A Myth Writer Who Realizes It Is a Myth

I just fin­ished re-reading Sri Mad­hava Mahot­sava by Sri Jiva Gos­vami­pada, trans­lated by Bhanu Swami. In the final sec­tion, The Union, Jiva says, “The Divine Cou­ple Radha-Madhava, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of beauty, the tem­ple of youth­ful­ness, the kin­dom of good qual­i­ties, the trea­sure house of all types of bliss, the essence of all sixty four arts, a heav­enly flower scented by Cupid’s own fra­grance, and the shel­ter of Their devo­tees…” I think this is a pretty good state­ment of what the essence of God-dess is.

Then, in The Con­clud­ing Request, Jiva says, “With all my intel­li­gence I have not even been able to vaguely describe this bliss­ful pas­time.. Far from pre­sent­ing the details, I can­not even present a gen­eral descrip­tion. The form of the moon is only man­i­fest in the full moon.” Jiva Goswami, who is bet­ter known for his the­o­log­i­cal trea­tises, did an out­stand­ing job of describ­ing Radha’s bathing cer­e­mony and coro­na­tion as the Queen of Vrind­a­ban. He talks about using his intel­li­gence to describe these bliss­ful pas­times. As I said else­where, faith tran­scends intel­li­gence, but it does not negate it. We are to use our intel­li­gence in these matters.

Jiva also admits his inabil­ity to describe these pas­times because of the lim­i­ta­tions of lan­guage and he also admits that his descrip­tion is dif­fer­ent from the actual pas­times. They are sym­bolic, metaphor­i­cal, mytho­log­i­cal descrip­tions of the actual spir­i­tual real­i­ties, and that is the only way spir­i­tual truths can be described. It is a lan­guage of faith devel­oped by a com­mu­nity of faith. There­fore, it is sub­ject to scrutiny and fur­ther development.

If we could all admit the lim­i­ta­tions of our visions and descrip­tions as Jiva so humbly does through­out, per­haps we would not be so attached to them and not need to take them in such a lit­eral, con­crete way.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 15:01 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.