God As Mother

I have been read­ing God As Mother: A Fem­i­nine The­ol­ogy in India, by Cheever Macken­zie Brown, and I am about half way through it. It is a fas­ci­nat­ing study of the Brah­mavaivarta Purana (BVP) in which I found many the­o­log­i­cal points I res­onate with, so much so that I have now ordered the whole BVP.

Some of the impor­tant points Brown points out are:
•The extant BVP con­tains both ancient and more recent writ­ings. It is quite dif­fer­ent from an ear­lier ver­sion of the BVP. It seems to be a 15th-16th cen­tury work.
•“It seems closely related to both the Val­labha and Cai­tanya schools…Nimbarkite influ­ence can hardly be ruled out in a work that attempts to embrace sev­eral points of view…there is not one the­ol­ogy in our Purana, but rather a num­ber of the­o­log­i­cal strands: pop­u­lar, Tantric, Saivite, Vaish­navite and oth­ers.” pp 37–38
•“Puranas were pub­licly sung or recited, and in the process under­went con­stant revi­sion and recre­ation or elab­o­ra­tion.” p 10
•Radha is mar­ried to Krishna by Brahma and so their love is not illicit. Radha’s posi­tion is quite com­pa­ra­ble to Krishna’s. “It has eroti­cized the Krishna leg­end, largely by the intro­duc­tion of Radha, and goes far beyond the mys­ti­cal erotic ten­den­cies of the Bha­ga­vat Purana.” p 36

These and many other points show that the BVP is a valu­able work which pro­vides an alter­na­tive vision of Radha Krishna from that of the more often relied upon Bha­ga­vat Purana. When dif­fer­ent visions of a myth which have devel­oped over time exist and are rec­og­nized, they allow room for the cre­ation of yet another vision adapted to cur­rent time and circumstance.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 15:04 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.