Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c5.s1.11

c5.s1.11

The Śrīmad-bhāgavata is indeed the one great Purāṇa which appears to have exercised an enormous influence on the development of Bhakti ideas in mediaeval times. No satisfactory theory of its date and origin has yet been advanced,¹ but there can be no doubt that its emergence marks a turning point in the history of the Vaiṣṇava faith, and that a whole series of sects, who take it as their leading scripture, appears in a sense to have been born out of this remarkable work. Contrasted with the Hari-vaṃśa and the Viṣṇu purāṇa, the Bhāgavata scarcely deals with the whole life of Kṛṣṇa but concentrates all its strength upon his boyhood and youth. With the youthful Kṛṣṇa at the centre, it weaves its peculiar theory and practice of intensely personal and passionate Bhakti, which is somewhat different from the speculative Bhakti of the Bhagavad-gītā. Although Rādhā is not mentioned, the Gopīs figure prominently in the romantic legend, and their dalliance with Kṛṣṇa is described in highly emotional and sensuous poetry. The utter self-abandonment of the Gopīs, the romantic love of the mistress for her lover, becomes the accepted symbol of the soul's longing for God; and the vivid realisation of the eternal sports of Kṛṣṇa in an imaginative Vṛndāvana is supposed to lead to a passionate love and devotion for the deity. The *Bhāgavata* thus introduces a type of erotic mysticism as the leading religious idea, and the importance of the work lies precisely in this. It asserts the rights of the emotional and the aesthetic in human nature, and appeals to the exceedingly familiar and authentic intensity of feelings and sentiments. It transfigures the mighty sex-impulse into a passionate religious emotion. The *Bhāgavata* is thus one of the most remarkable mediaeval documents of mystical and passionate religious devotion, its eroticism and poetry bringing back warmth and colour into religious life. The essential truth of its glorification of Vṛndāvan-līlā lies in this appeal for a more emotional religion and in its protest against the hard intellectuality of doctrines and dogmas.