Bhakti and Embodiment Read online

  Rādhāramaṇa is unique among these svayam-prakaṭa mūrtis of Kṛṣṇa—as well as among the other mūrtis established by the six Gosvāmins—in that it is the only mūrti that was not removed from Vraja and taken to a safer locale in response to the iconoclastic attacks of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707 CE) in the latter half of the seventeenth century CE. Rādhāramaṇa is thus allotted a special place in the history of Vraja as one of the oldest and most important of the mūrtis of Kṛṣṇa, for the image has been continuously worshiped in Vṛndāvana for over 470 years by the lineage of priests of the Rādhāramaṇa temple who claim direct descent from Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin through his first householder disciple, Dāmodara Gosvāmin.

  If we venture into the Rādhāramaṇa temple today, we find that the logic of the daily temple service, like that found in other Kṛṣṇa temples throughout Vraja, involves venerating the mūrti as the living body of Kṛṣṇa on two levels that reflect the “double life” of the deity. On the one hand, the priests of the temple celebrate the public life of Rādhāramaṇa as the embodiment of aiśvarya, divine majesty, by honoring and serving him as a royal guest in the temple in strict accordance with the ritual and aesthetic prescriptions of mūrti-sevā. Each day the deity embodied in the mūrti is awakened, bathed, dressed, adorned with jewelry and flowers, fed periodic meals, revered through ritual offerings, and put to bed. Worship of the mūrti involves the presentation of a series of sixteen ritual offerings (upacāras), including food, water, cloth, sandalwood paste, flowers, tulasī leaves, incense, and performance of āratī through circling oil-lamps before the image. On the other hand, the temple priests seek to foster an awareness of the hidden life of Rādhāramaṇa as the embodiment of mādhurya, divine sweetness, by dividing the temple service into eight periods (aṣṭa-yāma) corresponding to the aṣṭa-kālīya-līlā, the eight periods of the divine cowherd’s daily līlā that goes on eternally in his transcendent abode and its earthly counterpart, the land of Vraja.14 During this eightfold līlā he engages in intimate love-play in the secret bowers with his cowmaiden lover Rādhā, tends the cows and romps through the forest with his cowherd buddies, and returns home periodically to be bathed, dressed, and fed by his adoring foster mother, Yaśodā.15

  Pilgrims and local residents flock to Rādhāramaṇa temple throughout the day, eager to participate in one or more of the eight temple services—from maṅgala āratī, the early morning service that is held before dawn when Rādhāramaṇa is awakened, to śayana āratī, the final service of the day that is held around 9:00 PM just before he retires to his bedchamber in the inner sanctum of the temple. They come to receive darśana of Rādhāramaṇa, to see and be seen by the deity embodied in the mūrti, and to partake of prasāda, the remnants of food and other offerings that have been suffused with his blessings. They engage Kṛṣṇa’s embodied form in the mūrti with their own bodies, circumambulating the inner sanctum, prostrating before the mūrti, making offerings, singing, dancing, blowing horns, sounding gongs, ringing bells, and beating drums in exuberant celebration. Through līlā-kīrtana, singing the praises of Kṛṣṇa and extolling his līlā activities, worshipers hope to penetrate beyond the sight of Kṛṣṇa’s manifest form as the black stone mūrti to a visionary experience of his hidden presence in and beyond the mūrti, culminating in direct realization of the divine cowherd’s unmanifest līlā that goes on eternally in his transcendent abode and its immanent counterpart, the land of Vraja.

  Periodically during the daily temple service in Rādhāramaṇa temple, as well as in other Gauḍīya temples in Vraja, the sounds of nāma-kīrtana or nāma-saṃkīrtana, communal singing of the divine names of Kṛṣṇa, can be heard resounding throughout the temple. According to the Gauḍīya theology of the name that is ascribed to Caitanya himself, Kṛṣṇa’s nāmans, divine names, are his localized embodiments in the form of sound, just as his mūrtis are his localized embodiments in the form of ritual images. In this perspective singing the divine names serves as a means through which worshipers enliven Kṛṣṇa’s divine presence and send forth his reverberating sound-forms as offerings to his sumptuously adorned image-form. The sounds of nāma-saṃkīrtana are not confined to temple spaces but can be heard throughout Vraja, as kīrtana troupes process through the streets of Vṛndāvana and pilgrims traverse the parikrama paths singing the names of Kṛṣṇa.16

  Kṛṣṇa’s instantiation in sound extends beyond the seed-syllables that constitute his nāmans to the recited narratives of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which is revered as his text-embodiment in the form of speech. Pilgrims and residents of Vraja engage Kṛṣṇa’s living presence in the oral-aural text through hearing recitations of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa by qualified brahmin reciters as part of the daily service in local temples and through attending public performances of Bhāgavata saptāha in which all twelve books of the Bhāgavata are ritually recited, from beginning to end, over the course of seven days. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa is not only revered as a body of efficacious sounds that when recited manifest Kṛṣṇa’s presence among the listeners; it is also extolled as a wellspring of multilayered meanings that when expounded serve to illuminate the nature of the supreme Godhead and his līlā. Temples in Vraja occasionally sponsor seven-day Bhāgavata celebrations that combine Bhāgavata saptāha, in which 108 brahmins recite together one-seventh of the text each morning, and saptāha kathā, in which a learned Bhāgavata scholar delivers a discourse on the recited portion of the Bhāgavata each afternoon or evening, expounding the meaning of the Sanskrit text in a vernacular language appropriate for the particular audience.17 In addition to these oral-aural modes of reception, worshipers in Vraja also engage the Bhāgavata in its written-visual form by ritually venerating the concrete book, which is enshrined in a number of local temples as a special kind of mūrti.18

  During the monsoon season (July–August) every year thousands of pilgrims travel to Vraja from all over India to participate in Kṛṣṇa’s līlā not only through hearing the stories of his divine play as recounted in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and other authoritative texts but also through seeing these stories enacted in dramatic performances called rāsa-līlās. The rāsa-līlā is traditionally performed by rāsa-līlā troupes in which young brahmin boys native to Vraja enact the roles of Kṛṣṇa, Rādhā, the gopīs, and the other characters in Kṛṣṇa’s līlā. As soon as the central actors don their crowns as Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā and the performance commences, they are revered during the duration of the performance as svarūpas, living forms, of the deity and his eternal consort. Rāsa-līlā performances are divided into two parts. The first part, the rāsa section, enacts Kṛṣṇa’s eternal circle dance (nitya rāsa) with Rādhā and the other gopīs that takes place perpetually in the unmanifest līlā in his transcendent abode beyond the material realm. The second part, the līlā section, varies in content from day to day and enacts one of the specific episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s manifest līlā that occurred during his sojourn on earth in the land of Vraja. During the period that separates the rāsa section from the līlā section of the performance, a tableau is formed in which the actors who embody Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā are enthroned on a dais and members of the audience come forward to receive their darśana and make offerings to the svarūpas as living mūrtis.19

  How are we to understand the manifold ways in which Kṛṣṇa’s bodily presence—in stones, in a mountain, in an entire landscape, in temple images, in divine names, in a sacred text, in young male actors—has been invoked, encountered, engaged, and experienced through the bodily practices of Kṛṣṇa bhaktas, not only in Vraja but also in devotional communities throughout the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora? In this study I will interrogate the logic of embodiment that is integral to bhakti traditions and will seek to illuminate more specifically the multileveled models of embodiment and systems of bodily practices through which devotional bodies are constituted in relation to divine bodies in Kṛṣṇa bhakti traditions. I will
ground my general reflections on bhakti and embodiment in an analysis of discourses of Kṛṣṇa bhakti, focusing in particular on two case studies: the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the authoritative scripture of Kṛṣṇa bhakti; and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition inspired by Caitanya in the sixteenth century, which invokes the canonical authority of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as the basis for its distinctive teachings.

  In order to provide a broader theoretical framework for my study, I will briefly survey certain trends of scholarship on the body in the social sciences and humanities that have had a significant impact on studies of the body in religion. I will then map out an array of Hindu formulations of the body and will argue that a sustained investigation of these formulations can contribute in important ways to theories of embodiment and also to illuminating the connections between constructions of embodiment and notions of the person and the self. Finally, I will turn to an analysis of the role of embodiment in Hindu bhakti traditions and more specifically Kṛṣṇa bhakti traditions, which is the central concern of my study.

  Theorizing the Body in the Human Sciences

  In the past decades there has been an explosion of interest in the “body” as an analytical category in the social sciences and humanities, particularly within the context of cultural studies. Studies of the body have proliferated, representing a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, linguistics, literary theory, art history, and feminist and gender studies. In attempting to demarcate their respective methodological approaches, scholars speak of the phenomenology of the body, the anthropology of the body, the sociology of the body, the biopolitics of the body, the history of the body, thinking through the body, writing the body, ritualizing the body, and so on. Since the 1990s a number of scholars of religion have begun to reflect critically on the notion of embodiment and to examine discourses of the body in particular religious traditions. Among the plethora of perspectives and theories, three areas of scholarship in particular have had a significant influence on studies of the body in religion: the body in philosophy, the body in social theory, and the body in feminist and gender studies.

  The Body in Philosophy

  The growing importance of the body in philosophy is closely tied to critiques of the hierarchical dichotomies fostered by Cartesian dualism and objectivism: mind/body, spirit/matter, reason/emotion, subject/object. One trend of critical analysis stems from the philosophical phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who sought to overcome the dualities of subject/object and mind/body by positing the notion of the lived body based on a continuum of consciousness-body-world. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment has had a significant impact beyond the domain of philosophy, particularly in the areas of phenomenological psychology, phenomenological anthropology, and phenomenological sociology.20 Such studies tend to emphasize the role of the lived body as the phenomenological basis for experience of the self, world, and society.

  A second trend of analysis focuses more specifically on critiques of the mind/body dichotomy in which the disembodied mind reigns over and above the mind-less body. A number of studies have suggested that the relationship between the mind and body needs to be reevaluated and the model of hierarchical dualism jettisoned for a more integrated model of mutual interpenetration: the mindful body, alternatively characterized as the “mind-in-the-body,” “embodied mind,” or “body-in-the-mind.”21 Critiques of the mind/body dichotomy constitute an integral part of studies of the body not only in philosophy but also in other fields.22

  The Body in Social Theory

  While theories concerned with the phenomenology of the body emphasize the lived experience of the body-self, social theories that seek to develop an anthropology of the body or sociology of the body are generally founded on the assumption that the body is a social construction rather than a naturally given datum. Such theories involve an analysis and critique of the discursive practices that constitute and inscribe the social body and the body politic. These theories emphasize, moreover, that the body has a history, and thus one aspect of the social theorist’s task is to reconstruct the history of the body and its cultural formations.

  Among the various theoretical perspectives on the body developed by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, three types of approach are central. The first approach focuses on the body as a symbolic system that conveys social and cultural meanings. This approach builds upon the insights of Mary Douglas, whose work on the symbolism of the body emphasizes the dialectical relation between the physical body and the social body. A second trend of analysis is concerned primarily with the body as the locus of social practices. Among the theoretical bases of this approach are Marcel Mauss’s conception of “techniques of the body” and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “socially informed body” as the principle that generates and unites all practices. A third approach focuses on the body as a site of sociopolitical control on which are inscribed relations of power. This approach builds upon the seminal contributions of Michel Foucault, applying and extending his conception of the “biopolitics of power” through which the body is regulated, disciplined, controlled, and inscribed.23

  Following the lead of Foucault, a number of social theorists have sought to chronicle the history of the body, its representations, and its modes of construction.24 This has resulted in a variety of specialized studies focused on particular types of embodiment and the discursive practices that contribute to their formation. Among the different categories of the body singled out for attention by social theorists are the sexual body, the alimentary body, and the medical body. The sexual body is constituted by sexual norms and practices, including models of sexual difference, rules and techniques regulating sexual intercourse, codes of sexual restraint and decorum, traditions of celibacy and asceticism, and reproductive regulations and technologies.25 The alimentary body is constituted by food practices and dietary regulations, including taxonomies classifying types of food substances, laws regulating the preparation, exchange, and consumption of food, norms of table fellowship and etiquette, practices of fasting and control of food intake, and dietetic management.26 The medical body is constituted by medical discourses and practices, including taxonomies delineating categories of diseases, classifications of human bodies in terms of physical body types and pathologies, theodicies of illness and pain, traditional methods of healing and medicine, and modern medical technologies and regimens.27

  The Body in Feminist and Gender Studies

  The body is also a central focus of analysis and cultural critique in feminist and gender studies. Feminist critiques of the “phallocentric” discourses of Western culture generally involve a sustained critique of the dualisms fostered by these discourses, with particular attention to the gendered inflection of the mind/body dichotomy. The distinction between mind and body, spirit and matter, in its various formulations in Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, is a hierarchical and gendered dichotomy: the mind, characterized as the nonmaterial abode of reason and consciousness, is correlated with the male and is relegated to a position of superiority over the body, which is characterized as the material abode of nonrational and appetitive functions and is correlated with the female. Thus one aspect of the feminist project involves challenging the tyranny of male:reason by re-visioning the female:body and ultimately dismantling the dualisms that sustain asymmetrical relations of power.

  Among the wide range of perspectives on the body in feminist and gender studies,28 four types of approaches are of particular significance. One trend of analysis, consonant with early American feminists’ emphasis on the irreducible reality of women’s experience, centers on experiences of the female body, focusing on those bodily experiences that are unique to women, such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause. A second approach, inspired by French feminists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, focuses on the role of discourse in constructing the female body, emphasizing
that the body is a text inscribed by the structures of language and signification and hence there is no experience of the body apart from discourse. Irigaray and Cixous, exponents of écriture féminine (feminine writing), propose “writing the body,” generating new inscriptions of the female body liberated from “phallocentric” discursive practices and celebrating the alterity of woman’s sexual difference.29 The notion of sexual difference has been developed in a variety of distinctive ways by Anglo-American feminists such as Judith Butler.30 A third approach, represented by British and American Marxist feminists and other advocates of social reform, challenges the preoccupation by French feminists and other proponents of sexual difference with the discourse of woman’s body and emphasizes instead the politics of bodily praxis in which the female body is a site of political struggle involving concrete social and material realities, ranging from socioeconomic oppression and violence against women to reproductive rights and female eating disorders.31 A fourth trend of analysis, especially prevalent among American scholars, focuses on representations of the female body in the discourses of Western culture—philosophy, religion, science and medicine, literature, art, film, fashion, and so on.32