The Rasa Pancha-adhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: 3. Swami Krishnananda.

 

=========================================================================================

Sunday 18, May 2025, 11:00.
Article
Scriptures
The Rasa Pancha-Adhyai of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: 3.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on April 28, 1985)

==========================================================================================

The apex of love may be an aesthetic sense reaching its climax through listening to a beautiful recital of music. We may be enraptured beyond the capacity of our imagination by a beautiful sculptural piece. We may not be able to take our eyes away from that beautiful marble statue, inanimate though it is. There are such marvellous sculptures that we will not know what happens to us when we see them. We will not be there; we will be simply transfixed on that statue. We will be transfixed on a beautiful painting which may absorb our attention to such an extent that we will not know that we are existing there. We will be in the beauty of that painting, the inexplicable thing that pulls us and melts us down to such an extent that we do not exist at that moment. In all aesthetic appreciations, the appreciator ceases to exist for a moment, and in loves of every kind which have reached a particular measure of intensity, the lover ceases to be. A lover who is conscious of himself or herself is not a true lover because, in love, egoism melts.

I am coming to the point of the great achievement of Bhagavan Veda Vyasa in the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana wherein, in the Tenth Book, which is the biography of Sri Krishna, the author touches the core of the theme which he was expected to expound. Devotees, bhaktas, lovers of God, consider the Tenth Skanda as a treasure that cannot be equalled by all the gold and silver and rubies of the Earth. They do not stop with that. Even in the Tenth Skanda, the five chapters called the Rasa Panchadhyayi are considered as the five pranas of the Srimad Bhagavata. We know the importance of the five pranas—prana, apana, vyana, udana, samana. They are the vital breaths of an organism. If the great scripture, the Srimad Bhagavata, the book of the love of God, is a divine structure, a living organism, then the Rasa Panchadhyayi—the five chapters describing the love of the Gopis for Krishna—is considered as the prana, or the vital breath, of the whole scripture.

Very rarely do we love. We are machines mostly. We are business people, we are factory-goers, we are officials, we are operators of engines, we are mathematicians, calculators, architects. Everything is there, but we have no affection. We cannot love anything. The element of love has not entered us. We are distressed, and we go to bed with a sorrow that something is lacking. “I have done a lot of work today, but I go to bed with no peace of mind. I had no affection. Neither I loved anything, nor anybody loved me. I have been working like an automatic engine or a machine with no life in it. I have been the cause of large output in a factory, in a business organisation, but it has been done without heart. The machine does not love, and one cannot have an embracing affection for a machine.”

The reason behind many of the difficulties of spiritual seekers is the incapacity to love—to love God even, let alone others. We may admire God. We may fold our hands and look to the skies, and wonder at the majesty of God's creation and marvel at the starry heavens which are so expansive beyond our conception and imagination, but we cannot love. Our heart cannot go out and reach up to the object of our perception. Love is our movement away from ourselves into the object we are looking at; and if we believe that it is God that we are perceiving, we move away from ourselves and we are present there.

Mahabhava and many other terms are nomenclature that Bhakti Shastras attribute to these experiences. Few of us, perhaps none of us, have had the opportunity to experience what is referred to by these terms. We never cried for God. We did not feel the need for it. We did not shed a tear for our separation from God because we never felt the need for it. Why should we shed a tear? We never felt the sense of cutting bereavement which a wife feels when her husband is lost or a husband feels when his beloved is dead. God is a greater beloved than a wife or a husband, and we could not feel the need at any time in our life for that sense of separation. We have had an engineer's sense of bereavement, a mathematician's sense of bereavement, but not a lover's bereavement.

*****

Continued

=========================================================================================