through visionary experience and the ecstatic trance to realize truth or God, through the identification of self with real being, sometimes as the world-soul. Finally we come to that form of mysticism in which devotion plays a larger part than intellect. In the Upanishad era the merging of the self with the world-self is likened in its swooning-like state, but only thus, to the submerged consciousness in conjugal embrace. Emphasis on this leads to an erotic interpretation of intuition from which the cold ethics of early Buddhism preserved its devotees, the more easily as Buddha himself was no subject for romantic love. But with Buddhism rose the feeling of intense devotion which may easily express itself as love. In the early stage this devotion is rather a form of faith than of emotion. Even in Shankara, bhakti, the technical name of this attitude, still means contemplative concentration. And in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, though the connotation is that of affection, bhakti is still without any erotic tinge. As has already been observed, the Gîtâ has rather the content of an Upanishad based upon a belief in a man-god form of the All-god. The sun shines not, nor moon nor fire, whither they go who return not to earth but to my supreme home" (Gîtâ, xv. 6f). Seek wisdom (the man-god declares), whose eye sees truth; see self in the All-self, the light of the world. I am that light, as I am the essence of the sap of all life. If one knows me as the Supreme Soul, knowing me as the All, with all his being he devotes himself to me" (ib. 19, bhajati mâm sarvabhâvena). Again, as to the means: "Seek solitude; eat little; control the speech, the body and the mind; be intent on union through vision (dhyânayoga); avoid vanity, pride, lust, wrath, avarice; so the Yogin fits himself for the eternal Brahma-being." The devotee," serene of soul, without grief or desire, equable toward all beings, attains to highest devotion to me" (madbhaktim labhate parâm); through bhakti he learns my greatness and my being; then, taking refuge in me, he enters the supreme; through my grace, matprasâdât, he obtains the eternal place. Think ever of me, be devoted to me, through my grace thou shalt cross over all difficulties (ib xviii. 52f.). Here maccittah statam bhava is the key to the following (64-67), isto si me, manmanâ bhava madbhaktaḥ . .. mâm evaișyasi . . . priyo 'si me, aham tvâ sarvapâpebhyo mokṣayişyâmi, mâ śucah, "be devoted in thought to me, to whom thou art dear, and thou shalt come to me and I will release thee from all evil." This is not the language of passionate love but of religious devotion and it is this line which the sober saints of the Marâthas followed, who rejected metaphysical for personal religion and worshipped Krishna, yet not as a lover, but as a loving god. Thus Jñânesvara, who in the thirteenth century wrote a commentary on the Gîtâ, to save the world," preserves the pantheistic appeal; while the more emotional religion of Tukârâm and Nâmdev is still not erotic, though full of sentimental yearning for the divine. Thus Tukâ speaks: And again: "With milk of love Oh suckle me, At thy abounding breast, O mother, haste, in thee, in thee, How poor am I; thy children we, Within the shadow of thy grace Ah, guide us, Tukâ says. The love of man is like that of a child for its mother, or like that of a faithful wife for the husband: How the lotus all the night, To the faithful wife how dear The close parallel here is rather with Christian feeling, as in this plaintive hymn: New hope to Tukâ dost thou send, And new world bringest in; So like a happy child I play His is the sole authority, And on his will I wait. But it was inevitable that the love proclaimed in the Gîtâ should be rather more warmly felt in certain quarters. Thus in the twelfth century, following other mystics, Jayadeva wrote a mystical poem, the Gîtâ Govinda, in which the attachment between the soul and God is conceived allegorically in terms of a human mistress Râdhâ, and her lover Krishna. So sensuous is the perfervid description that it has been doubted whether the poem was intended as an allegory at all. But like Solomon's Song it is religious to the very religious-minded. Parts of it, however, cannot be translated properly, but an English rhyme may give a general impression: Say that I Râdhâ in my bower languish Widowed till Krishna finds his way to me; My eyes are dim with longing, all is anguish Until, with modest gentle shame, I see my lover come to me. So ch. ii; later on (vii) Râdhâ grows less modestly shameful: 8 Tukârâm died in 1649. The translations are from Nicol Macnicol in Hibbert Journal, October 1917. Now those who were parted grow one for ever, To be blended is gained at last; Glad tears are raining; No dread now, no plaining, Now doubt has passed Out of each face, in the close embrace. No fear that hereafter embracing is over, No sorrow that causes torturing pauses. No grief to be felt but fades and will melt The rapture of meeting, the swift and sweet greeting 9 This version of Edwin Arnold is not a close translation. It merely adumbrates in a chaste Victorian way the lurking appeal of the original. This appeal became the note struck by the earliest extant venacular Bengali poet Chandi Das of the fourteenth century, who belonged to the Sahajîya cult which originated in Vâmacâri Buddhism, that Left-hand cult which exalts adultery and incest as hand-maidens, so to speak, of pure religion. To appreciate Chandi Das and a number of later Bengali poets of this sort a Westerner must adopt something of the combination of faith and sensuous thrill shown at those Camp Meetings when delirium is caused by a morbid religious eroticism and then add indecencies happily unknown to Western cults.10 This rank growth is of course modified when the spirituality of these Bengali poets is exploited by natives for the benefit of foreigners. Thus Mr. Romesh C. Dutt discreetly presents Chandi Das to the West as a nerveless sentimentalist singing this ode to Krishna: 9 Compare for the survival of Buddhism in Bengal, The Modern Buddhism and its Followers in Ovissa, by N. N. Vasu, Calcutta, 1911. 10 Chandi Das made his specialty the cultivation of the Parakîya Rasa, "intercourse with another's wife," as a religious exercise; but he also urged the common use of women, as the greatest illusion" will be of spiritual edification. Oh how can words my thoughts portray, To be thy worshipper and slave. But the speaker is that abandoned female, Râdhâ, Krishna's mistress, and the Left-hand cult portrays the union of soul and God in terms appropriate to one whose highest religious activity is adultery. On much the same lines the Tantra sums up religious exaltation in terms of mystical sexunion. Yet to the native Oriental consciousness all this apparent lubricity is an example of "to the pure all things are pure." A congregation of devout, spiritually minded Hindus will listen enraptured to the images of the Vaishnava poets without (it is said) a thought of evil, even as the Christian Fathers wrote of their love to God in language tinged with eroticism, and it is at least fair to compare, though somewhat remotely, with the Tantra Mother-cult and its sensual excesses some phases of Gnostic phallicism in connection with the Mother and Savior. But Christianity has for the most part sloughed off what the Bengali devotee still keeps as a precious religious possession. But it would be a pity to leave Hindu mysticism in the hands of those thus purely devoted to sex-imagery. Nor is it necessary. Mr. Macnicol distinguishes between the sensual school of Vallabha and his followers and the "hysterical" school of Caitanya, the mystic of the fifteenth century, whose love for God is expressed in terms of filial devotion and whose followers are represented by the great saints of the nineteenth century. Their attitude is that of helpless childish devotion; they cling to the Mother-idea of God and lose themselves in fervid love which indeed sometimes expresses |