Institutionalizing Prema-bhakti

I was doing some web research today and came across this book excerpt by emi­nent Chai­tanya Vaish­nav scholar, Joseph T. O’Connell. He con­cisely and insight­fully describes how Chaitanya’s devo­tional teach­ings and prac­tices became insti­tu­tion­al­ized in a soft, sym­bolic, decen­tral­ized man­ner as opposed to the hard, cen­tral­ized, coer­cive insti­tu­tions later formed by Gaudiya Math and ISKCON.

I noticed these dif­fer­ences in the ways A.C. Bhak­tivedanta Swami and Lalita Prasad Thakur dealt with me and their other dis­ci­ples. I was much more attracted to Lalita Prasad’s way and mod­eled Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism on that.

— Steve Bohlert

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 22:53 and is filed under Jungle dispatch and tagged with Gaudiya Math, Institutionalization, ISKCON. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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One Response to “Institutionalizing Prema-bhakti”

1. Zvonimir Tosic says:

   July 20, 2009 at 05:31

   It’s inter­est­ing to read in the sec­ond part of his book excerpt; Joseph O’Connell describes work of six gos­vamis from Vrin­da­van (Braj) as per­haps too suc­cess­ful — in a way that their work seem­ingly dis­cour­aged fur­ther devel­op­ment and new cre­ative direc­tions of prema-bhakti. Instead, all suc­ces­sors were writ­ing com­men­taries on what six gos­vamis already out­lined. Aes­thet­ics of love sud­denly became teach­ings and phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion, now carved in stone.

   This goes hand in hand with my con­clu­sions about short­fall of cre­ative pur­suit in aes­thet­ics of prema-bhakti and its won­der­ful myth. The myth has stopped to develop fur­ther, and newer gen­er­a­tions were act­ing as blind fol­low­ers. Instead of con­nect­ing us with a liv­ing, beau­ti­ful myth — or an artis­tic motif — encour­ag­ing to accept it as such and enrich in each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion, we were left with a rigid and lit­eral inter­pre­ta­tion of it and thou­sands of strict rules to fol­low a doc­trine. Stag­na­tion took place.

   No won­der result­ing phi­los­o­phy is out­dated, full of flaws. In the his­tory of paint­ing that would mean noth­ing ever hap­pened since, say, Fra Angelico or in music noth­ing since Gio­vanni Pier­luigi da Palest­rina …

   So, this is a good exam­ple of lit­er­al­ism vs sym­bol­ism. Renais­sance in the West helped us rise above medieval lit­er­al­ism and accept sym­bol­ism (thank clas­sic Greeks for the inspi­ra­tion), but that never hap­pened in the Ori­ent. I should write more about it.

   — Zvon­imir Tosic