsas-visit-to-vrindavan-in-his-words/), I cut out the first sentence of his speech because I did not see its relevance, but later I understood it.

Ramkrishna prefaced his recollection of the trip to Vrindavan with the words, "Let me tell you something. One should follow various paths. One should practice each creed for a time." Ramkrishna was famous for this approach, and his disciples often proudly point to his "practice" of Sufism or Christianity, and in several instances, of Vaishnavism. But dilettantism is not the path to God, thought it might help with understanding. If anything, Ramkrishna was a bhakta of the Goddess, and so in all these instances he could perhaps find the common point of devotion, as is described in his visit to Vrindavan.

His "checking out" other spiritual paths was really only meant to confirm and legitimize his real spiritual commitment to the Mother. There may be many paths, but he did not really follow many, he followed HIS path and took occasional spiritual “vacations” in other paths.

 And that is really the point of sampradaya.

Vivekananda changed the focus from the Mother Goddess to Ramkrishna himself, and made bhakti to God as manifest in humanity the real culture of exclusive devotion to Ramkrishna and by extension to the Mother, and to the One God who underlies all these phenomenal appearances. One may say that a sampradaya was born in the particular crucible that connected Ramkrishna to the modern world through Vivekananda. I will continue these reflections over the coming days.