Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c5.s2.3

c5.s2.3

A Caitanyaite Vaiṣṇava would regard the *Gita-govinda* not merely as a poetical composition of great beauty, but also as a great religious work, and would feign explain it in terms of his Bhakti Rasa-śāstra. But it must not be forgotten that Jayadeva's poem was composed nearly three hundred years before the appearance of Caitanya and before the promulgation of the Rasa-śāstra of Caitanyaism. It is hardly believable, therefore, that Jayadeva, like Rūpa Gosvāmin of the Caitanya sect, could have written it expressly for the illustration of any particular dogma or doctrine. As a poet of undoubted gifts, his chief object must have been to create a beautiful and finished work of great lyrical, pictorial and verbal splendour. His emotional temperament preferred an erotic theme, but of all erotic themes of mediaeval times the eternally fascinating love-story of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā was probably found the most absorbing. The love that Jayadeva depicts is indeed a reflex of the human emotion presented in a series of extremely brilliant and musical word-pictures, and the divine Kṛṣṇa and his consort are greatly humanised. As a musician, courtier and court-poet of Lakṣmaṇa-sena, Jayadeva must have been, as his poem itself testifies, entirely different in temperament and outlook from such devout and scholarly Gosvāmins as Rūpa and Sanātana. Whatever may have been the original character of the work, there can be no doubt that the Gita govinda, with its mystical emotions, was claimed by Caitanyaism as one of the sources of its religious inspiration. It is said that the Padāvalis of Jayadeva, like the Maithili songs of Vidyāpati, had a great appeal for Caitanya himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that Caitanya's followers should try to transform Jayadeva, as well as Vidyāpati,¹ into a Vaiṣṇava of the orthodox type. But in all probability, Jayadeva, like Vidyāpati, was chiefly and essentially a poet. No doubt, he emphasises in his poem the praise and worship of Kṛṣṇa, but it is not unusual in older poetry to present poetic and even secular themes under the garb of religion. It is not our purpose to deny Jayadeva's Vaiṣṇava leanings, which are too obvious to be ignored, but we should like to emphasise the point that as a poet, it was probably not his concern to compose a religious treatise in accordance with any particular Vaiṣṇava dogmatics. It is undoubted that the erotic mysticism of his poem, which gives expression to fervent devotional longings in the intimate language of earthly passion, influenced similar tendencies of Caitanyaism, but it would not be historically correct to read later Vaiṣṇava Rasa-śāstra into his much earlier work, or judge it by the tenets and practices which came into existence some centuries later.