God is Love and Beauty

Divine Life Society Publication: The Rasa Panchadyayi of The Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana by Sri Swami Krishnananda

God is love and beauty, and there is a sense of imminence of this presence in every little object in this world. God is not merely a transcendent creator, a magnificent, almighty ruler. He is also imminent as the element of survival, beauty, self-love and altruistic love in this world. The Rasa Panchadhyayi of the Srimad Bhagavata clinches the whole matter when, in ecstatic language of Sanskrit poetry, Vyasa himself seems to be rising into an apotheosis of love.

The attraction and the separation, the twofold operation of love, are quoted in these chapters. We are pulled towards God, and in a tremendous ecstasy of love we seem to be gravitating towards God Who is everywhere, seeing Him in everything – in little things, in inanimate things such as objects, trees, stones, and whatnot, hugging even thorns as if they are the utmost of beauty. And, on the other hand, there is a sense of a cracking down of personality due to the bereavement due to a sense of separation from God. Only one who has experienced bereavement will know what it is, as only one who is hungry will know what hunger is. A well-fed man does not know what hunger is, and one who has not experienced bereavement will not know what bereavement is. One who has not loved, or who is incapable of loving and has a faint heart, cannot understand the beauty of these feelings of those lovers of God par excellence called the Gopis of Brindavan.

There is a sense of coming and going, attraction and repulsion in the operation of love. This is felt in human love, and also in divine love in a different context. We cannot adequately describe the relationship between the lover and the beloved. Are they one or are they two? We cannot say what it is. There are no two persons when the two love each other in the climax of their affections. And yet they are two different persons because if they are not two and it is just one person, that attraction cannot be explained. We cannot account for that surge of feeling which bounds above the limits of its own location and runs in the direction of the object if it were true that there is no one who is loved and no one who is the lover, and there is only one being. In that sense we may say that the lover and the beloved are not an identical entity. It is not one being; it is a one-in-two operation.

Perhaps it is this enigma of the lover-love relationship and the devotee-God relationship that has made great devotees and authors like Nimbarka, Vallava and Gauranga Mahaprabhu Chaitanya Deva to consider the relationship between the soul and God as one of identity and difference. We cannot say it is different, and we cannot say it is one because we are pulled toward God. We are asking for God; we are craving for Him. Our weeping and crying for Him shows that we are not yet one with Him and we cannot feel that oneness, yet we are not wholly different. If we were entirely different, that pull would not be there.

Nimbarka says in his great Bhasya, “Is the wave one with the ocean? Is the wave the same as the ocean, or not? The wave is not the ocean because the wave rises in the ocean and subsides into the ocean. But the wave is the ocean because a wave cannot be other than the ocean.” The devotee is inseparable from the all-encompassing existence of God. Yes, it is true, because outside God nothing can be. Yet – there is a great ‘yet’ – the devotee’s, the jiva’s, the soul’s pull towards God is an indescribable relationship that obtains. Were the Gopis one with Krishna or were they not one with Krishna? Who can say? No impure mind can understand the meaning of these chapters. It is an exquisitely purified mind that alone can appreciate the purity of this wondrous drama of love which the Gopis evinced in their hearts for the great Krishna whom they saw in trees and stones and pebbles and thorns, and in everything.

Thus, the Srimad Bhagavata highlights the need for the love of God and for being in ecstasy for God. You have to want God, not merely to understand God, analyse God, dissect God or vivisect Him. Analytical logic is not the way to God. It is you that wants God, and God wants you, not your reason and intellect. God wants not your apparatus, nor are you in any position to carry any luggage of apparatus to God’s kingdom of heaven.

Is the world outside you or is the world inside you? Are you different from the world or are you one with the world? You cannot say. Are you one with what you love or are you different from that? None of these questions can be adequately answered because of the peculiar relationship that obtains between that which loves and that which is loved. So is the case with God and His devotee, and saints like Mira, Surdas, Tulsidas and many others are great examples before us. God has to be loved and felt, not merely understood, analysed, discussed.

To this point we are raised by the majesty and the beauty of the Rasa Panchadhyayi, The greatest devotees of God are portrayed in the personality of the Gopis, and the reaction of God to the devotees is the reaction of Krishna to the Gopis. The coming and the going, the union and the separation, this wondrous ebb and flow, the rising and subsiding of the waves in the ocean of the bliss of God is the intention of the whole Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana. It is absolutely necessary for us to know and love and melt and feel and become anguish-filled due to our separation from the Almighty. And He shall come.

Excerpts from

God is Love and Beauty - The Rasa Panchadyayi of The Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana by Sri Swami Krishnananda