Month: August 2023

Love your neighbour as yourself

Parakīya-bhāva is a key idea in the tradition of Gaudyia Vaishnavism. It describes Kṛṣṇa’s loving pastimes with the gopīs (in the Rāsa Līlā) and with Rādhā herself (in the Gaura Līlā).

In Sanskrit, parakīya means belonging to an other, another group, another tribe, or another people. Parakīya-bhāva is most often interpreted narrowly to mean love outside of marriage. In modern Hindi, it has come to signify ‘adultery’.

But a more broad interpretation understands it as love with a foreigner, an outsider, or a stranger. What can this teach us about love itself?

When, in Luke 10, Jesus is asked what we should do to obtain eternal life, he replies, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul’, then adding a saying from the Torah, Leviticus 19, ‘and love your neighbour as yourself.’ 

A wise listener then asks him, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Jesus famously replies with what is know as the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

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The rasika history of the world

Verse 94

In the West we often understand our world in terms of its history. The typical ingredients are politics, power, money and greed. The typical result is suffering. 

From the point of view of the rasika, one who has the wisdom to relish the loving nectar flowing through the Creation, the history of the world is the history of love. 

In his commentary to Rādhā Rasa Sudhāndhi, Verse 94, Ananda das Bābājī, describes an episode from the Gaura Līlā that he calls ‘The festival of Srī Rādhā’s mercy’. It is the story of love, jealousy, loyalty and betrayal. 

The turns of the story might remind us of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean comedy of errors. But this pastime describe in Verse 94 and its commentary, do not end in sorrow and loss, but in a higher form of feeling. 

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I love therefore I am

One of the most well-known philosophical slogans in the West is ‘I think therefore I am’. 

It originates from the French philosopher Descartes, born in 1586. Descartes was trying to answer some of the fundamental questions that face us today: What is real? What is consciousness? What can I know?

Descartes reasoned that there are many things that we are conscious of, but that are not real (white unicorns, castles that float in the air, and so on), but that our mind is capable of doubting the reality of all of them. In fact, he said, everything we are capable of thinking can be put into question except of one: the fact that we are thinking. Thinking, he concluded is the absolute foundation of our being: I think therefore I am. 

Through the eyes of Bhakti this conclusion makes no sense for at least two reasons.

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