Devotion and Reflection in the Gaudiya Vaishnava Tradition

by Ravindra Swarup das

This article was originally published as “The Scholarly Tradition in Chaitanyite Vaishnavism: India and America” in ISKCON Review, Vol.1, No. 1.

One of the signs of health in a religious tradition is its ability to integrate emotion and intellect so that all thought is energized by feeling, and all feeling is disciplined and directed by thought. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder-acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, recognized this, and in his commentary to the Bhagavad-gita, he remarked that devotion and reflection "are interdependent as religion and philosophy. Religion without philosophy is sentiment, or sometimes fanaticism, while philosophy without religion is mental speculation."

The ideal of integrating feeling and thinking in religion is not always or even often realized. More often than not we encounter religious traditions in which the two have been separated. They become two-tier religions, so to speak. The lower tier is made up of a fervently emotional, relentlessly enthusiastic, and obstinately convinced following which understands its tradition's scriptures and "symbols" literally and feels threatened by reason and even education. The upper tier is made up of an urbane intelligentsia, often clergy, which is embarrassed by the naively faithful, and which has worked out a sophisticated piece of intellectual machinery enabling them to indulge in the same language and rituals as the naively faithful while intending something quite different by it – allegiance to a rational ethics or metaphysics, which is what their religion really amounts to, mythically conveyed.

I think that this sort of two-tiered religion is religion in a disintegrated form, even though theologies have been composed to justify it, e.g., those of Shankara in the East and Tillich in the West. In such cases the anti-intellectualism of the naively faithful may have justification, given this sort of trahison des clercs. At any rate, it is a problem for religions to stay integrated, and all of them go through phases of relative integration and disintegration, although it must be said that there are intrinsic characteristics that may make a particular religion more prone to one or the other. I myself believe that the Vaishnavism of Shri Chaitanya inherently provides for optimal integration of emotion and intellect, but to make the case here would take us too far into theological issues. For now, I just want to show that there was a strong and important intellectual tradition in Chaitanya's movement in India and that this tradition has come with the movement to the West. This intellectual side of Chaitanyite Vaishnavism is not as evident or as well-known as its devotional side, and the tradition has been criticized both here and in India as being deficient in rationality and reflection. For Chaitanyite Vaishnavism does exhibit, on the face of it, many of the features people associate with the lower tier of two tiered religion. Yet these features would also be found in an integrated religion, even though people may assume that they are incompatible with critical intelligence and rational deliberation.

Let me adduce some features of Chaitanyite Vaishnavism that would lead one to think of it as a lower tier, non-reflective religion of naive believers.

It is an uncompromisingly devotional tradition. Pure bhakti, unalloyed devotional service to God, is at once the means to salvation and salvation itself. Rupa Goswami defines pure devotional service as favorable service to Krishna without endeavor to achieve personal rewards (karma) or liberation through mental speculation (gyan). The only thing that counts in the end is the purity of one's devotion.

Bhakti is also defined in the Narada-pancharatra as "engaging the senses in the service of the Master of the senses (i.e. God)." As a consequence, a salient characteristic of Vaishnava devotional life is an unabashed utilization of the concrete and the sensual. Temples are equipped with lavishly decorated altars bearing opulently dressed images of God; devotees dress in distinctive garb and mark their bodies with sacred signs; much attention is given to the preparation and consumption of elaborate offerings of sanctified vegetarian foodstuffs; long, loud, and colorful public festivals such as the Rathayatra are executed with much enthusiasm; and, of course, devotees constantly hear and recite the names, qualities, and activities of Krishna. All these practices are meant to focus the senses and mind of the devotees on God.

Correlative to such devotional activity is a theology which develops and defends the idea of God as someone a person can really name, describe, and worship as an image in the temple. Vaishnava theology understands God to be concretely personal, to possess spiritual name, form, qualities, and activities. The descriptions of the persons of Krishna, Rama, Vishnu, etc., in the Puranas are not to be taken as allegorical or symbolic.

The distinctive feature, of course, of Chaitanyite Vaishnavism is the emphasis placed on chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. Chaitanya taught that chanting God's names was the yuga-dharma, the only means of salvation in this age. Chanting is considered to be especially efficacious in the form of sankirtan congregational chanting, in which the mantra is sung responsively to the accompaniment of percussion instruments and dancing. Moreover, sankirtan is frequently performed in public to attract people to the movement, for Chaitanya's movement was highly evangelistic. Chaitanya himself dispatched followers to preach from door to door, and he personally toured throughout India to propagate his sankirtan movement. He held that everyone was eligible for salvation through chanting; caste, sex, race, or learning were irrelevant, and his movement gained many adherents from the socially marginal and disenfranchised.

Chaitanya's attitude is made clear from this story recounted in the Chaitanya Charitamrita. While touring South India, Chaitanya encountered a certain brahmin in the temple of Rangakshetra. This man daily sat in the temple turning over the pages of the Bhagavad-gita, but his constant mispronunciation of the Sanskrit made him the object of general mirth and derision. Chaitanya, however, observed signs of genuine spiritual ecstasy on the brahmin's body, and he asked him what he read in the Gita to induce such ecstasy. The brahmin replied that he didn't read anything. He was illiterate and could not understand Sanskrit. Nevertheless, his guru had ordered him to read the Gita daily, and he complied as best he could. He simply pictured Krishna and Arjuna together on the chariot, and this image of Krishna's merciful dealings with his devotee caused this ecstasy. Chaitanya embraced the brahmin and declared that he was an "authority on reading the Bhagavad-gita." The point of the story is that the illiterate brahmin had achieved pure bhakti simply because of his fidelity to his guru's order, and the commentators cite a verse in this connection from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad: "Only unto those great souls who have implicit faith (para bhakti) in the Lord and in the guru are the imports of the Vedas revealed."

Chaitanya himself was quite well educated. He was born in Nadiya (Navadvip), at the time a center of Sanskrit learning and the seat of Nyaya philosophy. In his youth, Chaitanya himself taught Sanskrit grammar, and he was reputed to be skilled in rhetoric and logic. The change in his behavior after he took initiation from Ishvara Puri, a Vaishnava sannyasi, in Gaya, is described by Bhaktivinode Thakur:

Upon His return to Nadiya, Nimai Pandit (Chaitanya) turned out a religious preacher, and His religious nature became so strongly represented that Adwaita Prabhu, Shrivas, and others ... were astonished at the change in the young man. He was then no more a contending Naiyaik, a wrangling Smarta and a criticizing rhetorician. He swooned at the name of Krishna and behaved as an inspired man under the influence of His religious sentiments.... It was at this time that He opened a nocturnal school of kirtan in the compound of Shrivas Pandit with His sincere followers. There He preached, there He sang, there He danced, and there He expressed all sorts of religious feelings.

These features of Chaitanya and his movement have been the basis for the judgment that it neglects or even disparages the intellect. Since Chaitanyite Vaishnavism grew up in a milieu dominated by a twotiered religion – I mean the Adwaita Vedanta of Shankara and the smarta system he established – that judgment was expressed early on. The Chaitanya Charitamrita recounts the meeting between Chaitanya, who was by then a sannyasi, and Prakashananda Saraswati, the leader of the Shankarite monks in Benares. Prakashananda Saraswati said to Chaitanya:

You are a sannyasi. Why then do you indulge in chanting and dancing, engaging in your sankirtan in the company of fanatics? The sole duties of a sannyasi are meditation and the study of Vedanta; why have you abandoned them to dance with fanatics? You look as brilliant as if you were Narayana Himself. Will you explain why you have adopted the behavior of low class people?

But there was another side to Chaitanya and his movement. The Chaitanya Charitamrita recounts two occasions when Chaitanya orally delivered an exacting, sophisticated theistic reading of the Vedanta-sutras. One such discourse was offered in answer to Prakashananda Saraswati's criticisms. The other was delivered at Jagannath Puri to Vasudev Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, a Shankarite and eminent professor of the navya-nyaya, who subsequently became Chaitanya's follower.

Moreover, Chaitanya assigned some of his intimate followers to establish krishna-bhakti as he preached it, and the sankirtan movement itself, on a solid, scholarly and theological foundation. The leaders of this task were Sanatan Goswami and Rupa Goswami, two brothers who quit high ministerial posts in the government of the Nawab Hussain Shah to become disciples of Chaitanya. After taking instruction from Chaitanya, they were dispatched with a large collection of manuscripts to Vrindavan. They were later joined by four other sannyasi followers of Chaitanya. The six Goswamis of Vrindavan, as they are called, founded what was in effect a college or school of divinity. They are also responsible for establishing, at Chaitanya's request, Vrindavan as a place of pilgrimage. At that time the place of Krishna's early lila was practically wilderness, and the six Goswamis located and restored the sites of Krishna's various pastimes and caused temples to be constructed.

Sanatan, Rupa, and their nephew Jiva were the most prolific writers among the six Goswamis, being credited with four, seventeen, and over twenty works respectively. These include commentaries, devotional verse and dramas, as well as treatises on grammar, systematic theology, and devotional practices and rituals. Rupa Goswami's Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu has become a classic of Indian spirituality. It delineates the proper execution of the techniques and practices of bhakti-yoga, and systematically describes the successive stages in spiritual advancement. The work also provides an analytic discussion of spiritual ecstasies and emotions (bhava) and shows how to distinguish the genuine from the spurious. Rupa Goswami also adopts the methods and categories of Sanskrit poetics to classify and analyze the spiritual feelings that arise in various relationships between Krishna and his devotees (rasa-theology). Thus do emotion and feeling attain a rational, intelligible structure. Rupa Goswami's Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu demonstrates that emotion and even ecstasy can be melded with ordered analytical reflection on that ecstasy.

Jiva Goswami's major contribution is a systematic development, in his Satsandarbha, of Chaitanya's theology. He also composed a grammar, the Harinamamrita-vyakarana, in which the grammatical terms are formed from various names of Krishna.

The intellectual foundation laid by the six Goswamis was built upon by later teachers. We can mention their disciple Krishna das Kaviraj Goswami, whose Bengali biography of Chaitanya, written probably between 1550 and 1612, is also a compendium of Chaitanyite theology; and, in the eighteenth century, Vishvanath Chakravarti and Baladev Vidyabhushan. The former is noted especially for his Shrimad Bhagavatam commentary; the latter, for his Govinda-bhashya commentary on the Vedanta-sutras. He also wrote commentaries on the Bhagavad-gita, the Shrimad Bhagavatam, and Jiva Goswami's Sat-sandarbha. And in the nineteenth century there was Bhaktivinode Thakur, the author of over one hundred works. He had received a British education and was the first Chaitanya acharya to write in English. Bhaktivinode Thakur revitalized Chaitanyite Vaishnavism as a preaching movement and planned its propagation in the West.

When Shrila Prabhupada began to establish Chaitanyite Vaishnavism in America in 1966, the intellectual heritage of the movement was at first not much evident, either to outside observers or to Prabhupada's followers themselves. Most outsiders saw it as just another manifestation of hippiedom, not realizing that while ISKCON may have been in the counterculture it most emphatically was not of it. For Prabhupada's first disciples the emphasis was on chanting the maha-mantra, eating vast quantities of Krishna prasad, and getting free from attachment to drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll. Prabhupada's lectures were simple and dwelt on the themes "human life is meant for self-realization, not sense gratification," and "you are not your body." But as his disciples became more and more purified, Prabhupada introduced more and more elements of Vaishnava culture and his followers found themselves eventually absorbing a formidable body of teaching.

Prabhupada saw books as the foundation of his movement, and as soon as possible he organized ISKCON into an instrument for producing, publishing, and distributing books. He informed his disciples that the more efficiently they could publish and distribute his books, the more he would write. By studying his books, disciples all over the world could have the association of their spiritual master, and he informed his students that association with him through his books was better than his personal association. By distributing books, Krishna consciousness could be spread efficiently and effectively, for, as Prabhupada's guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, had said, the printing press was the brihat-mridanga, the great drum. The mridanga drum used in sankirtan could be heard for one street; the printing press could be heard around the world. Furthermore, books demonstrated to the world the authenticity and authority of the Hare Krishna movement; it was not sentimental or contrived, but based on ancient scripture, deep philosophy, and a long and venerable heritage.

This heritage Prabhupada transmitted through his translations and commentaries on the Bhagavad-gita, the Shrimad Bhagavatam, and the Chaitanya Charitamrita, as well as other works such as his "summary study" of Rupa Goswami's Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, also known as The Nectar of Devotion. His commentary on the Bhagavad-gita closely follows that of Baladev Vidyabhushan, and his commentary on the Shrimad Bhagavatam is indebted to those of Sanatan Goswami, Jiva Goswami, Vishvanath Chakravarti and Baladev Vidyabhushan.

Shrila Prabhupada's books have become widely appreciated in the scholarly community, particularly for their combination of devotion and scholarship. For example, Dr. J. Bruce Long, of the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, reviewing Shri Chaitanya Charitamrita, remarks:

Anyone who bothers to give a close reading to the commentary will sense that here, as in his other works, Shrila Bhaktivedanta Swami has combined a healthy mixture of the fervent devotion and aesthetic sensitivity of a devotee and the intellectual rigor of a textual scholar. At no point does he allow the intended meaning of the text to be eclipsed by the promotion of a particular doctrinal persuasion. At the same time, he establishes his doctrinal point of view clearly and convincingly....

Prabhupada had instituted daily classes on the Bhagavad-gita and the Shrimad Bhagavatam in ISKCON temples, and he was disturbed by a report in the Los Angeles Times (January 11, 1970) that Professor J. F. Staal of Berkeley had rejected an experimental course proposed by devotees on the grounds that ISKCON members "spend too much time chanting to develop a philosophy." Prabhupada answered Staal in a letter to the Times, and a scholarly debate ensued between them, by correspondence, over the scriptural validity of chanting. At one point Staal mentioned to Prabhupada that his conversations with ISKCON members had been unsatisfactory, but with Prabhupada, discussion was proceeding on a higher level. Prabhupada found this disturbing, and when he discovered that class attendance and individual study had become slack in many temples, a wave of reform went through the movement. Prabhupada made it clear that it was the duty of his disciples to master the literary and philosophical heritage he was transmitting to them.

Critics of ISKCON have interpreted the injunction against "mental speculation" as intended to make devotees mindless by banishing thought. Prabhupada's actual position was this:

There is no use in presenting dry speculative theories for sense gratification. Philosophy and science should be engaged to establish the glory of the Lord. Advanced people are eager to understand the Absolute Truth through the medium of science, and therefore a great scientist should endeavor to prove the existence of the Lord on a scientific basis. Similarly, philosophical speculations should be utilized to establish the Supreme Truth as sentient and all-powerful .... Scientific knowledge engaged in the service of the Lord and all similar activities are all factually hari-kirtan, or glorification of the Lord.

Rupa Goswami had laid down the principle that true renunciation means not rejecting any physical or intellectual facility but engaging it in Krishna's service. Then it counts as bhakti.

By 1974 Prabhupada had attracted a number of disciples who had or were in the process of getting doctorate degrees in mathematics, chemistry, economics, Sanskrit and religion. He had them meet together to form an institute, which the devotees named "Bhaktivedanta Institute," for propagating Krishna consciousness among intellectuals and academics. Prabhupada surprised many devotees by the importance he attached to this endeavor. He called his institute the most important arm in ISKCON, and told its members "the next phase is yours."

It is interesting to note how Prabhupada's actions in establishing the Krishna consciousness movement in the West parallel those of Chaitanya in founding it in India. The Chaitanya Charitamrita notes that Chaitanya exhibited "spiritual potencies" in propagating sankirtan in South India which he did not exhibit in his native Navadvip. Prabhupada comments that preaching should be done where people are receptive, and because Chaitanya found Navadvip full of unresponsive smartas, he went outside his native land to preach. In a similar way, Prabhupada says, he found his native India unresponsive to his attempts to spread Krishna consciousness: "the people of India, being absorbed in political thoughts, did not take to it." Therefore, he took it to the West. And in the same way that Chaitanya in India established Vrindaban as a place of pilgrimage, Prabhupada in America established a "New Vrindaban" as a place of pilgrimage. And in the same way that Chaitanya directed his educated disciples to establish his movement according to the scholarly standards of that time and place, Prabhupada formed his own educated disciples in a body to do the same in the West.

Prabhupada's institute has some further purposes. It is to continue the work of Prabhupada by bringing over from India more and more of the Vaishnava intellectual heritage, and it is to provide higher education to the many academically gifted children now moving up through ISKCON'S school system, where they are already being taught Sanskrit from Jiva Goswami's grammar. In 1975, Prabhupada outlined to me a plan for what he called "ISKCON Bhagavat College" – a university for ISKCON. One feature of this college would be a library housing a complete collection of texts from all the Vaishnava sampradayas.

The work of Prabhupada's institute has been inhibited by the necessary period of readjustment ISKCON has gone through after Prabhupada's passing away. In the scientific department, things were somewhat held up by a debate over whether the Christian creationists were a model to be imitated or eschewed. But ISKCON scientists are now breaking new ground, and those who like their science rigorous should appreciate Mechanistic and Nonmechanistic Science, An Investigation into the Nature of Consciousness and Form by Richard L. Thompson (Sadaputa Das), who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Cornell.

Those of us working in religious studies and Sanskrit have found at least one common cause with academic scholars of Hinduism, and we have begun a microphotography project in India to collect, conserve, and make available Vaishnava texts. The project is going on right now and is turning out quite successfully.

What contribution can devotee scholars make to the field of religious studies? One contribution is simply to present and represent articulately a major religious tradition in the way only those committed to it can, in thought enlivened by feeling. The field of religious studies has learned to be sensitive to the voices of those within a tradition and has recognized that they know their religion in a way no one else can.

And there is possibly another contribution. I mentioned in the beginning that I believe Chaitanyite Vaishnavism provides for a kind of integration of thought and feeling that is rarely seen nowadays. When I first encountered it, this wholeness forcefully struck me. It was highly attractive, and I remember thinking: this is what Christianity must have been like in the Middle Ages.

But we do not live in the Middle Ages, and if what we see today is mostly disintegrated twotiered religion, it is because religion in the West has had to pass through a Renaissance and an Industrial Revolution and now lives uneasily in a secular culture dominated by naturalism and scientism. All this has left its mark on religion, on the spiritual condition of Western people. We may recognize all too well our disintegration and have seen the truth in Yeats' description – "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." We know our malaise. "This world is too much with us," declared Wordsworth in anguish; "We have given our hearts away," and so he exclaimed that he would "rather be/ A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn." We know what he means, but we can't go back: the past is not available and besides, we know too much.

That's what I thought. But then I encountered Chaitanya's movement. Tucked away in some corner of India, it seemed to have eluded the historical processes going on in the West, to appear suddenly in America in the midst of the twentieth century, whole and integrated – like some living fossil that unaccountably survived a devastation. Something was now available that had not been available before.

But the momentous issue is: If Chaitanyite Vaishnavism had remained whole by not encountering those forces which had broken down Western religion, there was no way, having come West, it could avoid them now. Prabhupada clearly recognized this. He knew that if his tradition were to become established in the West, his disciples in his institute would have to come to grips with those intellectual forces that had led to disintegrated religion in the West – and come out successfully. He believed that he had given us the resources to do so.

It is our task to show that we have reasonable grounds for our convictions. If we have embraced Chaitanya's movement merely out of Romantic nostalgia or Wordsworthian longing or even out of sheer idealistic hope, it will not last. But l believe that we have accepted it because there are the best and most reasonable grounds for doing so. If we are successful in the intellectual task Prabhupada has given us, then we will come out whole. The danger is that Chaitanyite Vaishnavism in the West will gradually disintegrate into a two-tiered religion. No doubt success or failure are each instructive, but success will be the far greater contribution.