Our Roots – Bhaktivinode Thakur

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur (1838–1914), our grand teacher, was a unique man among Indian schol­ars in tra­di­tion of Radha-Krishnna devo­tion. Unlike many oth­ers, he was influ­enced by Chris­t­ian Uni­tar­ian thought and advo­cated for using the schol­arly tech­niques of British Ori­en­tal­ists to dis­sem­i­nate truth. He saw the rev­e­la­tion of truth as progressive.

Born of a wealthy fam­ily in 1838, Bhak­tivin­ode grew up in a tra­di­tional Hindu house­hold of rural Ben­gal. In his youth he moved to Cal­cutta where he was English-educated. He became an asso­ciate of the Tagore fam­ily, Bankim Chan­dra Chat­ter­jee, Iswar Chan­dra Vidyasagar and Keshub Chadra Sen.

Bhaktivinode’s life strad­dled con­tem­po­rary Ben­gali soci­ety and ances­tral Hindu cul­ture. One was mod­ern, ana­lyt­i­cal world that demamned ratio­nal thought. The other was the tra­di­tional world of Hindu faith and piety.

In his late twen­ties Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur dis­covred his East­ern Sav­iour, Krishna Chai­tanya (1486–1533). He even­tu­ally became a the­olo­gian and leader within the Chai­tanya Vaish­nava move­ment of Ben­gal. Bhak­tivin­ode made a life­long study of Hindu phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­ogy and lit­er­a­ture. He wrote and edited almost a hun­dred books in Ben­gali, San­skrit and Eng­lish.⁽¹⁾

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur real­ized that there are essen­tial truths in the scrip­tures, but they need to be rein­ter­preted for every new gen­er­a­tion, espe­cially when the per­sons receiv­ing that truth are of a dif­fer­ent cul­tural and reli­gious back­ground from the orig­i­nat­ing cul­ture. So, main­tain­ing the essen­tial truth of a pas­sage, we apply it dif­fer­ently today than we would have say 500 years ago, or even yes­ter­day, or from one audi­ence to the next. Each audi­ence calls for a par­tic­u­lar, unique per­for­mance of the truth accord­ing to its under­stand­ings and needs. Every­one is at a dif­fer­ent stage of spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence. There­fore, they need a dif­fer­ent word of truth. As Mar­tin Luther said, “That may be the word of God for you, but it’s not for me.”

This relates to exe­ge­sis and hermeneu­tics, the process of using schol­arly tech­niques to under­stand what a scrip­tural pas­sage meant in its ear­li­est set­ting for the orig­i­nal intended audi­ence, and then using an inter­pre­tive process to derive its mean­ing for the audi­ence being addressed today.

Bhak­tivin­ode wrote, “Progress cer­tainly is the law of nature and there must be cor­rec­tions and devel­op­ments with the progress of time.” (Bha­ga­vat 5) Accord­ing to process the­ol­ogy, every­thing is in process, includ­ing God-dess, who is beyond our under­stand­ing, and yet, our col­lec­tive and indi­vid­ual under­stand­ing of God-dess devel­ops over time. If faith does not grow and develop, it stag­nates and dies.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur fur­ther says, “Lib­erty then is the prin­ci­ple, which we must con­sider as the most valu­able gift of God. We must not allow our­selves to be led by those who lived and thought before us. We must think for our­selves and try to get fur­ther truths which are still undis­cov­ered. In the … Bha­ga­vata we have been advised to take the spirit of the sas­tras [scrip­tures] and not the words. The Bha­ga­vata is, there­fore, a reli­gion of lib­erty, unmixed truth, and absolute love.”

Bhak­tivin­ode was a nineteenth-century, British-educated mag­is­trate. He was trained to hear the tes­ti­mony, view the evi­dence, and draw a con­clu­sion regard­ing the truth of the mat­ter. He approached spir­i­tual truth the same way, study­ing var­i­ous reli­gions and philoso­phies, both East­ern and Western.

He con­cluded the teach­ings of the Bha­ga­vat were the best, but he also found errors in it and the writ­ings of its most revered com­men­ta­tors. He trusted him­self, his intel­li­gence, and nat­ural intu­ition to guide him. He some­times broke with tra­di­tion and took con­tro­ver­sial stands.

He expe­ri­enced the full influ­ence of nine­teenth cen­tury ratio­nal­ism, along with Chris­t­ian and Uni­tar­ian thought. As an essence seeker, he con­cerned him­self with eter­nal spir­i­tual truths rather than their exter­nal man­i­fes­ta­tions. He pre­sented the teach­ings of Krishna Chai­tanya in a new way to West­ern edu­cated intel­lec­tu­als of his day, some­thing we’re seri­ously miss­ing even today.

Bhak­tivin­ode sep­a­rated the received tra­di­tion, which is sub­ject to analy­sis, crit­i­cism, and change, from the tran­scen­dent real­ity, which he saw is beyond our logic, intel­lect, and lan­guage. He under­stood the dis­tinc­tion between reli­gious faith and belief, thereby free­ing us to cre­ate a lifestyle and phi­los­o­phy that allows West­ern­ers to use the spir­i­tual prac­tices of Chai­tanyaism with­out unnec­es­sary alien­ation from West­ern cul­ture and thought. Of course, many of us on the spir­i­tual path are prob­a­bly alien­ated from West­ern cul­ture and reli­gion to a degree nat­u­rally, and that is why we seek an eter­nal spir­i­tual home.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur rec­og­nized the need for the tradition’s spir­i­tual and cul­tural adap­ta­tion to time, place, and audi­ence. He iden­ti­fied with mod­ern reli­gious thinkers, like Ralph Waldo Emer­son, as fel­low uni­ver­sal­ist essence seek­ers, able to tran­scend the lim­i­ta­tions of their own spir­i­tual cul­ture and value the essence of other spir­i­tual traditions.

Fur­ther­more, he approached the divine through faith rooted in innate spir­i­tual intu­ition, which allows free­dom and cre­ativ­ity for new rev­e­la­tions of spir­i­tual truth by the inner teacher — Cos­mic Consciousness.

Today we live a con­tem­po­rary West­ern lifestyle con­ducive to spir­i­tual growth. Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism offers the updated essence of tra­di­tional, eso­teric Chai­tanyaism. Our grand teacher is indeed a shin­ing exam­ple and inspi­ra­tion to pro­gres­sive thinkers in the way he dealt with the spir­i­tual issues of his day.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur (then still called Kedar­nath Datta) wrote his sem­i­nal work Krishna Samhita in 1880. That same year Bipin Bihari Goswami (his devo­tional teacher) ini­ti­ated him into nat­ural devo­tional prac­tice and the year Lalita Prasad Thakur (our devo­tional teacher) was born to Bhak­tivin­ode and his wife Bha­ga­vati Devi.

In the pref­ace of the book he described the ben­e­fits of using a log­i­cal, intel­lec­tual method to study his­tory and the con­cept of time. He advo­cated a crit­i­cal ana­lyt­i­cal approach to old beliefs to free them from lay­ers of mis­con­cep­tions and bring India to a health­ier spir­i­tual state.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur received a mod­ern Eng­lish col­lege edu­ca­tion. He served as a Deputy Mag­is­trate in the Indian civil ser­vice under British rule, which he strongly sup­ported. While Euro­pean philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal thought influ­enced his think­ing, he was most taken with Krishna Chai­tanya and devo­tion to Radha-Krishna (although in his young days he dis­missed such devo­tion as sim­ple, emo­tional reli­gion for the com­mon, une­d­u­cated per­son). Many of Bhaktivinode’s peers sim­i­larly rejected the devo­tional path, which they viewed as backwards.

In Krishna Samhita, Bhak­tivin­ode appeals to think­ing per­sons to recon­sider the Bha­ga­vata Purana, which teaches devo­tion to Krishna, using mod­ern crit­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion like the British Ori­en­tal­ists. Con­sid­er­ing “his­tory and time accord­ing to rea­son and argu­ment” means using the tools of mod­ern, schol­arly research to date his­tor­i­cal events and the writ­ing of scrip­tures, as well as their inter­pre­ta­tion. For exam­ple, fol­low­ing a schol­arly exam­i­na­tion of the evi­dence, he con­cluded that the Bha­ga­vata was writ­ten about a 1,000 years ago, while tra­di­tion says it was writ­ten 5,000 years ago. We use a sim­i­lar schol­arly crit­i­cal approach to develop Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism.

It’s inter­est­ing to note that his ideas go com­pletely against the kind of fun­da­men­tal­ist tenac­ity to scrip­tural lit­er­al­ism that char­ac­ter­izes much of Gaudiya Vaish­nav­ism, includ­ing those branches that claim alle­giance to him. For exam­ple, they still accept a pre-rational, tra­di­tional notion that scrip­tures were writ­ten 5,000 years ago, and never acknowl­edge⁽²⁾:

1. His accep­tance of per­sonal intu­ition or per­sonal rev­e­la­tion, which he called sahaja-samadhi.
2. His accep­tance of the evo­lu­tion­ary or pro­gres­sive model.
3. His accep­tance of sym­bolic inter­pre­ta­tion of the scrip­tures and his the­ory of symbolism.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur saw a schol­arly crit­i­cal approach to faith as good for India and for per­sonal spir­i­tual advance­ment. Pro­gres­sive Chris­tians model this well. Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism apply it to Radha-Krishna devo­tion. Bhak­tivin­ode and many of his peers felt tra­di­tional devo­tion needed intel­lec­tual scrutiny to free it from “mis­con­cep­tions” and “whirlpools of illu­sion” to make it accept­able to mod­ern, well edu­cated per­sons. We feel the same way and con­tinue his work.

When we become whole, inte­grated per­sons, using faith and rea­son, right and left cere­bral hemi­spheres, body, mind, and spirit, we become per­fect and see things rightly. We may thor­oughly exam­ine and ana­lyze our faith, remove out­dated beliefs and prac­tices, and put it back together even more superbly. Bhak­tivin­ode and Paul Tillich clearly sep­a­rated faith and belief.

Bhak­tivin­ode saw the neces­sity of adapt­ing the rules and reg­u­la­tions passed on by the dis­ci­plic suc­ces­sion to develop devo­tion accord­ing to the needs of the audi­ence. This is espe­cially true as we move from one soci­ety to another. This pro­duces regional dif­fer­ences, which need not be viewed as sectarianism.

Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur saw devo­tion as a pro­gres­sive process that needs to adapt to time and cir­cum­stance. He did not have a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all men­tal­ity. Truth is not static–it is quite dynamic. There is not one Truth, but many truths. There is not one way, but many ways. He saw things plu­ral­is­ti­cally, from a non­sec­tar­ian uni­ver­sal­ist per­spec­tive. Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism: A Spir­i­tu­al­ity of Lib­erty, Truth, and Love car­ries on the teach­ings of Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur in the West.
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(1) Shukavak N Dasa, Hindu Encounter with Moder­nity, Sri, Los Ange­les 1999
(2) Hindu Encounter with Moder­nity by Shukavak N Dasa, a book review by Jagadananda das

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