MY LECTURES IN ENGLAND AND GERMANY

Chapter 1: Philosophy of Shri Krishna-Chaitanya

(Lecture delivered at the Theosophical Society at 78 Lancaster Gate, London,

on 8th November, 1933, Mr. F. M. Lee presided)

Friends,

Sri Krsna-Caitanya discussed the nature of the individual soul and the Godhead and their inter-relationship. Seekers of God follow either the path of induction or deduction or both. In the process of an inductive investigation of the Absolute Truth,one relies on sense perception,drawing inferences from the manifested phenomena. Owing to the changeable nature of the objects of phenomena and the defective nature of human senses, the process of inductive investigation or empiric method adopted in the search of God may be compared with the attempt of an individual to collect all the electric lights of a town in one place at the dead hours of the night in order to see the sun on the firmament ! The process is futile. Sri Caitanya rejected this empiric method of accepting material help for the realisation of the Transcendental Reality. Those who are conscious of the defective nature of the physical and mental senses, owing to the limitations and changeableness of relative time and limited space, follow the “Revealed Method”, which inculcates that God reveals Hiniself in the shape of transcendental Word, identical with His Form, Attributes, Entourage and Pastimes through an unalloyed chain of preceptorial successions, to the submissive aural reception of sincere and willing listeners. This is called the process of Divine Descent or Avatāra. This possibility of the Descent of the Divinity in the Form of the Word is also noticed in the beginning of St. John, where it mentioned like this: "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God." The name of God is the fundanental principle on which the whole philosophy of Sri Caitanya rests.

In Caitanya's philosophy one has to consider the nature of the observed, i.e. the object of pursuit, as also the nature of the observer and the relation that exists between the two. In theology, God is the Object of pursuit the individual souls are the observers or seekers, and the eternal relationship between God and souls is the eternal religion of all souls. This relationship forms the subject-matter of Sri Caitanya's philosophy. Regarding the nature of God, Sri Caitanya holds that in Aryan theology there are three distinct conceptions of the Absolute. The monists or non-dualists think that God is Impersonal, Who has been termed as Brahman in the Upanişads, the crest jewels of the Vedas. Sri Caitanya explained Impersonal Brahman as the negative Aspect of the Absolute or Effulgence of the Supreme Personality of the Godhead. To empiricists, this Neuter-God or It-God is the synthetic Abstract of the Absolute Reality. From the diversities and manifoldness of the phenomenal world, one is naturally inclined to a synthetic approach to the Absolute, which is conceived as One Unit. Just as the manifestness and all its diversities in the unit of a hill are not conceived when looked at from a long distance, so also the transcendental Divine Person with all His manifestiveness as the Absolute Whole, is not realised from the angle of a microscopic vision of such empiricists.

Secondly, Immanent Aspect of God is known as Paramātmā --- the Indweller of every entity, of the Yoga School. Whereas, according to the Bhakti Philosophy, the complete manifestation of the Godhead, as Bhagavān, is His transcendental Person possessing all-glory, all-majesty, all-beauty, all-power, all-intelligence and all-freedom. Sri Caitanya’s conception of God is this Bhagavān. Every individual sentient being is endowed with the faculties of cognition, emotion and volition. Viewed through cognition alone, irrespective of the emotional and volitional faculties of the unengrossed soul, God's existence is realised as the All-pervasive "Great -- the Undivided Knowledge, known as Brahman; approached through the soul's volitional insight, the Divinity is realised in every entity, as Paramātmā. Everything is accommodated in the Great Brahman, and in every sentient and insentient entity the Divinity exists as the Indwelling Lord, called Paramātmā. Both these are, according to Sri Caitanya, partial and qualitative approaches.

But when one submits unconditionally and unreservedly with one's all the three cognitional, emotional and volitional faculties, the Supreme Lord as Bhagavān manifests Himself in His most beautiful Person in the purest heart of such a genuine devotee. This conception of Bhagavān of the devotional school, as distinct from Brahman and Parmātmā--the Transcendent and Immanent Aspects, has again two distinct Forms—the Majestic and the Beatific. His majestic manifestation in the transcendental Realm is called Nārāyaṇa, while His Beatific Aspect is Krşņa. God in His Majestic Aspect is worshipped with reverential services. Krsna, the Lord of non-material Love and Beauty, is the Recipient of confidential services in any one of the fivefold aspects of Quiet-God, Master-God, Friend-God, Son-God and Consort-God. Krşna, the only object of divine pursuit is, according to Sri Caitanya, the Recipient of loving services from His Ecstatic Energy. His Consortship is His Highest Manifestation.

As regards the transcendental nature of Krsna, Sri Caitanya holds that He is the Divine Person. He has no material Body. His Body is All-animate and Divine. He is not born with any body of flesh and blood. He is not born of any sex-association like a mundane child. He manifests Himself out of His own prerogative. He is neither a hero nor an allegorical imagination, nor a historical person, nor a voluptuous enjoyer like any human being. Krsna is the only Proprietor, and everything else belongs to Him. Kșşņa is inaccessible to sensuous attempts and inconceivable by human physical, mental or intellectual senses. He is accessible to transcendental knowledge and absolute submission. He is the Chief Emporium of all mellow principles of Divine Love. He is the Efficient or Root Cause of all causes of the sentient and insentient worlds. Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Godhead and the Internal Guide of all. He is unborn and yet has an eternal Form of His own. He is the highest amongst the Objects of worship. Krsna is eternal and beyond the scope of all measuring potencies. Krsna is the friend of all and He is the Embodiment of All-beings, All-knowledge and All-bliss. He is true of speech and resolve. He is the true exponent of religion and is satisfied with the taste of Self-delight.

Sri Caitanya goes on further to say that Krşna is All-powerful and His Potencies are inseperable from Him. He is identical with His Internal Plenary Potency. This Plenary Potency has three Aspects, viz., His Internal Self-luminous Controlling Potency, from Whom emanates the eternal transcendental Realm which is beyond the limits of mundane time and space; secondly, His External Deluding Potency from which proceeds the material universe with its time, space, elements etc.; and thirdly, the Marginal Potency, which gives rise to innumerable infinitesimal souls, having the innate nature of either rendering loving service to God in their devotional aptitude or lording it over the phenomenal world in an enjoying mood or renouncing them in a spirit of abnegation.

Next, it may be mentioned here in a nutshell about what Sri Caitanya speaks about the conception of the “Observer”. The Jivas or individual souls are the seekers of God. These souls in their unalloyed and unfettered state of existence are the atomic or infinitesimal separated parts of the Internal Self-conscious Potency of Krsna. As sentient beings, they have their proportionate share of the faculties of cognition, emotion and volition. The volitional faculty of an individual soul indicates the free will in man. Those who are conscious of the limitations of the capacities of their gross and subtle senses, which are apparently the only recipient of knowledge, based on inferences and gained from the manifested phenomena, make the best of their free will by surrendering themselves entirely to the grace of the Supreme Lord Sri Krşņa. They are then supported by His Internal Potency in the shape of the Divine Master or Guru. This kind of eternal service with body, mind and soul under all circumstances is known as the unfettered or free state of existence even when one is living in this world in his mortal coil. But those who entirely depend upon their own limited and deceptive knowledge, forget their real nature and abuse their free will by endeavouring to lord it over the phenomenal world. They are either too optimistic and give themselves to the enjoyment of the world or they turn out to be pessimists and take refuge in renunciation. Deluded by the External Potency they are thus enwrapped with the two garments of the gross body of flesh and blood and the subtle body of the mind. They are then hurled down into this limited world of weal and woe, and can be redeemed only by submission to a true Spiritual Guru. This state of forgetfulness of the real and normal nature of a pure soul is known as the fallen souls. No amount of empiric knowledge or any other mechanical procedure can be sufficient to liberate the fallen souls from the bondage of illusion.

According to the philosophy of Śri Caitanya, on the plane of transcendence, things are identical with their names, forms, attributes, and actions. But in the phenomenal world, objects are different from their names, forms, attributes and actions. Though there is a semblance between things spiritual and material, they are not identically the same. In the Kingdom of God, the Supreme Lord is Absolute, because He reserves the absolute right of not being exposed to or realisable by human senses or human reasoning, which are confined within the four walls of time and mundane space. The finite conception can at best measure things of three dimensions and cannot go beyond them. That which can go beyond the ambit of three dimensions is transcendence, which ranges from the fourth to infinite dimensions. The Absolute Person transcends mundane limits and does not submit to sensuous experiences and mental speculations. Sri Caitanya has shown the distinct functions of mind and soul. In the mundane plane, the mind as an agent of the soul is ever engaged in trying to enjoy the phenomena through the agencies of the ten organs of sense and action. Its activities are entirely restricted to the plane of limitations, it itself being of a fleeting nature. As a perverted ego, it assumes the role of the subject or enjoyer. It is after all a subtle form of matter and acquires its initiative faculty from the soul, which is at present lying in a dormant state within the cage of the mind, just as a piece of red-hot iron acquires its burning property from the fire with which it comes in contact. In its enjoying or renouncing attitude, it is captured and enslaved by the Eclipsing Potency of the All-Powerful Supreme Lord Sri Krsna, and suffers pains or enjoys pleasures during its sojourn in the world.

But the soul is quite distinct from and independent of the body and mind. She is a spiritual entity and her eternal function is unalloyed service or devotion to God, of Whom she is an atomic separated part, yet inseparably associated with Him by the tie of divine love. Her eternal existence in her real nature is in the spiritual realm, though she may have her subtle and gross bodies in the material world. She neither accepts nor rejects, neither enjoys nor abnegates things of the phenomenal world. She is neither the subject nor an object of nature. When the soul wakes up from her present dormant state of existence by listening to the Name of Krsna from the lips of a genuine Spiritual Master, she realises her true self to be an eternal servant and property of the only Proprietor of all entities, God. The soul has no other function but to render reverential or loving service to the Divine Autocrat. The soul is at present under the influence of the mind and body owing to its forgetfulness of its true normal nature, and the mind is now a dominating factor, which is the greatest foe of its master, the soul. Senses are superior to the body, mind is superior to the senses, intelligence is superior to mind, and the soul is by far superior to all of them. Once the normal and eternal function of the fettered soul is awakened, the mind and body become helpful in the service of God.

The soul awakens when she gives up her enjoying and renouncing temperament and hears with submission the Divine Word, identical with God. Transcendental Words, entering the ears, regulate her dominant mind and other physical senses and remove the obstacles and impediments that stand in the way of her awakening. Thus the two sides of philosophical background are shown; and now the link that exists between God and individual souls should be noted. In the language of Sri Caitanya, his school of philosophy is known as Acintya Bhedābheda. It means that there is an inconceivable simultaneous existence of difference and non-difference between God and soul. As against the atheistic, sceptic, agonostic or pantheistic philosophies, there are in Hinduism four other principal schools of theistic philosophies of the Vaisnavas. They are Distinctive Monotheism of Sri Rāmānuja, Undifferentiated Monotheism of Visnuswāmi. Dualistic Monotheism of Nimbārka and Dualism of Sri Madhva. There are certain points of agreements as well as differences in these schools of thoughts of the four Vaisnava Teachers; but they all fundamentally agree on the conception of Visnu as the Supreme Transcendental Person of Divinity, Who is the all-powerful Lord. Sri Caitanya gave a final touch to them all, and harmonised all the different schools in his Acintya Bhedābheda.

The philosophy Acintya Bhedābheda approaches the relationship between God and individual souls from both sides of the subject. It transcends the discordant diversities of the phenomenal world, limited by mundane time and space. Śri Sankara tried to synthesise the diversities. Sri Caitanya was not satisfied with that alone. He realised that there was a beauty in manifoldness—analytical aspect is one of the fundamental principles of the creation of God. Unity and diversity must be recognised simultaneously. It can be equally applied to the relationship between God and souls. This simultaneous existence of difference and non-difference, between God and soul is inconceivable and incomprehensible to the present human understanding. Intellectual reasoning is not sufficient to appreciate it. When one is free from the misidentification of his true self from the physical and mental coverings, temporarily put on him by the influence of Máyá because of his own folly in denying himself the eternal service of God, it can be realised by the unalloyed faculties of the soul that in the qualitative aspects the souls are identical with God in essence, whereas there are eternal differences between God and soul quantitatively. When we say, "different', we do not mean that there is any intervention of the factors of relative time and limited spacs. The threefold differences of this world as between man and man and beasts, and hands and legs of the same individual do not exist in God's Kingdom. It is a plane of animate existence. Everything is cetan; nothing is inactive and without any initiative there; it is a question of Undivided Knowledge. The very conception of diversities of this world, or an imaginary unity of phenomena do not find any place on the plane of transcendence. And yet there is distinctiveness in a Unique Whole.

A mundane example with its limitations may be taken. There is the sun and it has its innumerable rays. Every particular ray possesses undoubtedly all the qualities of the sun in a proportionate degree, a particular ray of the sun cannot be detached wholly from the sun by the intervention of time and space, and yet is inseparably associated. On the other hand, a ray is not the sun; it is only a fractional part of the sun. Similarly, all souls emanate from God and are essentially of the nature of God. God is eternal and so are the souls; God is All-knowledge, and so also the souls possess a proportionate degree of knowledge and a cognitive faculty; blissfulness is common in the nature of both God and soul. At the same time, God is the Whole, while a soul is an infinitesimal part of the Whole; God is the Lord of the potency, called Māyā, and is never influenced by her-Māyā is subservient to God, whereas a soul can be overpowered by the influences of the Deluding Energy, Māyā. God is One, souls are many; God is the Proprietor, souls are properties; God is never shackled by the bondage of the gross and subtle bodies like the souls; God never forgets His Own Nature, while souls who are bound down by the forces of Māyā, forget their own true nature and their normal functions remain inactive in their abnormal existence in this world of changeable phenomena. In this sense, there are identities and differences that co-exist in the eternal relationship between God and individual souls. God, Who is Krsna, according to Sri Caitanya, is the Divine Attractor, and souls are the attracted; and the relation between God and souls is attraction, which is called Divine Love. This Divine Love is the relationship between the two, which is Caitanya's Philosophy.

Thus did Sri Caitanya enumerate the three Aspects of the Absolute Reality. The Impersonal Aspect is, according to him, a negative and imperfect manifestation of God. It is one-sided, approached qualitatively. In one sense this is correct, i. s. God has no physical form. But this is not all. An Impersonal Brahman is the Ultimate End of the empiric school, as it cannot go beyond, because of its own limitations, the arguments being based on limited sense-experience. The empiricists begin with a pre-supposition that God can have no form, name, attributes or actions, as if they are to be reserved only for men of the world! Sri Caitanya is very particular in his discussion on Divinity. God is not to be anthropomorphised or apotheosised by our mental speculation. The perfection of all positivism is in Him - the transcendental Name, Form, Attributes, Entourage and Actions of God must be categorically differentiated from the very conception of them that we possess here in this material plane. We use the same expressions, but they do not mean literally the same.