"Chaitanya & Tantrism"

    

    The element of pleasure has not been explicitly brought out in writings on religion. Therefore, let's look at the case of the mystic Chaitanya, and the hedonistic element in his movement of religious revival.

    It has amply been realized nowadays that for studying old civilizations like the Indian which have a rich literary tradition, synchronic anthropology has only limited utility. Anthropological studies of Indian culture should, therefore, be informed by Indological and such knowledge. So I shall first briefly outline the cultural background of Chaitanya’s movement.

    The world-view of Indians is religious, rather than secular. Whatever secular component is present in it is the gift of British colonialism in India, as Bharati has pointed out. Further, Indian ideas of time are cyclical, unlike the Western linear view. The monk or sannyasi is the charismatic of society. The individual and his works, still less the social reality, are not important, because they are seen against a “cosmic" background. Western observers tend to call this “fatalism", but from an anthropologist’s perspective, this is perhaps “persuasive", not “descriptive" language.

    Before going on to describe Chaitanya’s movement, I should make explicit what I mean by “mystic". I am using Bharati’s definition; he calls a mystic one who intuits his numerical oneness with the ground of being, and who uses the available ecstatic means to attain this state.

    Let us come now to our protagonist. A society as positively concerned with mysticism as the Indian has, not surprisingly, produced many mystics; the “great sixteenth century Vaisnava revivalist Chaitanya” was one such. His movement spread over a large part of eastern India, and even today this tradition is very much alive there. Even today people actively worship Krishna, who is the reincarnation of Vishnu, one of the great gods of Hindu polytheism. Krishna-worship would even seem to be catching on in the West in the form of the Krishna Consciousness cult, even though it is a spurious, non genuine mutation.

Chaitanya was “a religious leader of no ordinary power”. And the time was ripe for his “ideas and qualities”. Various things contributed to this ripeness: “the decay and subsequent ‘corruption* of Buddhism, the prevalence of extreme Tantric schools with their potential licentiousness, the aridness and dogmatic rigidity of Brahmanism in both social and religious spheres, and the impact of Islam, especially Sufi Islam with its emotionalism. Not only in Bengal but all across northern India in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there burst forth a "romantic" enthusiasm.

    “Viswambhara — he took the name Krishna-Chaitanya after his initiation into an ascetic order — was born in 1486 in Navadvip (in Bengal).  Very little can be learned of (his) early childhood. It is claimed by his biographers that he was a brilliant scholar  (but) he has left us no writings except for eight short devotional verses in Sanskrit.

    “When he was twenty-two, he made a trip to Gaya, to perform in that holy place his father’s funeral rites .... While ’there he accepted as guru (teacher) Isvara Puri, an 'emotional ascetic.' He returned to Navadvip God maddened and within a short time became the centre of frenzied devotional activity in that city. For a year he lived amid wild religious enthusiasm, with nightly singing of devotional songs and ecstatic dancing. He entered an ascetic order, taking this initiation at the hands of Kesava Bharati and with it the religious name Krishna Chaitanya.

    "He stayed for the rest of his life in Puri, except for an occasional pilgrimage. Here his friends and disciples from Bengal visited him annually at the time of the Car Festival. He died in 1533. The least orthodox biography, and probably the most factual one, says that he injured his foot during his frenzied dancing and died from an infection."

    After his death, “the revival he inspired encompassed the greater part of the populations of those areas now known as Bengal (both modern Bangladesh and West Bengal), Orissa, Assam, and Bihar.” Even while he lived, people considered him divine. Some thought he was an avatara, an incarnation of Krishna; some thought he was Krishna himself.”