līla [divine activity, sports, play, pastime]
We cannot know God by his words, only by witnessing his activities. Līla is the name of the activities of God done in order to be understood—and realised—by jīvas
In Vedic philosophy, God’s līla is the way that the truth about the universe can be communicated, not through high and mighty talk, but by frolicking, loving play. The Truth of the universe is a not a word, it is a feeling: love. It cannot, should not, must not be left to cold and hollow words, it must be seen in action, put into play. That is why stories are told of the pastimes of God.
Līlas can be found in religious and spiritual traditions throughout the Indian Sub-continent. The Vedas are filled with tales of divine līlas, from the Ramayana to the Puranas.
Wherever there are līlas, there is a lightness, playfulness, effortless movement, and natural emotion. Līlas are always graceful, joyous, and whimsical. They embody the way that God, the Absolute, effortlessly governs the universe, and the pleasure and happiness he takes in doing so.
The pastimes of God in all his forms are shared with believers in a perfect simplicity, in a form that can remind them of their own material pastimes, and inspire them to find the divine in them.
For Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, the playful, mischievous, pleasures of Kṛṣṇa’s līlas are the projection of his joyful bliss, the endless sea of happiness that attracts him to Rādhā and the endless flow of loving pleasure she offers to him.
And it is the spontaneity of emotion that makes Kṛṣṇa’s līlas so attractive to followers of Bhakti. The līlas communicate Kṛṣṇa’s personality, his tender love, his care and concern, tenders his desires, his passions, and of course his whimsical moods as well.
And because we are part and parcel of Kṛṣṇa, both one with him and separate, he is showing to us the feeling potential of our own souls, encouraging us to purify our hearts in order to experience this divinity.
Kṛṣṇa’s līlas never contain reasoning or rationality. There are no discourses or preaching. His līlas are pure play, pure feeling. They are never planned or calculated. They are perfect, divine spontaneity. They mirror the spontaneity of our own hearts when we are true to ourselves, and the spontaneity of our love for the divine—our natural tendency—when the clutter of our minds is cleared away, in we rediscover ourselves in our constitutional position.
The līlas are an invitation to a relationship with Kṛṣṇa, one in which emotion is everything and the only goal is to increase love for God. They are an invitation to know our hearts more deeply by seeing the pastimes through which Kṛṣṇa acts in his own heart.
For many Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas the most famous of Kṛṣṇa’s līlas is the rāsa-līla, the playful festival of dance in which Kṛṣṇa dances and frolics with the gopis of Vrāj, expanding himself into countless versions of himself, each one attracting the love of an individual gopi. By sharing himself in playful dance with the gopis, he make them discover prema, love for the divine, the highest form of love. And by slipping away from the dance, he makes them understand the longing the comes from the realisation of the loss and longing for that love.
More profound and dearer still for us is the nikunja-līla, the pastime carried to this world in the heart of Caitanya Mahāprabhu. It is in the person of Caitanya that Kṛṣṇa is incarnated with the form and mood of Rādhā, the one gopi from the rāsa-līla that Kṛṣṇa’s heart could not resist. So strong is Rādhā’s love for Kṛṣṇa, that he resolves to feel it himself, the God who feels divine love, and becomes the servant of it.
That līla is the greatest of all. It is the eternal discovery and rediscovery of the countless shapes and forms of prema, love for the divine. The nikunja-līla is the story of the shape of our hearts. It is a living map of the frolic and mischief, desire and disappointment, attraction and hesitation, that inhabits the soul of all jīvas because it is in fact the very soul of God.