Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c10.s3.18

c10.s3.18

Although the devotional sentiments admit of gradation in the form of the feelings of servitude, friendship or parental affection, there can be no doubt that the erotic alone is canonised by the Bengal sect. The mystic experience of the divine sports is almost entirely governed by the erotic feeling and wholly steeped in it, the other sentiments only touching its fringe. The highest object of religious adoration and worship is conceived and moulded, after the Purāṇic legend, in a frankly erotic cast, and there is nowhere any suggestion of allegory in the circumstantial working out of its minute sensuous details. The glorification of the sex-impulse is supreme. In the gorgeous expansion of the legend, for instance, in the Kāvya, Nāṭaka and Campū of the sect, composed by its venerable teachers, there is nothing but a series of erotic situations, described with the evident relish of sensuous enjoyment, and never symbolised into spiritual truths. It is plainly and emphatically the language of the senses, even if one may make a desperate attempt to read a supersensuous meaning into it. The spiritual foundation is too flimsy for its overwhelming excess of palpable eroticism. The cult of the infant and adolescent Kṛṣṇa need not be sweepingly characterised as vulgar² or immoral³, nor need the emotionalism of the Vaiṣṇava devotee be superficially deprecated as sensual delirium⁴ or serenity induced by exhausted passion⁵; but such strong language of critics undoubtedly implies, not without reason, that the conception and the attitude, in spite of scriptural or metaphysical justification, possess dangerous possibilities or demoralising tendencies. It may be suggested that it does not matter about the deficiency or questionable character of the means so long as it leads ultimately to the end; but, granted the spiritual end, can it justify the sensuous means?