Viraha Bhakti

Edited by Chatgpt

[Songs 682, 868]

More than any other genre, ‘viraha-bhakti’ provides an opportunity to pour one’s heart out to the Lord, as the pain in ‘love in separation’ is deeply felt, bringing the spirit closer to the Lord. That is why saints in every bhakti tradition, celebrating this attitude towards God by keeping themselves as His lady love, wrote such songs deep from their hearts. As I have already shared more about this in other places, I don’t want to repeat it here.

After reading the following Sangam poem and the comments by David Shulman, I could not read further and put my book down, beginning to reflect on the pain in the line ‘eyes welling with tears.’ Of course, this song is an ‘aham’ – In-ness poem, but as Shulman writes, ‘Even joyful union retains an element of separation and longing as, a fortiori, do the states where there is actual physical distance between the lovers.’¹ As I continued to meditate and reflect, I thought that I have to write another poem on this subject of ‘viraha bhakti’ – love in separation. Then, as inspiration came, I wrote this song [868].  One should read the following to understand the context of this poem:

Let’s begin with a poem, and then one more. The first is a love poem attributed to Kapilar, one of the most famous of the Sangam poets; it appears in the anthology 400 Short Poems, Kuruntokai:²

He comes from the hill

where a baby monkey plays in the sun,

rolling an egg laid by a wild peacock

on a rock.

Loving him

is good, my friend,

for any woman,

eyes welling with tears,

who can stand it

and not think too much

when he goes away.

Sangam love poems tend to be about separation, of varying intensity. We have already seen that there is a concept of stolen love, kalavu, a happy but transient moment when the two young lovers consummate their desire in some natural setting before the relationship is made public knowledge and before marriage. Normally, in the grammar of love, kalavu is followed by states of acute longing and waiting; often the young man goes off in search of wealth and knowledge, leaving his beloved behind. Separation, pirivu, is associated with the landscape of the desert, paalai; and the grammarians tell us that this aspect of love is common to all other phases of the relationship. Even joyful union retains an element of separation and longing as, a fortiori, do the states where there is actual physical distance between the lovers.

This view was highlighted by another scholar showing the love of Radha and Krishna for each other.³ Hawley wrote about the love of Radha with Krishna and more about Krishna’s love with Radha, which are explained in the viraha bhakti (love in separation) genre, particularly in the chapter: *Radha: The Play and Perfection of Rasa.* Shrivatsa Goswami. Pp. 72-88, in which he says:

…Love is by nature a mutual satisfaction that is possible only when one negates oneself totally for the sake of the other. This self-negation involves the negation of sensuality and constitutes the height of spirituality. Its other-directed delight both includes and transcends personal and subjective pleasure. Krishna seeks pleasure in heightening the bhava of Radha, and she is delighted in his delight.⁴

And commenting on such viraha-bhakti, John B. Carman says,

Intellectuals have paid a high price, however, for turning away from bhakti. Neo-Vedantic and “post-liberal” Protestant theology draw on earlier theologies of incarnation—or at least of intermittent divine presence in our degenerate world—but they tend to be bloodless, unable to do justice to either the awesomeness or the mysterious sweetness of the divine-human encounter.⁵

In her book, Roberts⁶ has done a wonderful comparison about this kind of love of Gaudiya Vaisnava, particularly that of Rupa Gosvamin, with that of medieval Christian theologian Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a celibate monk and abbot, which is worth reading (‘The Rasa of Love Incarnate’, pp. 57 to 84; ‘A Dilemma of Feeling’, pp. 85 to 92; and ‘Love, Bodies, and Others’, pp. 97-116). It is beyond the scope of this comment on Bhakti Theology to either quote all of them or to study them. However, it is worth noting that, like Rupa Gosvamin, the medieval Christian theologian Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) elevates love over all other emotions in the devotional life. He finds ample material for the devotional sentiment of love in the biblical ‘Song of Songs.’ He writes no fewer than eighty-six sermons on the first chapters of this short book of Hebrew wisdom literature, which consists of a series of poetic exchanges between two lovers. God’s emotions are not ordinarily met in kind—the proper response to God’s anger, for example, is fear and repentance—but “When God loves, he desires nothing but to be loved, since he loves us for no other reason than to be loved” (Sermon. 83.4). In these preliminary features—love’s mutuality and its superiority to reverence and familial love—this Christian love of God invites comparison with the Vaisnava love of Krishna. In Bernard’s symbolism, the deity is male, and the lover of God, like the lover in the Song he designates the “Bride,” is imagined as female.⁷ As more scholars have written about this subject, collecting them all and compiling them together as a book or paper would be an interesting topic to ponder.8

Mathigiri, 7-7-2017

1. David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography, Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Third Printing, 2016, pp. 43-44

2. குறிஞ்சி

          கான மஞ்ஞை அறை ஈன் முட்டை

          வெயில் ஆடு முசுவின் குருளை உருட்டும்

          குன்ற நாடன் கேண்மை என்றும்

          நன்றுமன் வாழி-தோழி!-உண்கண்

          நீரொடு ஓராங்குத் தணப்ப,

          உள்ளாது ஆற்றல் வல்லுவோர்க்கே.      உரை

          வரைவு நீட்டித்தவழித் தலைமகள் தனது ஆற்றாமை தோன்றத் தோழிக்குக் கூறியது. –, 38 கபிலர்

3. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff, eds. The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, Boston, Beacon Press, 1982

4. ibid. p. 83

5. ibid. Comments: The Reversal and Rejection of Bhakti. John B. Carman. Pp. 125-128, p. 128

6. Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, New York, Fordham University Press, 2014,

7. ibid. p. 85

8. …love requires two, because sweetness needs “another” to taste it.— A Sanskrit Portrait: Radha in the Plays of Rupa Gosvami. Donna Marie Wulff. Pp. 27-41 p. 41, in The Divine Consort.

The love of Radha and Krishna is a subtle interplay of freedom and commitment, spontaneity and constancy. If we envision these poles as opposite ends of a continuum, we may place Krishna nearer to the freedom end and Radha nearer to that of commitment. Yet each partakes to some degree of the other’s predominant quality.

Krishna, on the other hand, exhibits almost total freedom. Although his irresistible attraction to Radha leads to uncharacteristic single-mindedness, his love for her is never wholly exclusive. This perpetual fickleness on his part represents both the universality of divine love, which is as diffuse and varied as the many degrees and ways in which he is loved, and his transcendence of all conventional boundaries.

Why should commitment in love be preferred over freedom? For the Vaisnava, the highest religious ideal is the sweetness of perpetual relatedness in bhakti, rather than the release from all bondage that is represented by the goal of moksha.

The moments when he {Krishna} comes to her with the humility of one who would place his head in the dust at her feet or wash those feet and even drink the water left over as a substance of grace (Prasad) are greeted by their spectators first with hushed awe and then with shouts of excitement. —iA Vernacular Portrait: Radha in the Sur Sagar. John Stratton Hawley. Pp. 42-56, p. 42

Edited by Chatgpt

[Songs 682, 868]