Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c5.s2.6

c5.s2.6

While these parallelisms are admitted, there is no proof of Jayadeva's direct indebtedness to the *Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa*, and it is difficult to explain why Jayadeva should prefer its authority to that of the almost exclusively paramount Vaiṣṇava scripture, the *Śrīmad-bhāgavata*. The date of the *Brahmavaivarta* is uncertain, but assuming the genuineness of the extant text, the *Kṛṣṇa janma-khaṇḍa* must be at least later than Śaṃkara and his school, to whom a distinct reference is made.¹ The suggestion that the whole of the Uttara-khaṇḍa of the Purāṇa is a Nimbārkite interpolation² is hardly convincing. Of all the Vaiṣṇava schools the Nimbārkas appear, no doubt, to give prominence to Rādhā in their thought and worship; but there are chronological difficulties in assuming Nimbārkite influence either on Jayadeva or on the Purāṇa. The date of Nimbārka has not yet been fixed with certainty, but if he lived some time after Rāmānuja,³ he would be almost contemporaneous with Jayadeva, and the theory of any influence by Nimbārka or by his sect on Jayadeva and his assumed source would be highly improbable. But the exaltation of Rādhā is a distinctive feature of the Purāṇa as well as of Jayadeva and of the Nimbāra sect. It is possible that Jayadeva derived and developed his erotic mysticism from the same source as Nimbārka himself; and to the same obscure source probably the writer of the latter portion of the Purāṇa was indebted for his extremely sensuous treatment of the Rādhā-legend. Such emotional tendencies might have been wide-spread enough to have been thus widely and popularly utilised. In later times we find that the *Śrīmad-bhāgavata* became the ultimate source of such emotionalism, and it ceased to be confined to Bengal, Mithilā and Southern India; but the Rādhā-legend and the exuberant development of its erotic possibilities, which supplied inspiration alike to Jayadeva, Nimbārka and writers of such late Purāṇas as the *Brahmavaivarta*, must be traced to a different and earlier unknown source.