Sixteenth-century Hindu theologian Rupa Gosvamin established a technique by which, in imitating one of the significant figures in Krishna's dramatic world, a devotee might actually come to inhabit the world of the character whose part he or she was playing. Haberman here demonstrates that the Hindu view of reality accepts such role playing, called raganuga bhakti sadhana, as a preeminent way to salvation. He argues that Hindu devotional religion is not entirely a religion of grace, as many scholars have held, but one which requires discipline and effort. Throughout the book, Haberman explores Indian dramatic theory, Rupa's unique application of that theory to devotionalism, developments in the practice of this technique, and its contemporary manifestations.
David L. Haberman is a professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. He has been making frequent visits to the region of Braj for over forty years, studying and writing about the religious culture of this important pilgrimage center. Since initially publishing Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Raganuga Bhakti Sadhana (Oxford University Press, 1988), he has published five related books: Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna (Oxford University Press, 1994), an annotated translation of Rupa Gosvamin's Bhaktirasamatasindhu (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2000), River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (University of California Press, 2006), People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (Oxford University Press, 2020). His fondness for the sacred land and religious culture of Braj remains strong.
Oscar Wilde once wrote Ada Leverson, asking her about Max Beerbohm: ""When you are alone with him, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?"" Wilde was obsessed with, among other things, masks, for there is truth in the observation that only when a mask is being worn does one express the truth, and only then can the true self be discerned. The problem, of course, is that when one has worn a mask long enough it is sometimes no longer possible to tell which is mask and which is face.
It is a mark of the creativity of the Vaisnavas of Bengal (or the Gaudīya Vaişnavas, as David Haberman chooses to call them here) that such an interesting question can form the cornerstone of a religious and philosophical system, for definitions of the self, or selves, and the roles each of these play are critical to Vaisnava considerations. The script for the roles is Reality, and the playwright divine. In the Vaisnava system, the Stanislavski method is intensified to the nth degree: the part for which one trains is, ultimately, one's true self, and the transformation, when it comes about, lasts for longer than the play runs. It is complete, and final, and forever.
Haberman points out to us that the English word ""play"" has several meanings. It signifies ""game"" or ""drama,"" both of which are segments of action sometimes only metaphorically related to reality, defined and structured in such a way as to be made comprehensible in abbreviated time and space. But the Sanskrit word līlā, which is also usually trans-lated ""play,"" has an additional connotation, for it suggests the vast and unknowable mind of God, only tiny bits of which can be understood by our impoverished human processes. As a game imposes rules on random behavior, or as a drama editorializes upon segments of human experience, so the reality of human life is a definable fragment of the Real. The relationship is not metaphor but metonymy: by participation in the real one participates also in the Real. The trick is to understand that. And since one's small mind is not capable, one enters the play of God, the lila, by means of drama. One understands a small part of the mind of God by directed experience, by playing one's role on what is, ultimately, the divine stage.
Nor are there auditions for the parts. Everyone has a roje, and it is self-selected. The play was written long ago, before time began. It is the play of Krsna, made known on earth through the text called the Bhagavata Purana, and it is infinite. There are roles for all who choose to be devoted, who are willing to train themselves until they understand that they are, in fact, in the world of the Real, the friends or parents or servants or-most significantly-the lovers, of God. Because the drama is divine, the stage is eternity, the time frame is no longer act and scene. The real world and the Real world are revealed to be the same.
If this seems somewhat esoteric, it is because one of the cornerstones of the Vaisnava system which, as Haberman points out, is a system of both thought and method is the concept bhedabheda, the paradoxical and simultaneous immanence and transcendance of the divine. The concept is further described as acintya, not to be understood rationally. If there is a distinctive feature of Indian mysticism, it is that it is practical and experiential: it not only perceives the condition of the ultimate relationship of God to man, it also tells us just how to get there. The detailing of this process is one of the fascinating points of this book.
The concept and the process, and therefore the book, are both specific and not specific to India. There are of course many religions in which ecstatic experience is valued and is the ideal, many in which a model, or a paradigm of the process, is presented for emulation. But there are few, if any, that are so elaborate, so detailed, and so entwined with esthetic understanding that are based on the idea that there is a realm of the spirit which God shares with man. The imitation of Christ is not an unfamiliar theme in Christianity but, in itself, I don't think it aims one toward identity. The systems may be similar, in that in Christianity one does indeed participate in the Body of Christ through an institution, the Church, but Christ is unique in being God as well as man. His deeds. because of his divine nature, are by definition perfect. One can imitate them, for they were after all performed by a man, but through imitation one does not become Christ. The Vaisnava both becomes and does not become Krsna, for the stage on which the drama is being acted and the dramatis personnae are extensions of him.
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