The Rasa Pancha-adhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: 5. Swami Krishnananda.

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

Tuesday 17, June 2025, 08:30.
Article
Scriptures
The Rasa Pancha-Adhyai of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: 5.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on April 28, 1985)

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

 when biological and psychophysical instincts shackle the perception of beauty, the capacity to perceive beauty within the framework of the body, it charges forth in the direction of another physical object, imprisoning beauty in that object only, while it is pervading everywhere. Plato, the great master of Greece, wrote several works on love and beauty. He says that in the beginning a person is attracted to an object which is beautiful. We are attracted to objects which are beautiful wherein beauty is a quality of the object, and when we love a beautiful object we do not know whether we are loving the object or the beauty. The two are mixed up. Are we attracted towards the beauty, which is a quality, or the object?

Here, on account of the cessation of the reasoning faculty, such an analysis is impossible. It is just taken for granted. So Plato tells us that in the beginning, the crudest form of affection considers the object itself as beautiful, while the object is not beautiful. It is the beauty that is present in the pattern or the arrangement of the particular object that pulls us, not the object. A painting is an arrangement of canvas and ink, and canvas and ink are not beautiful. It is the arrangement, the pattern of distribution, the light and shade of the ink that creates a sense of beauty. Beauty is different from ink and canvas in the same way as beauty is different from any object, whether living or non-living. So there is an admixture and a confusion of thinking when we say that there is a beautiful object. It is like saying that there is beautiful ink and beautiful canvas. Neither the ink nor the canvas can be called beautiful. There is an element which is indescribable, imperceptible, super-physical, super-sensory, which subtly introduces itself somehow or other into the arrangement of the pattern of the ink, and pulls our hearts. So does every beautiful object in this world.

God is love and beauty, and there is a sense of imminence of this presence in every little object in this world. God is not merely a transcendent creator, a magnificent, almighty ruler. He is also immanent as the element of survival, beauty, self-love and altruistic love in this world. The Rasa Panchadhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata clinches the whole matter when, in ecstatic language of Sanskrit poetry, Vyasa himself seems to be rising into an apotheosis of love. Otherwise, an ordinary person cannot write such poetry which surpasses ordinary delicacy of style. The intention of the author is to transport us through the reading of these chapters.

The attraction and the separation, the twofold operation of love, are quoted in these chapters. We are pulled towards God, and in a tremendous ecstasy of love we seem to be gravitating towards God who is everywhere, seeing Him in everything—in little things, in inanimate things such as objects, trees, stones, and so on, hugging even thorns as if they are the utmost of beauty. And, on the other hand, there is a sense of a cracking down of personality because of the bereavement due to a sense of separation from God. Only one who has experienced bereavement will know what it is, as only one who is hungry will know what hunger is. A well-fed man does not know what hunger is, and one who has not experienced bereavement will not know what bereavement is. One who has not loved, or who is incapable of loving and has a flint heart, cannot understand the beauty of these feelings of those lovers of God par excellence, the Gopis of Brindavan.

Words fail here because words are grammatically construed, and grammar is like mathematics. We have now come to the conclusion that God is above grammatical rules, mathematical principles, calculations of every kind, above even the rules of language. Great poets such as Kalidasa and Shakespeare break through grammar. They do not care for grammatical rules because their feelings rise above the bounds of the restrictions of even language and grammar, in the same way as in our height of love we have no rules and regulations because we are no more there. If we are no more there, who is to observe the rules and regulations? We have ceased to be. What have we become at that time? We have become that which we wanted.

*****

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