Radha Krishna’s Ages

I have been read­ing Ananda Vrind­a­ban Champu, by Kavi-karnapur, trans­lated by Bhanu Swami & Sub­hag Swami with great joy. It is very well writ­ten and edited as to be very read­able. Still there are things I feel should be changed. I will not go into them now. I am about half way through, hav­ing skipped the child­hood and demon killing pastimes.

Here is a pas­sage that sup­ports my under­stand­ing of Krishna engaged in his erotic pas­times as being older.

“Nanda and Yasoda who were tied to Him by the creeper of parental affec­tion, thought that Krishna would remain per­pet­u­ally as their lit­tle boy.

“Despite their think­ing, Krishna soon blos­somed into man­hood. At this time the gopis saw Krishna as a hand­some most lov­able young man, but His par­ents con­tin­ued to see Him as their dar­ling son….To sat­isfy the Lord’s desire to rel­ish parakiya bhav, Yoga­maya also arranged for the gopis to main­tain the con­scious­ness of iden­ti­fy­ing as other men’s wives.” Ananda Vrind­a­ban Champu, p 140

A younger age for Krishna may be very appro­pri­ate for those in parental rela­tion­ships or for some of his child­hood pas­times with his friends. How­ever, for erotic rela­tion­ships with the cowherd girls, an older age is more appro­pri­ate. I say this from my own per­sonal view­point of desir­ing an erotic rela­tion­ship with Radha Krishna. I also say it from the view­point of want­ing to present an erotic mood that does not have the tinge of pedophilia from an eth­i­cal point of view. The parental and erotic moods are not really com­pli­men­tary. I’m sure Radha Krishna can appear at dif­fer­ent ages to sat­isfy the desires of their dif­fer­ent devotees.

Accord­ing to Kavi-karnapur, Krishna came to earth to enjoy child­hood pas­times, the killing of demons and the rela­tion­ship of para­mour love. These things do not exist in the tran­scen­den­tal realm which is unman­i­fest. I have no inter­est in any of these pas­times. I also have no inter­est in being born again, even if it is where Krishna is man­i­fest­ing his earthly pas­times. There­fore, I dis­agree with Vish­wanath Chakravarty that we have to be born in the earthly Braja with Krishna before going to the spir­i­tual Braja.

Look­ing at things in a post-modern, quan­tum physics type of way, I see no rea­son why we can’t just make a quan­tum leap rather than a sequen­tial jour­ney. I also see no need to develop all the details of our iden­tity before being able to go there because I am quite con­fi­dent that yoga­maya can fill in all the needed information.

I also want to clar­ify the use of two terms to describe the rela­tion­ship between Radha and Krishna—conjugal and erotic.

con•ju•gal Of or relat­ing to mar­riage or the rela­tion­ship of spouses.
e•rot•ic
1. Of or con­cern­ing sex­ual love and desire; ama­tory.
2. Tend­ing to arouse sex­ual desire.
3 Dom­i­nated by sex­ual love or desire.

I believe the sec­ond of the two terms is more accu­rate since the illicit nature of their love is empha­sized, and that is what I pre­fer to use.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 15:10 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.