Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu: Rupa Gosvami's ocean of devotional feeling
The Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, "the ocean of the nectar of devotional rasa", is the founding work of Gaudiya Vaishnava theology of practice and emotion. Rupa Gosvami completed it in Vrindavan in 1541. A page at this address once carried the preface and introduction of an English translation; this is a new presentation of the work.
The author and his project
Rupa Gosvami (died c. 1564) and his elder brother Sanatana were high officials at the court of the sultan of Bengal before joining Chaitanya. Sent by him to Vrindavan, they became the senior figures of the group later called the Six Gosvamis. Rupa wrote plays, poems and treatises; the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu and its sequel, the Ujjvala-nilamani, are his theoretical masterpieces.
His starting point was classical Sanskrit poetics. Since Bharata's Natyashastra and its commentators, Indian theorists had explained how a play or poem awakens a refined emotion, rasa, in the sensitive spectator. Rupa's bold move was to say that the true subject of rasa is love for Krishna, and that devotion is not merely one feeling among others but the very source of aesthetic delight. The theatre metaphor becomes a theology: the devotee is both spectator and participant in Krishna's eternal play.
Four oceans
True to its title, the work is divided into four "oceans", each made of several "waves":
- Eastern ocean. Devotion in general: its definition, the discipline of practice (sadhana-bhakti), the first stirrings of feeling (bhava) and mature love (prema).
- Southern ocean. The ingredients of rasa adapted from poetics: the stimulating causes, the outward signs, the involuntary bodily reactions, the passing emotions and the abiding emotion.
- Western ocean. The five primary relationships with Krishna: peaceful contemplation, servitude, friendship, parental affection and amorous love.
- Northern ocean. Seven secondary rasas, such as wonder, humour and compassion, and the ways rasas can clash or blend.
The amorous mode, which Rupa considered the highest, is treated only briefly here and developed at length in the Ujjvala-nilamani.
A definition and a ladder
Early in the first ocean Rupa defines the highest devotion as service to Krishna that is favourable to him, free from other desires and not covered by the pursuit of knowledge or ritual merit. The verse (1.1.11), beginning anyabhilashita-shunyam, is one of the best known in the tradition.
Another passage (1.4.15–16) traces a sequence of stages. It starts with faith, which leads to the company of devotees, then to regular practice. Practice removes obstacles, giving way to steadiness, then taste, then attachment, then the first real feeling (bhava), and finally love (prema). Gaudiya teachers still use this ladder to describe spiritual progress.
Rupa lists sixty-four limbs of practice, from accepting a teacher to observing holy days, and singles out five as especially powerful: the company of devotees, chanting the holy names, hearing the Bhagavata Purana, living in the region of Mathura, and serving the sacred image with faith.
Commentaries and translations
Rupa's nephew Jiva Gosvami wrote the first commentary, the Durgama-sangamani; Vishvanatha Chakravarti added another around 1700. In the twentieth century Bhakti Hridaya Bon (1901–1982), a disciple of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati who had preached in Britain and Germany in the 1930s, published an English translation of the first part from his institute in Vrindavan in the 1960s. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami issued a summary study under the title The Nectar of Devotion in 1970. The most complete scholarly translation is David L. Haberman's, published in 2003 with the Sanskrit text.
Scholars read the work as a landmark in the history of Indian aesthetics and of emotion in religion. Neal Delmonico, June McDaniel and others have shown how it reshaped Bengali devotional culture, from song to painting.
Devotion in practice and in feeling
One of Rupa's most influential distinctions separates two kinds of practice. Vaidhi bhakti, devotion according to rules, is followed because scripture prescribes it. Raganuga bhakti, devotion that follows passion, arises when a practitioner is attracted by the love of Krishna's companions in Vraja and wishes to serve in a similar mood. Rupa describes the second as the higher path but warns that it requires genuine attraction rather than imitation. Much later Gaudiya literature, from meditation manuals to debates in the Gaudiya Math, turns on how these two paths relate.
Rupa also gives a detailed account of the bodily and emotional signs of devotion: tears, trembling, change of voice, horripilation and others, classified as "sattvika" reactions. He distinguishes genuine signs from their shadows and imitations, an analysis that proved important in a tradition where public displays of ecstasy were both admired and suspected.
Influence on Bengali culture
The work's influence went far beyond theology. Its categories shaped the Bengali kirtan tradition, in which songs are arranged to evoke particular moods of separation and union, and the padavali poetry collections, in which poems are classified according to Rupa's scheme of emotions. Painters and performers drew on the same vocabulary. Historians of Bengali literature see the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu as one of the hidden foundations of the region's devotional arts.
The work and the Vrindavan circle
The Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu was written for a small learned community. Rupa composed it in Vrindavan among scholars who shared his references, and its intended readers knew the classics of Sanskrit poetics. Its sequel, the Ujjvala-nilamani, completed the system for the amorous mode. Together with the works of Sanatana and Jiva, these treatises form the core of what historians call the Vrindavan theology of the Gaudiya school, described in our article on the Six Gosvamis.
Sources and further reading
- David L. Haberman (trans.), The Bhaktirasamrtasindhu of Rupa Gosvamin, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motilal Banarsidass, 2003.
- David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Raganuga Bhakti Sadhana, Oxford University Press, 1988.
- S.K. De, Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, General Printers, 1942 (2nd ed. 1961).
- Wikipedia, "Rupa Goswami" (orientation): en.wikipedia.org.
