The Rasa Pancha-adhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: ( ENDS) 6. Swami Krishnananda.
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Saturday 28, June 2025, 08:30.
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The Rasa Pancha-Adhyai of the Srimad Bhagavata Maha Puranam: 6.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on April 28, 1985)
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And it is not a linear movement in a single direction towards God. The Rasa Panchadhyayi does not simply take for granted that love of God is a simple affair, that we can just cling to a thing and it is over. It is a widespread, inner operation which is a great drama within itself. A dramatic performance is the Rasa, and it is a dramatic performance of our life also when we are in the height of affection, when we are flooded with love, wherein we are that which we love.
There is a sense of coming and going, attraction and repulsion in the operation of love. This is felt in human loves, and also in divine love in a different context. The lover and the beloved are two different positions and terminals in an inexplicable relationship. We cannot adequately describe the relationship between the lover and the beloved. Are they one or are they two? We cannot say what it is. The heart jumps over the limitations of the physical frame of the lover, enters the heart of the beloved, and vice versa, the heart of the beloved enters the heart of the lover. There are no two persons when the two love each other in the climax of their affections. And yet they are two different persons because if they are not two and it is just one person, that attraction cannot be explained. We cannot account for that surge of feeling which bounds above the limits of its own location and runs in the direction of the object if it were true that there is no one who is loved and no one who is the lover, that there is only one being. In that sense we may say that the lover and the beloved are not an identical entity. It is not one being it is a one-in-two operation.
Perhaps it is this enigma of the lover-love relationship and the devotee-God relationship that has made great devotees and authors such as Nimbarka, Vallava and Gauranga Mahaprabhu Chaitanya to consider the relationship between the soul and God as one of identity and difference. We cannot say it is different, and we cannot say it is one because we are pulled toward God. We are asking for God; we are craving for Him. Our weeping and crying for Him shows that we are not yet one with Him and we cannot feel that oneness, yet we are not wholly different. If we were entirely different, that pull would not be there.
Nimbarka says in his great Bhasya, “Is the wave one with the ocean? Is the wave the same as the ocean, or not? The wave is not the ocean because the wave rises in the ocean and subsides into the ocean. But the wave is the ocean because a wave cannot be other than the ocean.” The devotee is inseparable from the all-encompassing existence of God. Yes, it is true, because outside God nothing can be. Yet—there is a great 'yet'—the devotee's, the jiva's, the soul's pull towards God is an indescribable relationship that obtains. Were the Gopis one with Krishna or were they not one with Krishna? Who can say?
No impure mind can understand the meaning of these chapters. It is an exquisitely purified mind that alone can appreciate the purity of this wondrous drama of the love which the Gopis evinced in their hearts for the great Krishna whom they saw in trees and stones and pebbles and thorns, and in everything. How is it possible for us to love God in that manner that we hug trees and stones? To that extent we are artificial lovers of God. It is not merely Nimbarka, Chaitanya and Vallava that speak this. We also have the great Southern saints, the Alwars who sang the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the 4,000 verses on the beauty, grandeur, majesty, and love of God.
Thus, the Srimad Bhagavata highlights the need for the love of God and for being in ecstasy for God. You have to want God, not merely to understand God, analyse God, dissect God or vivisect Him. Analytical logic is not the way to God. It is you that wants God, not your reason. Reason is a frail tool. It is you that wants God, and God wants you, not your reason and intellect. God wants not your apparatus, nor are you in any position to carry any luggage of apparatus to God's kingdom of heaven.
You are in this unenviable position or enviable position, call it in the way you like, of being placed in a mysterious context of relation with God the Almighty. So is your mysterious enigmatic relationship with anything in this world. Is the world outside you or is the world inside you? Are you different from the world or are you one with the world? You cannot say. Are you one with your dear friend or are you outside your dear friend? Are you one with what you love or are you different from that? None of these questions can be adequately answered because of the peculiar relationship that obtains between that which loves and that which is loved. So is the case with God and His devotee, and saints like Mira, Surdas, Tulsidas and many others, some of whom I have already cited, are great examples before us. God has to be loved and felt, not merely understood, analysed, discussed.
To this point we are raised by the majesty and the beauty of the Rasa Panchadhyayi. The greatest devotees of God are portrayed in the personality of the Gopis, and the reaction of God to the devotees is the reaction of Krishna to the Gopis. The coming and the going, the union and the separation, this wondrous ebb and flow, the rising and subsiding of the waves in the ocean of the bliss of God is the intention of the whole Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana. I was thinking that I shall speak a few words on this theme of it being absolutely necessary for us to know and love God, and to melt and feel and become anguish-filled due to our separation from the Almighty. And He shall come.
End.
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Note:
These five chapters are known for their detailed description of the Rasa dance, a divine dance performed by Krishna and the Gopis (cowherd women) in Vrindavan.
They are also considered a key part of the scripture, with some scholars referring to them as the "five vital breaths" of the Bhagavatam.
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