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The Five Primary Relationships (Rasas)

Two hands holding a heart

As hard as they may sometimes be, relationships between people form the fulcrum of existence. Our actions and choices are judged on whether they help or hinder the balance of our relationships with others. We humans are by nature gregarious social creature; isolation rarely lasts long and almost never by choice. The Sanskrit wisdom texts offer insight into this universal human trait: personhood is the nature of the soul. We are gregarious not just now, in our embodied state, but eternally.

Some of the oldest treatises on the subject of relationships originated in 15th-17th-century India. These Sanskrit texts are often grouped under the heading of rasa, which refers to the distinct flavor or quality of something. The scholar-practitioner Rupa Goswami is often credited with having developed rasa theology as “the soul’s particular relationship with the divinity in devotional love”. The relationships between “devotees” (lovers of God) and God resemble loving feelings that humans experience with one another, such as lover and beloved, friend and friend, parent and child, and master and servant.

The word rasa has several meanings. The most common is “taste” or “essence.” A traditional Indian dinner, for instance, contains several rasas, or flavors: sweet, salty, spicy, pungent, and so on. When applied to devotion, the word rasa signifies a shade or flavor of loving exchange. Devotees situated in shanta rasa, or the neutral stage, appreciate God with a mood of awe and veneration as the merciful deliverer of fallen souls. The aspiration of such devotees is to study scripture, live in a peaceful place, keep company with saints, and always think of the eternal form of Krishna. Examples of these devotees include yogis who meditate on paramatma, the Supreme Being present in their hearts. In the eternal world, where everything is sentient, even Krishna’s flute and the cows of Vrindavan experience this form of neutral love.

Devotees who feel an active, affectionate attachment to Krishna are described as serving in dasya rasa, a reverential mood of servitude. Devotees in this rasa take shelter in and feel protected by God. Some popular personalities in this mood are Hanuman, the monkey-like warrior-servant of Lord Rama, and Arjuna, hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Devotees in dasya rasa can face all kinds of adversity calmly, knowing they are protected by Krishna. In dasya rasa, devotees honor Krishna as their superior. 

In sakhya rasa, friendship, devotees love Krishna as their equal. The mood of a sakha, or friend, is playful, someone who jokes and shares adventures with the Supreme Being. In this friendly mood, Krishna’s identity as the Supreme Being and source of all creation is subdued and secondary to the spontaneous interactions between Krishna and his friends. The cowherd boys of Krishna’s village exemplify this form of love. 

Devotees who feel a sense of responsibility for God’s well-being, who treat him as a parent would a child, are situated in vatsalya rasa. Devotees in this parental mood care for Krishna as though he is not self-sufficient, but needs their care and attention. God for these devotees is no longer the providing Father but a dependent Child. Krishna’s mother and father, Nanda and Yashoda, embody this mood of parental love. 

The devotees that embody these rasas bow before the position of the gopis, the cowherd women of Krishna’s village, who have no concern for guidelines, responsibilities, or restrictions. Their feelings of conjugal affection for Krishna, madhurya rasa, ignore all social constraints. Their love is unfettered, unconcerned with anyone’s opinion and without regard for consequences. The gopis belong to Krishna—heart, body, and soul.

For a more detailed explanation of the five rasas see Prabhupada’s Nectar of Devotion, 23, 271-357

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What Did Prabhupada Mean In His Statements Concerning Hitler?

Auschwitz. Photo by Erica Magugliani from unsplash.com

Recently I received an email from a devotee I had known in France in the 1970s. We haven’t had contact since then. It turns out that in the years since we were last together he discovered he is the grandchild of Jewish Polish survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps. Questions about statements from Srila Prabhupada concerning Hitler prompted this old friend to write and ask if I could help him understand the meaning of certain statements. 

“Dear Prabhu,

How wonderful to hear from you after all these years. Your email was like entering into a time machine and going back to our youth. I’m so glad you thought to reach out. Your questions are of course very challenging, but you are correct that I’ve thought about this over the past half-century and have a few ideas that may be useful for you.

When people talk about “Prabhupada said” in relation to Hitler, they are generally referring to a few well-known quotes. To understand these quotes properly requires studying the longer conversations in which they took place.

“Hitler was a gentleman.”

Reading this quote literally and out of context is misleading. Did Srila Prabhupada mean to say that “Hitler was a gentleman at all times and in all circumstances”? Not likely. When you read this quote in the larger context of the discussion, he was referring to the fact that Hitler did not drop an atomic bomb and that the Americans did. In this sense, the Americans were not “gentlemen” and world opinion is in agreement with that statement. Things have to be taken in context for proper understanding. For example, Hitler loved dogs. If, in a conversation about Hitler and animals, Srila Prabhupada had called him “kind,” meaning kind to dogs, should we conclude that Srila Prabhupada thought Hitler was “kind” in all circumstances? Of course not. Some common sense is called for when interpreting his statements.  [For the record, the Germans never had an atomic bomb. So technically, this is discussion is moot.]

“I don’t think Hitler was so bad man.”

During my time with Srila Prabhupada, I remember instances when he would take a position arbitrarily as a way of getting us to think more deeply about a topic. If we were talking about contending theological positions, he might take the position of an atheist and say, for example, “There is no God. [taking the adversarial position] Now you all discuss.” The original unedited quote in this instance says, “So these English, they were very expert in making propaganda. They killed Hitler by propaganda. I don’t think Hitler was such so bad man. [taking the adversarial position] What do you think? You are Englishman…” and then he laughed. To my mind, he was laughing at the farcical notion that “Hitler was not such a bad man,” but someone who doesn’t know the context might take him literally.

Srila Prabhupada mentioned Hitler and propaganda in a letter to Krsnadas from 1972. He wrote, “Regarding Hitler…it is a fact that much propaganda was made against him, that much I know, and the British are first-class propagandists. And I have heard that his officers did everything without informing him, just like in our ISKCON there are so many false things: ‘Prabhupada said this, Prabhupada said that.’ But we have nothing to do with Hitler in our Krishna Consciousness. Do not be deviated by such ideas.”

This is important. Prabhupada was pointing to the power of propaganda and how it can be used to attribute false statement to people—including himself. To conclude that therefore Srila Prabhupada was an apologist for Hitler’s crimes, or that he was in favor of killing Jews, is to fall victim to selective citations. For anyone who had the honor of knowing Srila Prabhupada as I did, the idea is patently absurd.

“The Jews have got money. They want to invest and get some profit. Their only interest is how to get money, no nationalism, no religion, nothing of the kind.”

This is another example of how dangerous it is to take a statement out of context. Here is a larger portion of that discussion on January 23, 1977, in Bhubaneshwar:

Prabhupāda

That is politics. Once you become strong; once I become… That is struggle. It will go on. You cannot stop.

Rāmeśvara

It’s also commonly known that in the West the banks supplied money to Lenin to fight his revolution. They have no discrimination. If it seems like it is a good chance for making interest…

Prabhupāda

Therefore, Hitler killed these Jews. They were financing against Germany. Otherwise he had no enmity with the Jews.

Hari-śauri

Yes. They were controlling the economy. That was his one thing.

Prabhupāda

And they were supplying. They want interest money—”Never mind against our country.” Therefore, Hitler decided, “Kill all the Jews.”

Historically this is an accurate representation of Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews. Hitler railed against what he called “international Finance-Jewry” and threatened in a famous Reichstag speech on January 30, 1939: “If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” (Some Holocaust historians argue that annihilating the Jews was not his first plan. Initially, they say, he wanted to ship them out of Germany. Then, as the war progressed, he saw an opportunity to murder them. This position in Holocaust studies is called the “situationalist” theory, versus the “intentionalist” theory, which argues that it was Hitler’s intention from the outset to murder all Jews.)

 Here is more of that conversation in Bhubaneshwar:

Rāmeśvara

These banks in the West, they supported Lenin. They made it possible to finance his revolution.

Prabhupāda

Yes. They have got money. The Jews have got money. They want to invest and get some profit. Their only interest is how to get money, no nationalism, no religion, nothing of the sort. Therefore, it is not now; long, long ago… Therefore, Shakespeare wrote “Shylock, the Jew.”

Hari-śauri

Yes. “Shylock.”

Prabhupāda

“One pound of flesh.” The Jews were criticized long, long ago.

Hari-śauri

They were hated in the Middle Ages.

Rāmeśvara

America now has this policy that they will sell their guns to both sides.

Prabhupāda

That is all right, because they are doing business. So, I am shopkeeper. Anyone pays, I shall… That is good.

Rāmeśvara

But no discrimination.

Prabhupāda

Why discrimination? I am selling. You come. Pay me. I shall give you.

Rāmeśvara

It’s dangerous. They are promoting violence.

Prabhupāda

That dangerous in every item. This Gandhi was also dangerous, although superficially nonviolent. Everyone is dangerous. Until one is devotee, he’s dangerous in any position. He’s dangerous. Harāv abhaktasya kuto mahad-guṇāḥ. It is mental concoction that “This is good; this is bad.” Everything is bad.

Prabhu, note the way the unedited conversation shapes the meaning of a statement. Is Srila Prabhupada advocating selling guns? Of course not. He’s saying that nobody in the material world discriminates between good and bad. Without becoming a devotee, everyone is dangerous. Gandhi was dangerous. Business people are dangerous. Jews are dangerous. Non-Jews are dangerous. Children are dangerous. Nazis are dangerous. Everyone is dangerous without Krishna consciousness.

By the way, I live in a wealthy neighborhood of Long Island. There are many charitable, compassionate, righteous people among them. But there are also some who fit the above description: “Their only interest is how to get money, no nationalism, no religion, nothing of the sort.” And me telling you that doesn’t make me an antisemite, it makes me an accurate observer of the demographics in my section of Long Island. It also tells you nothing about my real feeling about Jews—and that is the point. Taking Srila Prabhupada’s statements out of context tell us nothing about his true feelings. My heart goes out to those who think isolating statements about women, about blacks, about Jews—about anyone—tells us anything about Srila Prabhupada’s true feelings. They are doing themselves and others great spiritual harm with such selective citations and misinterpretations.

Srila Prabhupada was everything you would have wanted him to be: kind, compassionate, equally disposed to all. Don’t let shallow thinkers looking to distort his teachings dissuade you from that understanding of our beloved founder-acharya. He loved everyone.

Your servant,
Yogesvara dasa”

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The You You Don’t Like

People as products of history and the yogic remedy

“One should engage oneself in the practice of yoga with undeviating determination and faith. One should abandon, without exception, all material desires born of false ego and thus control all the senses on all sides by the mind.” (Bhagavad Gita 6.24)

The term “kama” in this verse is fascinating, defined here as “material desires born of false ego”—in simple language, anything that does not bring one closer to our non-material self. When I was  younger, I had a young person’s understanding of kama, namely sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. With time, I began to see that art, education, even philanthropy and science, can be kama if undertaken without a spiritual purpose. Actions in these realms may be situated in sattva-guna, goodness, but sattva is not transcendent as “goodness,” too, is motivated by ego. Maybe a cleaner ego or less harmful, but still binding. “Good” people according to Gita also have to be reborn, in order to reap the rewards of their prior good deeds. 

This moment historically is a fascinating time to track kama at work. How did we become a society so obsessively focused on the material and so consistently ignorant of the spiritual?

Max Weber was a 19th century German scholar who is credited with inventing the field of sociology, along with Emile Durkheim in France, Herbert Spencer in England, and W.E.B. Du Bois here in the States. Weber looked at the rise of capitalism and saw something interesting: that in the 17th and 18th centuries an industrious nature geared to the acquisition of wealth was condemned as irreligious. God preferred His children pious, not productive. “It is easier,” the Bible proposed, “for a camel to go thru the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.”

Then along came the industrial revolution, and Weber noted that capitalism overtook its religious predecessor by redefining the meaning of “pious.” Capitalism, Weber noted, was not just a set of financial transactions but an attitude that bordered on religious. The capitalist definition of God’s will for humanity was to pursue piety within productivity. After all, had recent discoveries not proven that God’s plan was for the pious to become wealthy?

Case in point: the American oil industry, which began around 1870 when John D. Rockefeller formed Standard Oil. Two years later, Rockefeller formed Standard Oil Trust: a monolithic umbrella entity that housed more than forty Rockefeller companies. The Trust quickly became the richest, biggest and most feared business in the world.

Here’s what you need to know. Rockefeller was guided by his religious beliefs, and for him oil had a divine purpose. The underground riches were there, he said, to help establish God’s Kingdom on earth. Oil was “the bountiful gift of the great Creator” and a “blessing . . . to mankind.” 

Rockefeller was not alone in this assessment of oil as a gift from God for perpetuating His plan in the world. After World War I, oil barons were funding Christian institutions such as Baylor University. One of Baylor’s graduates, Sid Richardson, became a millionaire in the oil industry and a major supporter of Evangelist Billy Graham. 

You may have heard the names of some of the other oil-wealthy families such as the Hunts and the LeTourneaus. How about Oral Roberts and Charles Fuller, among America’s first televangelists? They used their oil profits to fund ministries. 

By the 1920s, the work-ethic was firmly entrenched in mainstream thinking. Work hard and God will reward you with riches and comfort. Well, here’s the upshot. Quickly people realized that if the goal was wealth, and if wealth was obtained by working hard, then why bother with God at all? If there is a God, He rewards our hard efforts. And if there isn’t a God, hard work gets rewarded anyway.

Wealth of Nations Jacket

Weber concluded with this tragic prediction: “Today this [American free market consumer capitalist] system determines not only the life of those directly involved with business, but of every individual who is born into this mechanism—and may well continue to do so until the day when the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” This is 100 years ago! Weber was tragically prescient in his prediction of consumerism’s impact on the environment. If you go back to the roots of economic theory—Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes—they all saw work and capitalism as a means for serving the interests of humanity, and they assumed that nature was this unlimited resource from which hard-working consumers could keep drawing down forever. We’ve been dealing with the consequences of that illusion ever since.

These then are some of the historic roots of the American obsession with hard work and consumption—what this verse of the Gita describes as “material desires born of false ego.” The tools of market economics—Facebook profiling and other aggregating of personal information—assure that it will be nearly impossible to extricate ourselves from that system—nearly, but not wholly impossible.

In this verse and elsewhere in the Gita, Sri Krishna reminds us that by cultivating inner vision, through yoga, meditation, and well-guided study, we can reawaken our true selves, the non-consuming selves we were meant to be. I like what Jimmy Fallon said recently: “I don’t want to be another white guy who just says ‘Let’s be the change.’ I want to know what the change is. What is it we’re meant to be?”

He didn’t answer that, but it’s the right question. The Gita’s answer, the yoga-culture answer, is: “Stop defining life by what you can measure. That’s the tip of the iceberg.” When we think we are this body, then sooner or later our bodies and life itself become commodities within the capitalist system (seen viscerally in factory farming and bio-engineering).

The material self is of course part of the reality—for instance, I’m a Jewish, white male, vegan, centrist democrat. That’s the external part: it’s variable. I’d vote Republican if the right candidate came along. What is the invariable part? What is the unchanging common ground of all life? Consciousness. 

Let’s be clear about this: a philosophic appreciation that we are non-material consciousness does nothing to alleviate historic realities. But we should never think that the Gita speaks in theoretical abstractions. Remember, at the conclusion, Arjuna goes to war. The time can come when good arguments fail and we have to take to the streets. And if that time comes, then we should do that—but if our actions are going to achieve long-term change, they would benefit from a grounding in awareness of all beings as non-material consciousness. 

Along with oversight in our efforts for social reform, let’s include a measure of insight. Permanent solutions to social issues demand an understanding of our true selves, the selves that exist with or without the elusive social justice we all crave.

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Anger in the Gita

First published in ISKCON News on June 21, 2020

All photos from unsplash.com

For the past several weeks we have been watching a stream of broadcasts revealing the violence against African Americans that has been endemic to American culture for the past four hundred years. The videos are clear evidence of systemic racism, and any thoughtful person, devotee or not, cannot help but feel angry. Yet many ISKCON community members I have spoken with recently are confused about how we should respond. Should we join the protests? Should we speak out against a government that oppresses black men and women and attacks those wishing to publicly object to such racism? Is meddling in politics the business of Vaishnavas? As devotees, are we entitled to get angry?

The Bhagavad Gita has something to say about anger—two “somethings” that seem to contradict one another. One is shockingly violent. In a startlingly passage (2.32) Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that when there is a chance for righteous battle, “happy are the warriors to whom such fighting opportunities come unsought, opening for them the doors of the heavenly planets”—essentially advising Arjuna to prepare to die. Krishna proceeds to say that He Himself takes up the call to fight (4.8) when there is a decline of religious principles and a rise of irreligion. At such time, He comes “to deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants.” He follows this (4.42) by making it painfully clear to Arjuna that, however long they may discuss the matter, He expects Arjuna to “stand and fight.” As if to underscore the seriousness of His expectations, He goes so far as to warn Arjuna that if he fails to show the righteous anger needed to enter into battle, he will “incur sin for neglecting [his] duties and thus lose [his] reputation as a fighter.” (2.33) 

How can killing be the consequence of the teachings of a religious text? How does violence represent the values of a just Divinity? What kind of Bhagavad Gita or “Call of the Supreme” is it that encourages anger and slaughter?

The answer is the second “something” that the Gita has to say about anger. The miracle of the Gita is not that it records Arjuna’s turn from inaction to battle, from pacifism to anger; that was a foregone conclusion. He was a warrior, the enemy was a regime of homicidal usurpers, and they had to be stopped. Rather, the miracle is that the same text that calls for Arjuna to bring down his enemies calls for him to do so with love.

For Bhakti Yogis anger must eventually give way to love, and the Gita provides the spiritual resources to make this transition possible. In the aggregate, while some isolated verses do take a firm stand against evildoers, the majority of the Gita’s verses emphasize the value of nonviolence, of compassionate behavior, and a vision of all living beings as equal and worthy of respect—including one’s enemies. In just one chapter alone, Krishna says:

“One who is not envious but who is a kind friend to all living entities…is very dear to Me.” (12.13) 

“He for whom no one is put into difficulty…is very dear to Me.” (12.15) 

Then, as if to draw a heavy line under the contradictory nature of Arjuna’s duty, Krishna concludes His list of those most dear to Him by saying, “One who is equal to friends and enemies…is very dear to Me.” (12.18) It is challenging to imagine what Arjuna was thinking at that moment, hearing from Krishna that he must be equal to friends and enemies—and also kill his enemies.

The ensuing battle was not a false reconciliation. Arjuna was confronting state-sponsored terror, and he was compelled by both duty and faith to act. That is why the Vaishnava community today should be actively speaking out against systemic, institutional racism in America—not only because it is the socially responsible thing to do but also the spiritually necessary thing to do. Without that socially active dimension, Krishna consciousness is at risk of becoming irrelevant to anyone other than those living behind the sequestering walls of a temple.

We might consider not only Arjuna’s epiphany on the verge of the battle of Kurukshetra but also his actions after emerging victorious from the battle: Once installed on the throne that was rightfully theirs, he and his brothers did not punish their enemies further, but instead invited Dhritarastra and his son, Duryodhana, to live with them. The Pandavas then set about restoring order to the kingdom and implementing the social reforms for which they had fought so bravely.

Protest becomes a spiritual enterprise when it moves from vengeance to justice, when it reflects not hatred of our enemies but compassion for their victims.

Protest becomes a spiritual enterprise when it moves from vengeance to justice, when it reflects not hatred of our enemies but compassion for their victims, and when we learn to see not enemies but fellow spirit souls, misled perhaps, mistaken in their values or actions, even heinously so, but worthy of respect as sparks of the same Supreme Being from whom we come. That vision of the dignity of all life—not just human but other than human as well—is the “call” from Sri Krishna that we are compelled to answer. 

It is a call that should move us—as Vaishnavas and as human beings—to act whenever injustice is visited upon anyone.

Yogesvara dasa was initiated by Srila Prabhupada in 1970. He taught Holocaust history at Hofstra University and frequently lectures before educational and legal venues nationwide.

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Unhappily Ever After

Fun Book Recommendations To Help You Prepare for the Apocalypse

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

As if we don’t have enough drama in our life just now, here are a few novels that suggest humanity may never recover from the pandemic.

In her book Oryx and Crake, Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood tells a cautionary tale about a near-future time when the world has become a wasteland due to genetic experiments gone horribly awry. On her blog, Atwood describes the subtext to her depiction of bizarre crossbreeds and eerie landscapes: “What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?”

“Several of my close relatives are scientists,” Atwood writes, “and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinners is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or—when that makes the non-scientists too queasy—the nature of the universe.” She describes that she has been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years and notes with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies have become possibilities, then actualities. She wrote this a nearly twenty years before Covid-19.

It was, in fact, during her writing that 9/11 occurred. 

“It’s deeply unsettling when you’re writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens,” she says. “I thought maybe I should turn to gardening books—something more cheerful. But then I started writing again. Because what use would gardening books be in a world without gardens, and without books?” 

Cormac McCarthy has no such concern for runaway technology in his 2006 bestseller The Road (adapted as a film that received mediocre reviews). Its stripped-down storyline describes a man and his young son trekking through an unexplained nuclear-winter landscape in search of food and warmth as they run from bands of cannibalistic outlaws. Scavenging in abandoned towns and withered forests, they provide each other with just enough encouragement to not lie down and die. It is a spare book, filled with hypnotic prose and poignant depictions of emotional longing. Indeed, for all its stark, ash-gray finality, it is McCarthy’s belief in love’s power to redeem when there is no hope for redemption that makes The Road such an engrossing portrait of things to come. 

Had the current pandemic not happened, such novels about humanity’s demise might have continued to reside on Amazon’s science fiction page. Now, however, fiction looks more like fact every day, and daily reports about the Corona virus’s spread share space with deeply troubling reports of melting ice caps and global warming. In an often-quoted New York Times Op Ed, Robert Wright, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, describes three ways the world might come to an end.

  1. Classic nuclear Armageddon. This plays out on the level of world governments and has been in remission since the end of the Cold War. However, current political circumstances—particularly given the Trump administration’s penchant for waving red flags at North Korea and other hostile governments—could revive it.
  2. Terrorism. This occurs on the ground, below governmental radar screens. As the ranks of terrorists grow, and if the world further polarizes into “them and “us,” the odds increase that a rogue terrorist organization could acquire the technology needed to hold the world hostage. 
  3. Eco-apocalypse. Whether it is a viral pandemic, rising sea levels, or other environmental threat, solving climate change requires global cooperation. Many governments in general, and the U.S. in particular, have been going in the opposite direction. America’s withdrawal from nearly all climate-related commissions and its reversal of all but a handful of Obama-era safeguards have raised this option to the top of the pile of end-of-days scenarios.

Wright’s solution to this dire prediction is that “we may have to cultivate our moral imagination, putting ourselves in the shoes of people who hate us. This understanding,” he writes, “involves seeing how, from a certain point of view, hating America ‘makes sense’—and our evolved brains tend to resist that particular epiphany.” 

Wright has reason for concern. For most other nations currently, there isn’t much impetus to like America just now, and plans to save the world are being developed without U.S. participation. The reason is simple: the rest of the world can’t count on U.S. to either participate or keep its word about anything. If cooperating suits the current administration’s political or economic agenda, the U.S. cooperates. If not, it doesn’t. To quote poet George Meredith, “In tragic life, God wot, no villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.” 

Like their notable predecessors Brave New World and 1984, the more recent Oryx and Crake and The Road admit the existence of something “false within” that compels post-modern man to stop at nothing to get what he wants. In remote history, the Bhagavad Gita used the following words to describe those who would put the world at risk for their own ambitions: 

Poster inspired by Atwood’s Oryx & Crake

“In this world there are two kinds of beings, one divine and the other demoniac…. The demoniac do not know what is to be done or not done…. They say this world has no God in control, that its main moving force is sex, and following such conclusions they engage in unbeneficial, horrible work that can destroy the world… ‘So much is mine now,’ they tell themselves, ‘and it will increase in times to come. I have killed my enemy and soon others shall also die…’ ”

Unlike novels, which offer no way out of the abyss, the wisdom text Bhagavad Gita reveals a frame of consciousness that has no borders. There is not the slightest hint of nationalism in the bhakti culture: it is not the property of India, of Hinduism, or any political party. Devotion—the vision of all life as sacred—compels practitioners to nurture compassion, respect nature, and work for the wellbeing of all. Pandemics and end-of-days devastations may be unavoidable, but in cultures guided by love of all life they are not irreversible.

Some scholars point to Chapter 11 of the Gita as a kind of Apocalypse, for it is here that Krishna displays his ability to devour the universe in an explosion of nightmarish imagery and atomic fire. Still, nowhere does Krishna say that this is how things must be. The Gita is overall an optimistic work that resides at the bright end of the literary spectrum.

Krishna reveals his unpleasant side

Guided by the Gita’s teachings, members of the bhakti community benefit from resources that writers and peacekeepers might want to consider when envisioning potential futures for humanity: (1) knowledge of the fundamental oneness of life on its substratum of consciousness, and (2) faith in a beneficent divinity capable of resuscitating even the most devastated of post-Apocalypse scenarios. The two tools—knowledge and faith—go together. Knowledge without faith remains abstract and does not assure change in behavior; and faith without knowledge remains blocked on the level of sentiment and may even fuel fanaticism. 

Unlike the wildly popular Left Behind series, which also depicts an end-of-time scenario, the Gita does not posit any exclusive clubs for those who will be saved. A simple acknowledgment that the sanctity of things precedes selfish interests suffices for a multitude of unseen resources to kick in. Amazing, really, what even a hint of humility can do to set humanity back on track.

The Gita may lack some of the page-turner qualities of the current spate of Apocalypse literature (for that you’ll need to revert to the larger work Mahabharata of which Gita is but a handful of chapters). Still, for an ending that leaves readers feeling hopeful and a bit more cheerful, Gita deserves the Pulitzer.

Books mentioned in this article:

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A Threat to the Sacred

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Scheduled for publication in the Journal of Vaishnava Studies 29.1 (Fall 2020).

In his new book, Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century, scholar Jack Hawley shines a troubling light on modernity’s impact on Vrindavan.

by Joshua M. Greene

What an extraordinary work this is, part dramatic reportage on the effects of modernity on a holy town, part historical analysis of past transformations, part personal memoir, part pilgrim’s journal offering brief biographies of local dignitaries, all blended with musings and insights from a deeply introspective connoisseur of India’s bhakti tradition. 

“At the heart of religion,” Hawley comments, “is the question of what’s real, and the idea of Vrindavan has always raised this very question.” Which Krishna, he asks, is to rule creation: the maintainer of dharma, the speaker of the sacred Gita; or the breaker of dharma, the lover who is the center of the rasa lila? Religion, he reminds us, is about “grappling with the unreality of so much that seems patently real.” The tension in that bifurcated creation is highlighted in his alliteration of “the soul…closer to the soil untilled: the forest, jungle, wilderness,” old and new in perpetual dialog, or perhaps perpetual friction—it is an uncertainty that pervades the text.

The book reports on Vrindavan’s dramatic transformations in seven chapters that take readers from a reminiscence of the author’s first visits a half century ago, through a summary of current environmental and political affairs; an analysis of the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir—a proposed 70-story tower that embodies shifting attitudes over the meaning of “sacred”; an overview of dynamic new attitudes toward and initiatives by women residents; a loving biography of one of the author’s teachers, Shritvatsa Goswami, one of Vrindavan’s most distinguished scholars, and his efforts to preserve and protect the holy land; and a concluding section that puts the urgent condition in sharp relief.

Hawley uses three ways to survey the current situation: a walk down Chatikara Road to determine whether recent structures do or do not reflect the old Vrindavan, an exploration into real estate developments that surround the road, and an overview of new gurus who flourish here. As if this were not already an ambitious undertaking in less than 300 pages, he also manages to describe open sewers and the spillage of untreated waste into the Yamuna River, environmental damage, government corruption, traffic jams, noise pollution from twenty-four-hour loudspeakers, and the chronic annoyances caused by free-roaming pigs and gangs of predatory monkeys. There is also as breathtaking a description of cremation (Shrivatsa Goswami’s father) as one is ever likely to read. The range of topics is impressive.

In an interview with Niharika Gupta for “The Wire,” Hawley described himself as “an outside observer” but also “an involved observer,” and that involvement informs his disturbing portrait of the sacred under lethal assault. Hawley attended graduate school at Harvard, expecting to study religion and psychology, then discovered the bhakti texts and Krishna. His studies led to a first visit to Vrindavan in 1974. The town “seemed a kind of paradise back then,” he writes, a stepping back in time, with pilgrims arriving by horse cart or foot and everyone bathing in the beautiful Yamuna River. The lazy horse carts and quiet cycle rickshaws are nearly gone, replaced by traffic jams of noisy motorcycles, auto rickshaws and private cars; and the Yamuna is so polluted almost nobody bathes in it and fewer dare drink its water. 

Hawley recalls with relish his early visits and pleasant walks along the Yamuna’s sandy parikrama path and “the pleasure of that soft and granular dust on your feet as you honor the sacred space by this ever so basic means.” Today, except for a tiny segment around Keshi Ghat, the sandy parikrama path had been turned into a paved road, and new construction is taking place on illegally dumped landfill. Hawley argues that the paved parikrama and other changes have fundamentally altered the pilgrimage experience. I wonder, though, whether this is true only for those old enough to have known the barefoot walks of old Vrindavan, and that’s part of a meta-issue. If someone never knew old Vrindavan, are they really missing something of importance to them, or only to those of us who do remember? My students never use libraries. Are they missing much? I think they do, but they don’t.

In the 1970s the town was cleaner and smaller. The opening of ISKCON’s Krishna Balaram Mandir in 1975 triggered a dramatic increase in visitors and since then, this quiet, lightly forested area on the outskirts of town has become the center of Vrindavan with rows of shops, hotels, ashrams, real estate offices, and restaurants. An array of apartment complexes and gated communities crowds the landscape. The crowding was exacerbated with completion of a massive expressway in 2012, which essentially made Vrindavan a suburb of Delhi, part of a convenient day trip to Jaipur and Agra. Vrindavan’s population skyrocketed from 65,000 in the 2011 census to 100,000 in 2018. “The wilderness of Vrindavan,” Hawley writes, “is being flooded with Delhi.”

Some changes to Vrindavan culture are relatively benign, such as cell phones or New Year’s celebrations, and in this otherwise bleak portrait there is some good news. A new generation of women’s ashrams has emerged that is moving away from the old condescending model of Vaishnava widows’ homes. The new ashrams are training centers, social action headquarters. Gender taboos are also changing, with women teachers such as the teenagers Devi Shri Shail Kishori and Vishnupriya Goswami giving public discourses. 

Still, dire concerns overshadow these pockets of progress, and in response two groups of planners have emerged: those looking to develop and bring Vrindavan into the modern world, and those looking to save Vrindavan’s beautiful historic waterfront. 

Hawley reserves his choicest words for the real estate developers, who advertise to prospective homebuyers, “Live like a king in the Lord’s own kingdom,” and in particular the team behind the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir (VCM), which he describes as having an unabashedly Disney-like agenda, hence no sacred-secular boundary. The VCM will have an immense parking lot to accommodate huge crowds, and plans call for rides for kids, including an Aghasura serpent-monster water slide; little cars that will take young ones beneath the giant Bakasura bird, with sound effects and light show; and a typhoon blowing around the mountain-high Trinavarta whirlwind creature. The VCM will feature high-speed elevators to whisk visitors to the top of the tower, where they will emerge into an open gallery that offers a panoramic view of Vrindavan. Through telescopes they will zoom in on Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura or Radha’s home in Barsana or follow the course of the Yamuna. In other words, visitors will circumambulate Vrindavan in minutes, without ever having to go anywhere, and with 3-D goggles they will witness a Vrindavan that purports to show the town as Radha and Krishna saw it 5,000 years ago. The whole plan for such a massive entertainment complex strikes Hawley as contrary to the pastoral Vrindavan that Krishna inhabited. 

Hawley toggles back and forth between nostalgia for the past and concern over the threat of modernity, in particular the 70-story VCM tower which would have visitors “leveraged into a new reality…where virtual and real are all the same.” Is the VCM going to be a part of Vrindavan, he asks, or its replacement? Is the VCM “perhaps a death knell to all that was”?

The bleak portrait painted in Krishna’s Playground is not wrong; if anything, it is scarily accurate, yet what’s missing from this otherwise praiseworthy book is not a call to action—something Hawley has sounded with Kurukshetra-like clarity—but, at the risk of sounding a bit pious, a call to prayer, prayer not as an escape from harsh problems but as a portal into invisible solutions. When confronting the impossible, all of bhakti theology compels followers to recall that there is a mystery to creation that can transform the impossible into the possible, darkness into light, defeat into victory. “I am victory and adventure,” Krishna reminds Arjuna (Bhagavad Gita 10.36), who saw similar disaster and impossibility in his call to military action. 

Hawley seems to have set aside the importance of bhakti in addressing real life issues, as though the two were separate concerns. “I worry about some of the theology,” he writes, “that has helped propel this process. I think it will not do to imagine Krishna as someone whose very essence is to attract to himself… It makes him too much a symbol of our narcissist species, Rather, I think, his attraction radiates from the fact that he reflects the world he naturally inhabits.” There follows an analysis of Krishna in two features: the male-dominant lord Vishnu, the all-seeing ruler; and the child Krishna who, “wily as he is, is really just a boy with a voracious appetite for butter [who] lives in an ecosystem where [his appetites] can flourish…. He is still a hero…but he doesn’t have to be big to accomplish the feat.” It is human-size Krishna who lifts Govardhan Hill, he reminds us, and chastises the Kaliya serpent.

In both cases, however, Krishna is responding not only to environmental threats but to his devotees’ prayers. He lifts Govardhan Hill not merely to restore ecological balance but to protect the residents of his town. He admonishes Kaliya not simply because dharma needs realigning but because the serpent’s poisonous fumes pose a risk to his cowherd friends. Hawley has chosen to not address this dimension of the lila, arguing that “the serpent’s heat is unbearable, just as Vrindavan’s heat and the world’s heat, stoked by the release of masses of carbon from beneath the earth’s surface, become more unbearable year by year…. Krishna [by banishing Kaliya] acts on behalf of humanity in distress, but he does so without compromising his place in the wider world, a world that displays the interplay between humans and the rest.” He closes by stating, “Everything depends on seeing Vrindavan as the image of the world, yet we see how fragile the real Vrindavan is.” 

Perhaps. There was no climate change back then and no indication of this in the Bhagavata Purana. It has become a trope of modern bhakti scholarship to envision such parallels, and certainly they have value, but the tradition would deem them supplementary to the greater value of self-surrender. “Of all yogis, those who give themselves to me in love and devotion are the greatest of all.” (BG 6.47) Hawley’s is an expansive, noble mind at work, one that is constrained to find meaning that anyone can appreciate, but which runs afoul of Krishna’s declaration that “Everything depends on Me” and not on a metaphorical image of Vrindavan as a mirror of the larger world. 

Krishna reassures us that the “sense of the sacred” Hawley so yearns for is not divorced from Himself as “the source of the sacred” (aham bhija pradak) and that he will respond if we invite him. Full disclosure: having passed 70, for many years I’ve been an admirer of Jack’s ability to navigate so freely between the formality of academia and the informality of Krishna’s world. Yet I cannot share his hope for a cure to Vrindavan’s woes solely based on the recommendations he offers in the book’s final section, including application for World Heritage Site funds to build light-rail public transportation, new sewage treatment plants, more favorable wages for street-cleaners, plastic regulations, speed limits, and a humane capture-and-release program for the town’s monkeys. Without the change of heart induced by devotional practice, clean-up efforts alone will do nothing to stop interlopers from finding other means for their exploitation. In the extreme, such longing for an old Vrindavan of cherished memory, no matter how noble, should be viewed with concern, as it might prove vulnerable to misappropriation by Hindu nationalists. To draw a parallel, Jurgen Habermas, in his essay “1989 in the Shadow of 1945: On the Normality of a Future Berlin Republic,” warned that a new emphasis on more positive periods of German history—new “historical punctuations,” as he put it—would diminish the importance of the collapse of civilization in 1933-45 and increase the risk of its recurrence. Any romanticizing of a presumed glorious past runs that risk. 

Already the ISKCON project in Mayapur (the Bengali parallel to Vrindavan’s VCM) risks preempting by the BJP as an icon of India’s noble Vedic history and a monument to Hindu nationalism. Removing the blacktop from Yamuna’s periphery and restoring a sandy parikrama path will not change the habits of those who see Vrindavan as nothing more than real estate.

Along with oversight, the resurrection of Vrindavan will require insight, the product not of political maneuvering but heartfelt devotion. Legislation and funding in one hand and the Gita in the other—that might get the attention of bureaucrats. 

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