Art

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. 

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

A young man pursues the meaning of creative expression

I came of age in the mid-Sixties and attended expensive schools on scholarships. That put me in a socially awkward position and I ended up spending a number of weekends on my own wandering through New York City’s cavernous museums. New York’s museums offered an unparalleled perspective on the history of art. In one afternoon, a visitor could journey on foot from prehistoric cave paintings to Renaissance pietas, and from there to pop art, op art, and the latest in Sixties psychedelia.

My favorite museums were the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and also the Museum of Natural History where I was struck by the apparent parallel between the evolution of art and the evolution of man. First came the cavemen, with their cave paintings rough, simplistic products of an obviously lower order of intelligence. Then, as man began wearing clothes, shaping tools, and tilling the earth, he produced the crude religious paintings and iconography of early civilization. Finally, as man grew more civilized, art grew more sophisticated, until homo sapien was producing an artistic legacy as complex and unfathomable as his own neurological organs.

The apparent parallel evolution of art and man was too pat; it left an empty feeling in my stomach. Though my education taught me to accept such a parallel, some part of me disagreed with the premise that art viewed chronologically was synonymous with art viewed progressively. The free-floating Calder mobiles appealed to my sense of aesthetics, but did that place them somehow above the simpler works relegated to sections marked “Tribal Talismans”? The sensual curves of a Moore sculpture attracted my adolescent mind, but were they “better” than the three-thousand-year-old works designated “Hindu Deities”? The open-ended canvases of Jasper Johns made me think about how his work affected me, but did I feel any less affected by the delicate miniature encrusted with gold and labeled “Krishna: Indian Forest God”?

These exhibits were consistently arranged to suggest that objects of art were no more than cultural artifacts. The arrangement was no doubt the work of anthropologists, art historians, sociologists, and others who had a vested interest in making culture central and human history a chronological journey forward. Religious art with its references to gods and goddesses might be esthetically pleasing, but it was the vestige of a less evolved time in humanity’s past. It was art as an expression of life’s grounding in physicalist reality that had something useful to offer. 

By the time I met devotees of Krishna in Paris in 1969, I’d been indoctrinated into this idea that art could change the world provided it did not depend on a theistic structure to creation. I’d attended courses with titles such as “Existentialism and Modern Art,” “Physics for Poets,” “Social Trends in Art History,” and “Picasso and the Collective Unconscious.” What these courses all had in common was an insistence on the interrelationship of the arts and the notion that art should judiciously avoid otherworldliness. Like the perfectly ordered historical art exhibits I had known during my high-school days, my university also treated art as one of the Humanities, as a subject that dealt exclusively with human meanings. Art, these courses insisted, can be understood only within the context of culture.

Krishna devotees lived with art that went beyond this notion. In those early days of the Krishna consciousness movement in France, readings from the Bhagavad-gita and group chanting of Hare Krishna took place on Sundays in the Latin Quarter, at a gray two-story hangout for students, artists, poets, and musicians. Perched precariously on a folding chair in the corner of a room that sat about thirty was a three-foot-high color poster of Gopala (Krishna), the Supreme Lord and the speaker of the Gita. The name Gopala means “cowherd boy,” and in the picture Gopala was sitting gracefully, with His arm around a calf, looking off into the distance.

“Who’s that in the picture?” I asked a devotee named Umpati who stood peeling apples by the door.

“That’s Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.”

“And the cows and trees—is that supposed to be heaven?”

“No, not heaven. That’s still within the material world. The spiritual world is different.”

I watched the devotee meticulously arrange the apple sections on a brass tray, then he placed the tray on before the poster on the folding chair and murmured prayers. A few moments later, he sat on a cushion before the group that had assembled for the class and began reading in French from the Bhagavad-gita. 

“Krishna’s body,” he explained, “is not limited by material elements, as is our body. His body is not subject to laws of decay and death. And since He is absolute, He remains spiritual in all His manifestations. His appearance in wood or stone or paint transforms the material medium into His own spiritual substance. We should not think that a Deity or painting of Krishna is an idol. It is Krishna Himself, graciously appearing in a form visible to us, to help us remember Him.”

Unexpectedly, I was hearing a challenge to my long-held belief in the cultural relativity of art. Extrapolating freely, the Bhagavad-gita had this to say about art. Art can contain more than human elements. Under certain conditions a work of art can serve as a vehicle for higher, transcendental forces, whose impact on the viewer or hearer (in the case of music, drama, or poetry) will not depend on social or intellectual history. The mere act of seeing such art can produce a spiritually uplifting effect. Though intellectual awareness of the history of the image may enhance appreciation, such awareness is not prerequisite to its spiritual impact. According to the bhakti or Krishna tradition, an artistic representation of divinity is not different from divinity and can act on observers regardless of the art’s cultural significance.

I began spending evenings with devotees in their small apartment, which they had decorated with posters and drawings of Krishna in His various incarnations and of sages from the scriptural histories. None of these works struck me as artistically astute. The features were often naive, the compositions unimaginative, the proportions out of whack. 

The greatest travesty, in my eyes, was that they failed to challenge the observer’s imagination. Little in any of these pictures left anything to the onlooker’s interpretive skills. They were purely representational; the spectator did not participate. There was Krishna tending His cows in His village, called Vrindavan, and there were the trees and flowers, all neatly arranged, best blossoms forward. It was clear that the artists had done their job quite well by painting what was described in scripture—but now the painting was there, and now the observer had only to gaze.

The devotees described their experience differently. Seeing Krishna in art, they explained, was for them like looking through windows onto the spiritual world. Each morning they would sit for an hour or more, concentrating on the paintings as they chanted Hare Krishna on wooden beads. Cultural significance had nothing to do with these contemplative moments. The devotees sat entranced before these paintings, which permitted them to commune with Krishna, and for the devotees that was all that mattered.

Many months later Srila Prabhupada, the founder and spiritual guide of the Krishna consciousness movement, visited Paris. By that time I had myself become a devotee of Krishna, and Srila Prabhupada’s visit seemed a good opportunity to clear up some of my lingering questions about the role of art in spiritual life. I waited until I could meet with him in his quarters, and then I dove right in.

“What is the function of art for devotees, Srila Prabhupada?” 

He looked up and studied my face for what seemed a long time, then said, “It is to put things in their proper place for best utility.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, but rather than ask the same question again, I said, “Some artists might disagree. Sometimes it is considered art to take an object out of its proper place and give it a life of its own. Some artists argue that a work of art is a reality in itself and that art doesn’t depend for its value on anything or anyone else. They say that art is most beautiful when accepted as a self-sufficient reality.”

“Beauty and art are different,” he corrected. “Beauty is something that satisfies my eyes. Your eyes may be satisfied by something, my eyes by something else. According to your idea of beauty, my beauty may be unacceptable. Beauty is a kind of sense gratification.”

“Some paintings are not trying to be beautiful,” I said. “They’re trying to make a statement about the world and our place in it.”

“That’s alright,” he said, “but you asked about beautiful. There is no such thing as a standard of beauty. Just like nowadays artists make ‘beautiful’ paintings,” and he waved an imaginary paintbrush wildly in the air above his head and laughed. 

“I don’t like it, but someone else may say it is very beautiful. So beauty and art are different. And for devotees art means arranging things for the highest utility. Beauty may satisfy but not have any higher utility. A picture, a poem anything is art when it serves the very best utility.”

Utility was obviously the crux of his definition of devotional art. “If someone’s work fulfills that qualification of highest utility, is he an artist?”

“Yes. An artist is one who knows the standard of best utility.”

I opened Webster’s. “One definition for artist in the dictionary is ‘one specifically skilled in the practice of a manual art or occupation, as cooking.’ So applying this to your interpretation, a cook preparing food for Krishna is an artist.”

“Oh, yes, anyone who performs his work for the satisfaction of Krishna, who knows His relationship with Krishna, is a true artist.”

That helped clarify his use of the word utility. He was defining art as any work that brings the performer out of the cycle of birth and death and closer to God. He was defining art as yoga. By this Prabhupada was not denying the need for rules of composition or balance in color and design. Rather, he was expanding the meaning of art beyond the traditional forms of painting, sculpture, music, drama, poetry, to include every field of human endeavor–a notion described in Bhagavad-gita (2.50):

Persons engaged in devotional service free themselves of both good and bad actions even in this life. Therefore, strive for yoga, which is the art of all work.

In the simple acts of devotion I’d witnessed in my first encounter with devotees—the offering of sliced apple on a tray before a poster of Krishna—there was artistry at work I could not appreciate at the time. Inspiration is communicated by the art of work as effectively as by a work of art. In simplest terms, Krishna in the Gita exhorts everyone to become an artist by performing their work as an offering of love to Him.

“In other words,” I asked, “would we say that anyone who works on behalf of Krishna, according to Krishna’s direction, is an artist?”

“Yes. A devotee knows the standard of utility. He knows how to put things in their proper place to inspire love for Krishna in himself and others.”

Srila Prabhupada stopped speaking, and a thoughtful silence filled the room. I thought back to my first days after Paris, as a devotee in the London Krishna temple, where I met a young Scottish devotee named Digvijaya. He was the temple’s cook. No one knew how to “put things in their proper place” better than Digvijaya. A simple country boy with a knack for detail, Digvijaya could turn a tray of raw vegetables into a royal feast and kept an immaculate kitchen that boasted rows of pots sparkling from the hours of patient scrubbing he had put into them. Attracted by his fastidious habits and culinary feats, I would sometimes go down to the basement work area and help him prepare an offering for the Deities.

“You like to work for Krishna in the kitchen, don’t you?” I asked him one evening. 

Digvijaya looked a little flustered and went on with his cooking. Finally, he looked up and said, “Actually, I don’t consider myself advanced enough spiritually to serve Krishna directly. I’m happy just cooking for His devotees.”

This was a young man whose culinary skills could have earned him a place in fine restaurants, yet he was humble, and during our talk he revealed to me the secret of spiritual cooking.

“Don’t speculate,” he said. “The best recipes for Krishna prasadam, vegetarian dishes for Krishna’s pleasure, have been around for a long time. A good devotee chef cooks them just as Krishna has always liked them, since time immemorial.”

Now, two years later, Srila Prabhupada was confirming the same principle as the essence of spiritual art. Don’t speculate. Your work is meant to be an offering of love for Krishna, not a product of artistic ego. Let Krishna guide your efforts.

“Real art, then,” I said, “means simply to do something for Krishna’s pleasure?”

“Yes,” Srila Prabhupada replied. “That is also the definition of love: to do something for the pleasure of the beloved.”

“But what about artists as a class of people? What about art as a specific field of creative endeavor, art in the classical sense painting, sculpture, music? Do spontaneity and personal inspiration play no part in Vaisnava [devotional] art? Is the artist irrelevant if everything he does is already laid out in the scriptures?”

“All these questions will be answered when you visit the artists who paint for my books.”

Many months later I had that opportunity. At the devotee artist studios (then in Los Angeles), much was like what I had seen in dozens of other studios: paintbrushes, canvases, some reference books. But there were new elements as well. Music played constantly in the background: devotional songs that set a mood for the work at hand. Sometimes two or even three artists at a time worked to complete a painting, each contributing his or her best effort, either in background design, facial details, jewelry, architecture. The artists, in their discussions, constantly referred to Vedic scripture. Clearly they had studied the history of their subjects well, and they drew details for the work from the ancient texts.

I asked one young man where he had received his training. He had graduated from a well-known art school, he said, and after becoming a devotee he had gone to India. What was an artist’s training like in India? “Oh, very intense,” he said. “An artist in the devotional tradition never attempts a sculpture or painting of Krishna unless his teacher has sanctioned both the work and his readiness to execute it. The forms of Krishna are divine; when depicted by one who is not in the proper devotional mood, the result can be unintentionally offensive.”

I noticed a young woman prepare her brushes by washing them in a sink down the hall. There was a bathroom closer by, but, she explained, through the agency of these brushes Krishna would appear on canvas, and so she preferred not to wash them in the bathroom. Before applying the first strokes to her canvas, she folded her hands and offered Sanskrit prayers before a picture of her spiritual master.

The artists were trained technicians in their craft. In the sculpture workshop a heavyset man with a clean-shaven head applied filler to a bust of Old Age, a character in a diorama depicting birth, death, and rebirth. He looked at the bust, and, for my benefit, broke down the visual impression into colors, contrasts, perspectives, relationships, planes, and other aspects that had escaped my untrained eyes.

Yet beyond technical prowess, the artists were depicting Krishna in minute details. They pointed them out to me: flowers leaning toward Krishna’s feet, birds observing Him from the branches of trees, in the rainclouds hovering in the distance, intentionally abstaining from disturbing Krishna’s playing with His friends. The artists described as well their appreciation for the very tools of their trade. Krishna was in the earth and clay that made up their paints. He was in the water that washed the brushes. He was the light of the sun that illuminated their studio. Nothing in their work was separate from Him, and by His presence the work itself became transformed into an act of meditation and prayer.

I asked several of the artists what they felt was the most important part of their work. Though one or two spoke of abstract concepts such as detachment from the finished product, they agreed that the most important part of their work was a strong daily program of morning sadhana, the devotional and meditative practices that begin around 4:30 a.m. and end by 8:30 a.m. in every temple of the Krishna consciousness movement. Without that regularity of spiritual discipline, they all agreed, they could never put brush to canvas or chisel to stone.

Over the course of the last few years, my deepening appreciation for spiritual art has cast in a different light the culturally based ideas of art that I grew up with. Instead of a progressive development in the arts, the contents of our museums seem to evince man’s increasing estrangement from his spiritual roots. The further we divorce ourselves from the notion of a higher being and a life beyond matter, the more abstract and cerebral and sterile our artistry grows. And what usually passes as spiritual is in fact merely a negation of what we take to be material: form, personality, recognizable elements of creation. As a result, the spiritual reality, a world filled with variety, form and personality remains hidden from our view. That spiritual reality, says the Bhagavad-gita, is revealed proportionately as we step away from the egoistic notion that “I am the creator” and “I am the artist” and step closer to acceptance of his role as an intermediary, a conduit for God’s artistry.

Even an untrained devotee artist can become such a medium. This is true because the transcendental quality of a work of art is a result not of technical skill but of the artist’s purity of devotion, his desire to glorify God through his work. Properly guided, even an unskilled devotee artist can bring out the Supreme Spirit for all to see, as exemplified by the following anecdote told to me by one of the artists in Los Angeles.

Once, while traveling by plane, Srila Prabhupada chanted Hare Krishna on his beads while meditating on a drawing of Krishna pinned to the back of the seat in front of Him. This is a common practice among devotees who travel, but it was striking that Srila Prabhupada had chosen this particular drawing to meditate upon. It was done in crayon: the unpretentious, untutored work of a child. It had little aesthetically redeeming value. To Srila Prabhupada it was finer than a Rembrandt, more meaningful than a Degas, more intriguing than a Picasso, because it was Krishna drawn by the loving hand of His young devotee. 

In that simple sketch was abundant subject matter for Srila Prabhupada’s artistic contemplation: devotion, sincerity, earnest labor, and a six-year-old’s humble offering of love to God.