Bhakti and Embodiment Page 2
Among the broader community of scholars with whom I have engaged in fruitful exchanges at conferences and other forums over the years, three collaborations have been particularly important in stimulating new directions in my thinking about South Asian theories of embodiment. The first collaboration developed out of a Conference on the Study of Religions of India on Religion and the Body at Albion College in September 2007, hosted by my dear late colleague Selva Raj, which inspired a productive ongoing conversation among a number of the conference participants—in particular, Carol Anderson, Kendall Busse, Andrew Cerulli, Steven Hopkins, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Karen Pechilis, Tracy Pintchman, Michael Radich, Kerry Skora, and Liz Wilson—that has borne fruit in a collection of essays, Refiguring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions, that I co-edited with Karen Pechilis. The second collaboration emerged out of the first and has involved an ongoing series of illuminating exchanges with Michael Radich, beginning with his invitation to me to present my research on Hindu theories of embodiment at a Seminar on the Body in the Study of Asian Religions at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in March 2008 and my return invitation to him to present his research on Buddhist theories of embodiment to our South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in June 2008. More recently, a third collaboration emerged out of a Conference on the Study of Religions of India on Altered and Alternative States at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in June 2011, hosted by Christopher Chapple. This conference inspired a fruitful ongoing conversation about the sex/gender distinction and alternative bodily identities with Elaine Craddock, my doctoral student Anya Pokazanyeva, and two of my previous collaborators—Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Tracy Pintchman—that has resulted in a collection of essays, Sex, Gender, and Alternative Bodily Identities in Hindu Traditions, to be published as a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies that I am guest editing.
My abiding research interests in the category of bhakti were initially inspired by two of my mentors during my doctoral studies at Harvard University: John Carman, whose groundbreaking studies of Śrīvaiṣṇava theology and other bhakti traditions have helped to define the field of bhakti studies, and Diana Eck, whose landmark studies of Banaras (Vārāṇasī) and other pilgrimage places in India have had a formative influence on pilgrimage studies. During this period I pursued my ongoing studies of Purāṇic traditions under the guidance of Diana Eck, and I also made my initial forays into the study of Indian aesthetics under the guidance of Gary Tubb, which led to my first encounters with the Gauḍīya theory of bhakti-rasa. During my doctoral studies I had the good fortune to engage with other pioneering figures who have helped to shape the field of bhakti studies and of Vaiṣṇava studies more specifically, including Charlotte Vaudeville, Norvin Hein, Jack Hawley, and Vasudha Narayanan. My subsequent collaborations with Jack Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in a variety of other venues have been pivotal to the development of my thinking, and I was delighted to explore with both of them, along with Steven Hopkins and Tracy Pintchman, the connections between bhakti and embodiment in a session on “Embodying Bhakti: Devotional Bodies, Fertile Bodies, and Bodies of Desire” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November 2007. Within the more specialized field of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava studies, I have benefited from illuminating conversations with David Haberman, Graham Schweig, and Jonathan Edelmann, with whom I collaborated most recently in a session on “Bhakti and Yoga” convened by the Dharma Academy of North America in San Francisco in November 2011. My work has also been enriched by the insightful comments of Ravi Gupta, June McDaniel, and Kenneth Valpey, with whom I have collaborated in various contexts. I have also benefited from the many graduate students who have participated in the Seminar on Bhakti Traditions that I teach periodically, whose perceptive comments have contributed to the refinement of my reflections on the category of bhakti.
I am especially indebted to Gavin Flood, Editor of the Routledge Hindu Studies Series, for including my book in his series. Special thanks are also due to Routledge (in particular to Leanne Hinves, Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison) and Jessica Stock at Sunrise for their steadfast commitment and patient efforts in shepherding the book through the final stages of production.
Beyond the many scholars in the Western academy who have enriched my studies of the body and of bhakti and of the connections between embodiment and bhakti, I am grateful to the many bhaktas who welcomed me into their worlds during my field research on the contemporary pilgrimage traditions of Vraja-maṇḍala. It is these bhaktas, whom I met in the villages and towns and at the temples, wayside shrines, bathing places, and other pilgrimage sites that interweave the region, who enabled me to move beyond the worlds of the texts and to enter, albeit temporarily, into the living worlds of Kṛṣṇa bhaktas in Braj—from the local Brajbāsīs to the contemporary representatives of the various Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas to the pilgrims visiting Braj from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, Maharashtra, and other parts of India. Among contemporary exponents of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, I am especially grateful to Shrivatsa Gosvami and Giriraja Swami, whose insights have inspired me to penetrate more deeply into the teachings of the early Gauḍīya authorities.
Finally, I thank my husband, Eric Dahl, my bashert, my śaktimat, and my muse, who has nurtured, sustained, and inspired me at every stage of this project and, through his unwavering love, has taught me the true meaning of devotion.
Introduction
Kṛṣṇa is one of the most captivating and beloved of Hindu deities, whose divine exploits are celebrated in all parts of India in devotional poetry, scriptures, theological works, visual arts, pilgrimage traditions, dramatic performances, and an array of other cultural forms.1 The Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the authoritative scripture of Vaiṣṇava bhakti, recounts the divine drama through which Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Godhead, descends to earth at the end of Dvāpara Yuga in approximately 3000 BCE and unfolds his līlā, divine play, in the region of Vraja in North India.2 Kṛṣṇa is born in the city of Mathurā as a prince of the Yādava clan known as Vāsudeva, the son of Vasudeva and Devakī. He is born in a prison where his parents have been confined since their wedding day by his evil uncle, King Kaṃsa, because during their nuptial festivities Kaṃsa had heard an incorporeal voice prophesying that he would be slain by the couple’s eighth child. Immediately after his birth Kṛṣṇa reveals his resplendent four-armed divine form to his parents and then resumes his appearance as an ordinary infant. Through his yoga-māyā, power of illusion, he loosens the chains of Vasudeva and causes the prison guards to fall asleep. In order to protect his newborn son from death at Kaṃsa’s hands, Vasudeva then carries Kṛṣṇa across the Yamunā River to a nomadic cowherd encampment and places him in the care of the cowherd Nanda and his wife Yaśodā, who raise him as their son.
The core narrative of the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa focuses on the first sixteen years of Kṛṣṇa’s life as Gopāla Kṛṣṇa, in which he carries out his līlā in the form of a gopa, cowherd boy, in the land of Vraja (Vraja-bhū), the pastoral arena outside of the city of Mathurā, where he engages in playful exploits with his companions, the cowherds (gopas), cowmaidens (gopīs), and cows (gos) of Vraja. At the end of his extended sojourn in Vraja, Kṛṣṇa is portrayed as returning to Mathurā, the city of his birth, where he assumes his princely mantle as Vāsudeva and accomplishes his divine mission of killing his evil uncle Kaṃsa. He then establishes his kingdom in Dvārakā, where he rules as Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa, the chief of the Yādava clan. It is in his royal status as the prince of the Yādavas that Kṛṣṇa serves as the charioteer of Arjuna in the Mahābhārata war and proclaims to him the wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gītā.
Whereas Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa is represented in the Bhagavad-Gītā as the wise, somber teacher who is the upholder of dharma, the cosmic ordering principle that maintains the ha
rmonious functioning of the social and cosmic realms, Gopāla Kṛṣṇa is represented in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as the master of līlā, divine play, who during his sojourn in Vraja delights in pranks and lovemaking, overturning the norms of the social order with unrestrained exuberance while at the same time maintaining the cosmic order by effortlessly disposing of numerous demons who torment the people of Vraja. He is the divine trickster and the divine lover who lures his companions, the gopas and gopīs of Vraja, with the sound of his flute, bewitching and intoxicating them, inspiring them to break the boundaries of social convention and join with him in his play. In his youthful exploits as the cowherd of Vraja, Gopāla Kṛṣṇa is celebrated as the mischievous child of his foster parents Nanda and Yaśodā, the cherished friend of the cowherd boys, the passionate lover of the cowmaidens, and the heroic protector of all the people of Vraja.
The land of Vraja in North India is thus celebrated as the sacred terrain where Kṛṣṇa, during his sojourn on earth, romped through the hills and forests, danced in the groves, and bathed in the rivers and ponds. He is held to have left his imprint—literally—on the entire landscape in the form of his footprints and other bodily traces that mark the līlā-sthalas, the sites of his playful exploits. Among the earliest known religious authorities to visit Vraja and perform pilgrimages in the area are seminal figures in two of the most important Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas (schools): Caitanya (1486–1533 CE), who inspired the establishment of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, and Vallabha (1479–1531 CE), who founded the Vallabha Sampradāya, or Puṣṭi Mārga. Caitanya and Vallabha subsequently directed their followers—the early Gauḍīya authorities known as the “six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana” and the leaders of the Puṣṭi Mārga—to “rediscover” and restore the “lost” līlā-sthalas where particular episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā occurred and to establish temples and shrines to visibly mark these sites as tīrthas, sacred sites. In accordance with the directives of their teachers, the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the Puṣṭi Mārga mapped the narratives of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and other authoritative Sanskritic scriptures onto the landscape of Vraja, transforming the geographic region into a pilgrimage place interwoven with tīrthas identifying the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā activities.3
From the end of the sixteenth century CE to the present day, millions of pilgrims have traveled to Vraja—or to “Braj,” the Hindi designation by which the “Vraja” of the Sanskritic scriptures is known today—from all regions of India to track the footprints of Kṛṣṇa and to recall the stories of his youthful exploits that are indelibly associated with this place. Vraja is represented as a maṇḍala, or circle, formed by an encompassing pilgrimage circuit called the Vana-Yātrā (Hindi Ban-Yātrā), which was established in the sixteenth century and is schematized as a circular journey through twelve forests that is traditionally calculated to be eighty-four krośas,4 or approximately 168 miles. Pilgrims come from all over India each year to perform the Vana-Yātrā, arriving via trains, buses, and automobiles as well as on rickshaws, bullock carts, horse carts, and by foot. After inaugurating their pilgrimage with a ritual bath in the sacred waters of the Yamunā River, they traditionally embark on the parikrama (circumambulation) path that encircles the entire region of Vraja with bare feet as a sign of their reverence for the dust that has been consecrated by the feet of Kṛṣṇa. As part of the Vana-Yātrā, the full circumambulation of Vraja, which generally lasts from one to two months, they may also traverse the three smaller pilgrimage circuits within the encompassing circuit, circumambulating the city of Mathurā, Mount Govardhana, and the town of Vṛndāvana as they reach each of these central nodes along the Vana-Yātrā path. Since the establishment of these pilgrimage networks in the sixteenth century, local residents of Vraja have also undertaken their own pilgrimages periodically throughout the year, walking around one or more of the parikrama paths at Mathurā, Govardhana, and Vṛndāvana.
As pilgrims and local residents journey through the landscape of Vraja, they move from līlā-sthala to līlā-sthala, celebrating the particular episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā that are associated with each geographic locale. They visit the hills, forests, groves, ponds, and other sites where he is said to have engaged in his playful exploits and left behind his bodily traces. They revel in Kṛṣṇa’s bodily presence in the sacred terrain of Vraja with their own bodies, embracing the ground through full-body prostrations, rolling in and ingesting the dust, touching the stones, hugging the trees, bathing in the ponds—engaging with their bodies every part of the landscape consecrated by the body of the divine cowherd. Moreover, as David Haberman has emphasized, many contemporary pilgrims and residents of Vraja proclaim that “Vraja is the body of Kṛṣṇa,” echoing the pronouncement of Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, the sixteenth-century Gauḍīya authority who is credited with creating the Vana-Yātrā.5
Kṛṣṇa’s corporeal instantiation in the land of Vraja is particularly evident in pilgrimage traditions associated with Mount Govardhana. Kṛṣṇa is represented in one līlā episode in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as assuming the form (rūpa) of Mount Govardhana and in his mountain form consuming the ritual offerings that the cowherds had originally intended for the deity Indra. When Indra retaliated by unleashing torrential rains to punish the people of Vraja for ceasing to worship him, Kṛṣṇa in his cowherd form effortlessly uprooted the mountain and held it aloft with one hand as an umbrella for seven days in order to protect the cowherds, cowmaidens, and cows of Vraja from Indra’s deluge.6 Evoking this tradition, many contemporary pilgrims and local residents revere Govardhana as a localized embodiment of Kṛṣṇa in the form of a mountain—even though, according to several narratives that are traditionally recounted about Govardhana, this once vast mountain has now been reduced to the size of a modest seven-mile-long hill due to the curse of a sage.7 Because they venerate Mount Govardhana as the body of Kṛṣṇa, they may refuse to set foot on the sacred mountain lest they desecrate the divine body—a tradition that is held to have been established by Caitanya during his sixteenth-century pilgrimage to Vraja.8 Instead they circumambulate the mountain by foot, traversing the Govardhana parikrama path—which is calculated to be seven krośas, or approximately fourteen miles—in a minimum of five to six hours if walking at a brisk pace. Some pilgrims and residents of Vraja, out of reverence for Kṛṣṇa’s mountain form, circumambulate the mountain in a manner called daṇḍavat-parikrama, which involves performing a sequence of full-body prostrations along the parikrama path—a practice that can take ten to twelve days if performed along the entire length of the pilgrimage circuit. This practice is particularly prevalent during the festival known as Govardhana Pūjā, or Annakūṭa, which is celebrated each year on the day after Dīvālī, the festival of lights, in the month of Kārttika (October–November). As part of their veneration of Mount Govardhana during the festival, pilgrims and local residents traditionally perform daṇḍavat-parikrama along the parikrama path until they reach the town of Jatīpurā at the foot of the mountain. In Jatīpurā a great feast is celebrated in which the mountain, as a form of Kṛṣṇa, is ritually anointed with milk, decorated with auspicious red and yellow powders, and offered a “mountain of food” (anna-kūṭa).9
Mount Govardhana’s special status as a localized embodiment of Kṛṣṇa is ascribed not only to the mountain as a whole but also to each of its stones, or śilās—a tradition that is held to derive from Caitanya.10 In contrast to sculpted iconic images, mūrtis or arcās, which are fashioned by artisans and must be consecrated by brahmin priests through rites of installation (pratiṣṭhā) in order to invest the image with the deity’s presence, Govardhana śilās are worshiped as natural forms (svarūpas) of Kṛṣṇa and therefore do not require ritual installation. These aniconic mūrtis are venerated by pilgrims and residents of Vraja as living forms of the deity and are worshiped regularly through pūjā, ritual offerings, in public and domestic shrines throughout Vraja.
Kṛṣṇa’s bo
dily instantiations in Vraja are not limited to Govardhana śilās, Mount Govardhana as a whole, or the entire sacred geography of Vraja. Kṛṣṇa is also held to be embodied in a multiform array of particularized mūrtis, ritual images, that are worshiped in the myriad temples that dot the landscape of Vraja. The most revered among the mūrtis in Vraja are those that are considered svayam-prakaṭa, “self-manifested” by Kṛṣṇa himself. These self-manifested mūrtis are venerated as Kṛṣṇa’s living bodies in which his real presence spontaneously dwells, and thus, in contrast to sculpted images fashioned by artisans, they do not require rites of installation. The central mūrti of the Puṣṭi Mārga, for example, is the self-manifested Śrī Nāthajī, a black stone image of Kṛṣṇa with his left arm held aloft as upholder of Mount Govardhana, which is held to have progressively revealed itself in the fifteenth century CE by emerging from the ground in stages on the top of the mountain.11 Among the central mūrtis of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya are two svayam-prakaṭa mūrtis that Kṛṣṇa is held to have manifested to two of the early Gauḍīya authorities who were immediate followers of Caitanya, appearing in his two-armed cowherd form in the emblematic tribhaṅga posture that he adopts when playing the flute in which his body is “bent in three places.” The first, a black stone image of the flute-playing Kṛṣṇa as Govindadeva, the keeper of cows, is celebrated as revealing itself to Rūpa Gosvāmin in 1533 or 1534 CE at the site of the original yoga-pīṭha, “seat of union,” in Vṛndāvana where Kṛṣṇa enjoyed his nightly trysts with Rādhā, his favorite gopī, cowmaiden lover.12 The second, a small black stone image of the flute-playing cowherd as Rādhāramaṇa, the beloved of Rādhā, is held to have appeared to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin in 1542 CE out of a śālagrāma stone that he was worshiping in Vṛndāvana.13