Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c8.s1.8

c8.s1.8

For a proper understanding of this Vaiṣṇava Bhakti-rasa, as expressed in its literary and religious productions, it would be necessary, therefore, to appreciate the fundamentals, as well as the details, of this presentation of Bhakti as a psychological entity, as a literary-erotic emotion transmuted into a deep and ineffable devotional sentiment, which is intensely personal and is yet impersonalised into a mental condition of disinterested joy. But the attitude is a curious mixture of the literary, the erotic and the religious, and the entire scheme as such is an extremely complicated one. There is an enthusiasm, natural to the analytic scholastic mind, for elaborate and subtle psychologising, as well as for developing and refining the inherited rhetorical traditions; but the attempt is also inspired very largely by an antecedent and still living poetic experience (Jayadeva and Lilāśuka), which found expression also in vernacular poetry (Vidyāpati and Caṇḍidāsa), as well as by the simple piety of popular religions which reflected itself in the conceptions of such Purāṇas as the Śrīmad-bhāgavata, the fountain source of mediaeval Vaiṣṇava Bhakti. But it goes further and rests ultimately on the transcendental in personal religious experience of an emotional character, which does not indeed deny the senses but goes beyond their pale.