Chaitanya Charitamrita

Schol­arly Com­ments on Chai­tanya Charitamrita

Some time ago, I wrote a blog express­ing the need for a schol­arly explo­ration of just who the his­tor­i­cal Krishna Chai­tanya really was. Recently, a friend com­mented on it say­ing, “let’s get the ball rolling.” Hav­ing some time avail­able, I make some com­ments on what we may actu­ally know, espe­cially when such mate­r­ial may pro­vide a new view of Chai­tanya rather than the doc­tri­nal one.

My pri­mary source will be: Dimock, Edward C., Jr., Trans. Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita of Krish­nadas Kavi­raj. Ed. Tony K. Stew­art. Cam­bridge, Har­vard Ori­en­tal Series, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, 1999. This is the most author­i­ta­tive, schol­arly Eng­lish ren­di­tion of the Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita avail­able. Edward Dimock spent his life work­ing on it start­ing in 1955. Tony Stew­art began study­ing the text with Dimock in the 1970s. Both are lead­ing schol­ars in the field. I pro­vide brief excerpts from their one hun­dred forty three page intro­duc­tion along with some brief com­ments of my own. Click here to order from Amazon.

Dimock writes, “Nei­ther they [his friends, col­leagues, and teach­ers] nor I, in the mid-50’s, had any idea that the Vaish­navas, a small, geo­graph­i­cally lim­ited reli­gious group would in two decades spread out through the west­ern world with an extra­or­di­nary, and some­times aggres­sive mis­sion­ary zeal. (xvii)”

They see Chai­tanya not as the founder of the Ben­gal Vaish­nav move­ment but its revival­ist since he became the leader of an already exist­ing group of devo­tees. They also say,

Despite protes­ta­tions from many of his biog­ra­phers, very lit­tle is known about Chaitanya’s early life; inci­dents are so min­gled with sto­ries of the child Krishna as told in the BhP that it is hard to sep­a­rate fact from fancy.… His biog­ra­phers are under­stand­ably anx­ious to make him out to be a great philoso­pher, rhetori­cian, and poet, but there is no reli­able evi­dence to sug­gest that he was any of these things, or that he had any sig­nif­i­cant amount of edu­ca­tion in them. (11)

I have to agree with their conclusions.

As has been described else­where, cer­tain of his [Rai Ramanand’s] prac­tices as well as his reported con­ver­sa­tions would seem to indi­cate that he was a Saha­jiya or Tantric Vaish­nava, and his doc­tri­nal posi­tion might well have influ­enced Chaitanya’s own atti­tudes.… it was Ramanand who revealed Chaitanya’s own Radha–bhav, his per­son­al­ity as Radha, to Chai­tanya him­self (CC 2.8). He saw Chai­tanya as both Radha and Krishna: and from that time Radha man­i­fested her­self more and more in Chaitanya’s per­son, until in the anguish of his pain of sep­a­ra­tion from Krishna she took him over com­pletely, and he became irrev­o­ca­bly with­drawn from the world of ordi­nary men–mad, as it seemed to worldly human sight (19).

The his­toric­ity of Chaitanya’s con­ver­sion of Prakashanand is open to seri­ous ques­tion for a num­ber of rea­sons such–as it not being men­tioned by biog­ra­phers other than Krish­nadas and Krish­nadas’ ani­mos­ity toward Prakashanand.

The man­ner of Chaitanya’s death is a mys­tery.… Jayananda records the least ortho­dox, least accept­able, and prob­a­bly the most accu­rate, in this case, account: that near the end of the Car Fes­ti­val Chai­tanya injured his left foot while danc­ing, and after being in great pain for six days, died from an infec­tion of the wound (JCM 9.119–56) (22).

If we cut away like this all the sto­ries of Chaitanya’s life which are told to bol­ster the idea of Chaitanya’s iden­tity with Krishna, and all the mir­a­cles and all the hyper­bole, and all the lengthy argu­ment and instruc­tion so lov­ingly pre­sented by Krish­nadas, we are left with really very lit­tle to tell us about Chai­tanya the man. It is clear that he was an ascetic and with­drawn indi­vid­ual, hav­ing at the same time an extra­or­di­nary per­sonal mag­net­ism. He was almost cer­tainly, espe­cially in the later stages of his life, mad, whether this be inter­preted as the divine mad­ness of the holy fool, the ran­dom mad­ness of the irre­spon­si­ble child, or, as A.C. Sena prefers, epilepsy. And he seems, when lucid, to have been a gen­tle man, though not above sus­tained and bit­ter anger, as when he drove poor Chota Hari­das to sui­cide for a minor offense (CC 3.2.100–170). There was one thing he was not: he was no the­olo­gian, and this fact had pro­found effect on the move­ment after his death (23).

They call Nityanand “a Tantric avad­hut” (13) and later say,

Nityanand … seems to have been deeply con­cerned with the lower social orders. He him­self was a caste­less avad­hut, and began a pop­u­lar phase of the move­ment, per­haps one involved with the Tantric or Saha­jiya beliefs, which found itself in oppo­si­tion to that which Advaitacarya led (24).

Nityanand mar­ried Basudha and was given her sis­ter Jah­nava as part of the dowry. Basudha was Nityanand’s wife and bore his chil­dren. Jah­nava was his tantric part­ner or “shakti” who bore him no chil­dren but raised his chil­dren after her sister’s early death. After Nityanand’s death, Jah­nava inher­ited his man­tle of spir­i­tual lead­er­ship and is the founder of my lineage.

Of all the Gos­vamins, Raghu­nath prob­a­bly knew Chai­tanya best. It was from him that Krish­nadas knew most of the sto­ries of the life of Chai­tanya, as it was from Jiva and Rupa that he learned most about how to inter­pret them.

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Dimock and Stew­art point out that the Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita is “a book not of the acts (charita) but of the nec­tar of the acts (chari­ta­m­rita), in which per­son­al­i­ties would be out of place (26).”

Krish­nadas him­self was writ­ing decades after Chaitanya’s death, and in Vrin­da­van, nearly eight hun­dred miles from the worlds of Navad­vip and Puri, and in this sense devel­oped a per­spec­tive that only dis­tance could bring, for the events were to him remote in time and space, how­ever inspired he was.…

This did not mat­ter for his pur­poses, which were to present the basic ideas of Ben­gali Vaish­nav­ism in terms of Chaitanya’s life, and not to give a his­tor­i­cally accu­rate account of the life itself. (29)

As has been sug­gested, in some ways the Ben­gal branch of the move­ment was becom­ing more diver­gent from the the­o­log­i­cal “ortho­doxy” which the Gos­vamins were tying to estab­lish. In the mat­ter of the rela­tion of the gopis to Krishna, for exam­ple, the Gos­vamins were explain­ing that they were intrin­sic to him, parts of him (svakiya), and that the BhP’s state­ments that they belonged to oth­ers (parakiya) should not be taken lit­er­ally; the bhak­tas of Ben­gal, on the other hand, were cling­ing to the notion of the reli­gious impor­tance of the parakiya idea, hold­ing that trans­gres­sion of social norms is a nec­es­sary part of true love. So it is likely that Krish­nadas chose to write in Ben­gali not only to reach non-Sanskrit-reading peo­ple, but to reach peo­ple who were devi­at­ing from the Gos­vamins’ doc­trine, to bring them back, so to speak, to the fold. The essen­tial thought of the move­ment had gone from emo­tion­al­ism and imme­di­acy to ratio­nal and dog­matic state­ments as to the mean­ing of that; it was nec­es­sary to bring that thought back down from the rar­i­fied atmos­phere of scholas­ti­cism to the fer­tile earth of Ben­gal (33–34).

Krish­nadas was not a his­to­rian. He often con­fuses sequences of events, and as the irrev­er­ent A. C. Sena points out, he puts quo­ta­tions from the Brahma Samhita into the mouth of Ramanand Rai dur­ing that worthy’s first meet­ing with Chai­tanya, before the lat­ter had gone on his south­ern pil­grim­age (2.8. sl.29, sl.39). Yet it does not bother Krish­nadas to inform us that Chai­tanya brought that text back with him from south­ern India, and that it was not known in the north until he did (2.1.111; 2.9.295–97; 2.11.127–29). There are many exam­ples of this kind of thing, and some of them will be pointed out in the com­men­tary. It is tire­some, and irrel­e­vant, to cat­a­logue all these impos­si­bil­i­ties and ahis­toric­i­ties.… He was writ­ing a hagiog­ra­phy, not a his­tory; it was the mean­ing of the Chai­tanya–lila that was impor­tant to him, not the his­tor­i­cal facts.… One is never entirely sure, due to Krish­nadas’ inten­tion and to lack of gen­der in the pro­noun and suf­fixal forms of the lan­guage, whether Radha is being spo­ken of, or Chai­tanya, or both at the same time. Vrin­da­van and Puri, Chai­tanya and Krishna, Krishna and Radha, gopa, gopi and bhakta are all super­im­posed upon one anther. Peo­ple move back and forth between the human and divine, the finite and the infi­nite, with breath­tak­ing ease, and as this is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the faith as a whole, so it is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of this book, and his­tor­i­cal fact loses its sig­nif­i­cance (35).

“Krish­nadas was writ­ing for the peo­ple of Ben­gal, and so emu­lated the form which would, for this kind of con­tent, have been famil­iar to them (39).” Authors usu­ally write for the peo­ple of their time and place. I cer­tainly do. We need not stick with old, for­eign, out­moded expres­sions of spir­i­tual truth that we can­not relate to. To be a rel­e­vant, liv­ing way in the West, it must grow, evolve, and adapt, not remain stagnant.

Tony Stewart’s unpub­lished dis­ser­ta­tion “analy­ses the evo­lu­tion of the idea of Chaitanya’s divin­ity from its ori­gins in the ear­li­est text, Murari’s KCC, through the five inter­me­di­ate biogra­phies to Krish­nadas’ CC (78).” Jesus’ divin­ity in the four gospels evolved in a sim­i­lar man­ner. In Mark, the ear­li­est, Jesus is most human and in John, the last, most divine, like the CC.

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There are seven com­plete biogra­phies extant to the six­teenth cen­tury. Each biog­ra­pher is inescapably bound to his own his­tor­i­cal cir­cum­stance and, more impor­tant here, to his or more prob­a­bly his guru’s per­sonal devo­tional per­spec­tive.… the CC of Krish­nadas … is, both lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively, the final word in shap­ing the sacred image of Chai­tanya (82).

Krish­nadas pro­poses a final, novel image of Chai­tanya as the dual-incarnation of Radha and Krishna, an androg­y­nous divin­ity that encom­passed the full range of devo­tional pos­si­bil­i­ties between humans and God. When devo­tees envi­sioned him as a model for emulation–that is, as Radha–he served as the sub­ject of devo­tion; at other times, he was approached as the object of that devotion–Krishna (83).

Sri­vas Pandit’s sister-in-law, Narayani is the mother of Brind­a­ban Das, author of the pop­u­lar Chai­tanya Bhagavat.

Vrin­da­van Das’ father is never men­tioned, which raises the specter of ille­git­i­macy; and sec­ond, Narayani is reputed to have con­sumed Chaitanya’s left­over food, a priv­i­lege asso­ci­ated with inti­macy, but also a stan­dard mythic vari­ant for insem­i­na­tion (CBh 2.2.319; 2.10.288–94) (85).

Brind­a­ban Das was a dis­ci­ple of Nityanand and wrote at his com­mand. Most schol­ars date Chai­tanya Bha­ga­vat at 1548, which

argues heav­ily for its his­tor­i­cal accuracy–or at least a ver­sion of events accept­able to the community–for many of Chaitanya’s close com­pan­ions were still alive and prob­a­bly had the oppor­tu­nity to read the text.… Vrin­da­van Das pro­vides details of the puz­zling dis­so­cia­tive states expe­ri­enced by Chai­tanya when he was pos­sessed of the var­i­ous bhavas of devo­tion. His descrip­tions are vivid and pas­sion­ate, cap­tur­ing the spec­ta­cle of Chaitanya’s pro­found reli­gious expe­ri­ences (86).

The Chai­tanya Bha­ga­vat is also avail­able in English.

Most early biogra­phies, includ­ing Kavikarnapura’s own KCCM, empha­sized the regal and resplen­dent power (aish­varya) of Chai­tanya, the incar­na­tion of the sov­er­eign lord Krishna as a major com­po­nent of his divin­ity; but the CCN, focus­ing on his other-worldly ascetic life, pro­motes his role as pur­veyor of divine love, the sweeter, gen­tler side of Krishna–bhakti (mad­hurya). These two posi­tions, as will be seen in the CC, are a com­ple­men­tary pair of defin­ing fea­tures, poles around which Krishna’s per­son­al­ity has been his­tor­i­cally artic­u­lated, and like Krishna before him, so must Chai­tanya be pre­sented (91).

In Kavikarnapur’s hands, Chai­tanya is no longer the sim­ple avatara of the early tra­di­tion, but an increas­ingly com­plex fig­ure whose image serves dif­fer­ent the­olo­gies that develop within their group dur­ing the six­teenth cen­tury (92).

The Chai­tanya Man­gal of Lochan Das … for the first time in the hagio­graph­i­cal tra­di­tion … pro­motes the lov­ing aspect–the essen­tial sweet­ness or mad­hurya of Chaitanya–nearly to the exclu­sion of  his iden­tity as cos­mic overlord–the majes­tic aish­varya (93).

Chaitanya’s divin­ity found sev­eral out­lets, a per­spec­tive which rec­og­nized that both mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine fea­tures were com­ple­men­tary parts of the whole, thus for the first time Chaitanya’s bio­graph­i­cal image was very con­sciously fash­ioned as alter­nat­ing or ser­ial androg­yny (95).

Krish­nadas claims that he fol­lows Svarup’s ver­sion of that crit­i­cal meet­ing between Chai­tanya and Ramanand Rai (2.8.63), the rev­e­la­tion of Chaitanya’s androg­y­nous dual-incarnation. While Krish­nadas cred­its the Gos­vamins with all of his expla­na­tions for Krishna’s divin­ity and Radha’s love, he cred­its Svarupa with every major the­o­log­i­cal inno­va­tion regard­ing Chaitanya’s divin­ity and how that relates to Radha and Krishna (97).

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The CC is well-known for its com­pre­hen­sive sum­maries of Gos­vamin the­ol­ogy … Krish­nadas weaves together all of the pre­vail­ing the­o­ries of Chaitanya’s divin­ity and then hier­ar­chizes them into an inte­grated struc­ture that assigns rel­a­tive val­ues to each and explains how these appar­ently com­pet­ing inter­pre­ta­tions might be uni­fied. He brings together the pop­u­lar devo­tional styles of Ben­gal and the highly ana­lytic the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tion of schol­ars in Puri and Vrin­da­van to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive the­o­log­i­cal state­ment that would even­tu­ally serve to unite the dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of fol­low­ers. His argu­ment serves as a blue­print and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the group we have come to know as the Gaudiya Vaish­nava sam­pra­daya. (99–100)

The “inter­nal” cause of the avatara, then, was to taste that inti­mate sweet­ness (mad­hurya) of prema rasa, and in so doing, to prop­a­gate a new devo­tional form, the raga marga, the way of pas­sion­ate love (1.4.14) (101)

The inter­nal rea­son for Chaitanya’s appear­ance is to spread the way of nat­ural devo­tion because its sweet, pas­sion­ate nature is all that really sat­is­fies God-dess. This “new devo­tional form” has yet to catch on in the West because the Saraswati sam­pra­daya which intro­duced Chai­tanyaism to the West repressed it.  Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism seeks to rem­edy that by intro­duc­ing nat­ural devo­tion, “the way of pas­sion­ate love.”

Krish­nadas’ book endures as the clas­sic biog­ra­phy of the tra­di­tion; and … is arguably the best com­men­tary of this bio­graph­i­cal tra­di­tion. It has been so effec­tive that there have been few sig­nif­i­cant new for­mu­la­tions of Chaitanya’s divin­ity since; but so con­vinc­ing is this the­ol­ogy that after read­ing the CC, one is invari­ably led to ask if this work is about Chai­tanya at all, or is it really about Radha and Krishna? (106)

To some extent, this aspect of the belief [the power of the name] has been overem­pha­sized in some mod­ern forms of Vaish­nav­ism, and those forms take on the aspect of mantrayana, the tantric sys­tem which believes that all power is vested in the word itself. It is true that in CC 3.7, Chai­tanya praises Hari­dasa for the prop­a­ga­tion of the great­ness of the name, and for his dis­ci­pline in repeat­ing the name “three lakhs of times” each day (vv. 35–36). But in that same pas­sage he also praises Sarv­ab­hauma for his great learn­ing … and Ramanand for the depth of his under­stand­ing of bhakti (vv. 18–28). It is also true that nama-samkirtana, the singing of the name of Krishna, is given as one of the five most impor­tant forms of sad­hana bhakti, the pre­scribed rit­ual (vaidhi); but equal place with it is given to asso­ci­a­tion with holy men, lis­ten­ing to the read­ing of the BhP, dwelling at Mathura (Vrind­a­ban), and hon­or­ing and serv­ing the image of Krishna (CC 2.22.74–75) (112–13)

Again, Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism cor­rects this imbal­ance and pro­vides a more nat­ural, intu­itive approach to devo­tion which encour­ages prac­ti­tion­ers to use what­ever meth­ods work best for them per­son­ally in their unique context.

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It would in fact be pos­si­ble to char­ac­ter­ize the whole sys­tem as one which con­joins seem­ing oppo­sites (a posi­tion which one ordi­nar­ily thinks of as a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the tantras, and which in fact allows a Sha­jiya or tantric inter­pre­ta­tion of Vaish­nav­ism).… One has to real­ize that to Vaish­nava think­ing there is only a series of con­tin­u­ums, between human and divine, between male and female, reli­gion and esthet­ics, and between bhakti and sam­nyasa (119).

One con­cen­trates all one’s activ­ity and power of mind on one or another of the char­ac­ters of the BhP story, prefer­ably a gopi. And with the con­stant appli­ca­tion of sixty-four types of dis­ci­pline, … a change takes place in the psy­chic state. One knows one’s self as that gopi upon whom one has been con­cen­trat­ing; and know­ing is becom­ing (121).

This very con­cisely presents the means and goal of Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism.

J.A. Hon­ey­well in an arti­cle called “The Poetic The­ory of Vish­vanatha,” in the Jour­nal of Esthet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism … writes … Thus the poetic world rec­om­mended by Vish­vanatha is two steps removed from the nat­ural world of par­tic­u­lar objects. First, it is a world in which nat­ural objects are rep­re­sented in their gen­er­al­ity rather than in their par­tic­u­lar­ity; sec­ond, and only pos­si­ble because of the first step, it is a world in which super­nat­ural objects are accept­able as nat­ural objects (123–24).

This helps explain our under­stand­ing of Braj, Radha-Krishna’s spir­i­tual realm.

The sub­ject of Vaish­nava poetry is real­ity, and the world of that poetry is real; as Ignatius said, “the com­po­si­tion will be to see with the eyes of imag­i­na­tion the cor­po­real place where the thing I wish to con­tem­plate is found.” … Beauty is truth; art reflects the divine pat­tern.… Reli­gious and poetic truth are iden­ti­cal (128).

Com­ment­ing on a poem by Govin­dadas, Stew­art and Dimock point out:

Govin­dadas is also say­ing that Radha is the mate­r­ial crea­ture, and Krishna the imma­te­r­ial. The impli­ca­tion is that the imma­te­r­ial needs the mate­r­ial to con­tain it and make it real and potent. As Krishna needs Radha, God needs man. It also means that Krishna can be known through the mate­r­ial being, that there is a direct link between the phys­i­cal world, includ­ing the body, to the deity, and that there­fore the phys­i­cal world, includ­ing the body, is real (134–35).

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism agrees that God-dess is best real­ized and served by embrac­ing life fully and see­ing God-dess’ pres­ence in all things which spir­i­tu­al­izes them and us. The spir­i­tual world is the model for this world. Our life in this world works best when con­formed to the spir­i­tual life in its higher manifestations.

Per­haps these excerpts and com­ments have raised more ques­tions than they answered, and per­haps that was their intent. I just want to get the ball rolling. I would like to see some cre­ative dis­cus­sion of this sub­ject here as well as in schol­arly cir­cles. Pub­li­ca­tion of Tony Stewart’s dis­ser­ta­tion would cer­tainly be helpful. Meanwhile, I highly rec­om­mend this edi­tion of the Chai­tanya Chari­ta­m­rita to all seri­ous stu­dents of Chai­tanyaism. Click here to order it from Amazon.

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