śṛńgāra [love, pleasure or delight that emerges between lovers, ornamentation]
In the poems and prayers of the Bhakti tradition, śṛńgāra leads a sweet yet mysterious double-life.
On the one hand, in the spiritual tradition where jewels, trimmings, and decorations meet our eyes every day, śṛńgāra is ornamentation. On the other hand, through the Bhakti practice of serving and nurturing divine love (prema), śṛńgāra refers to the deepest and sweetest emotion experienced by the heart.
How is this double-meaning possible? Only in the practice of Bhakti.
In the most evolved expressions of this practice, the two meanings of śṛńgāra shift seamlessly. The brilliant verses of Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura, for example, move quickly from one meaning to the other.
In Śrī Gurvāṣṭaka [Eight verses in praise of Śrī Guru], Śrī Viśvanātha reminds us that the guru is engaged in daily worship of the Lord’s divinity, ‘decorating Him with ornaments [śṛṅgāra]’, as well as caring for the temple and teaching devotional service to his disciples.
And in several verses from Mādhurya-kādambinī [A rain shower of divine sweetness], he describes RādhāMohan as the monarchs of transcendental love [śṛṅgāra-rasa].
In other words, for Śrī Viśvanātha and others, śṛṅgāra, is both a visual ornamentation that enhances loving feelings, and the highest form of divine pleasure, both the radiant, visual energy of love, and the bliss of love in its purest form.
As far back as the Ṛgveda, ‘śṛńga’, is used to mean a ‘peak’, or ’horn’. For example, it refers to both a mountain peak and the supreme power that such a peak symolises. Similarly, it denotes the horn of a bull— both as the sharpest point on the body and as a symbol of perfection.
It was in the Nāṭya-śāstra, the ancient handbook on aesthetics and the performing arts, that ‘śṛṅga’ evolved from referring to the highest point of excellence of something, to ‘śṛṅgāra’—the means to reach that highest point.
It is natural that the Nāṭya-śāstra would do this service. The book is a kind of guide for actors in the theatre. It is a set of techniques—encompassing dance, hand, facial expressions, body movements, and voice modulation—all designed to steer the emotional reaction of classical Indian audiences.
Traditionally, the purpose of drama, of līlā, was to produce meaning, Its spiritual aim was to bridge the hidden space between feeling (rasa) and devotion (bhakti). Rather than cultivating spiritual experiences through ideas and philosophy, the masterful Nāṭya-śāstra describes the passage between material experience and spiritual experience as a journey of feeling.
This is how spiritual deepening in the tradition of Bhakti becomes an experience of emotional deepening. A fully realised spiritual life means a full emotional life, where love itself becomes the ultimate goal.
The Nāṭya-śāstra designates śṛṅgāra as one of nine emotional states that can be achieved through the dramatic arts. Furthermore, it gives detailed guidance in how to attain this state through gestures, expressions and adornments on the stage and in the arts. The ornamentation of the body is born as the way to increasing spiritual feeling, attraction to the Divine, love for the soul of God.
Through the centuries, śṛṅga has had a charmed relation to Bhakti philosophy. Under the guidance of Caitanya Mahāprabhu, it evolved into one of the pillars of Rūpa Gosvāmi’s teachings. An entire chapter is dedicated to it in the climax of his Ujjvala-nīlamaṇ [A Radiant Blue Jewel], and it appears often in Ananta Dāsa Bābājī’s commentaries of Rādhā-rasa-sudhā-nidhi and Vilāpa-kusumāñjali.
Material consciousness, of course, insists that what is external—visible, measurable, understandable—is different from what is internal—invisible, secret, mysterious, confidential. However, soul consciousness, reveals that what is true, eternal and real about our lives is the soul that maintains our life-airs and the energy of our every move. And that our material experience—fleeting and fickle, ever changing, ever decaying—is only a passing dream, a mere shadow of the real.
When we live in soul consciousness, when we see the world through our soul-eyes, in the certainty that only our soul is true and real, and that only the souls in all other things is true and real, then this distinction, between inner beauty and out beauty is will also fall away.
In the realm of our spiritual consciousness—where we experience ourselves as souls, and the world around as a million expressions of the pure spiritual energy of the creation—every sensation counts.
In the state of consciousness where material attachement and false ego have melted away, our senses remain alive. But these senses remain indifferent to the changing sensations of material experience, pleasures that inevitably run dry or sorrows that depend only on circumstances. In spiritual consciousness our senses are touched only by those sensations flowing to and from the soul. These sensations deliver the experience of pure emotion.
In spiritual consciousness our lips savour the taste of emotion, our ears attune to the music of sentiment, our fingertips caress the textures of tenderness, and our eyes perceive the thousands shades of feeling.
And where these spiritual eyes see the śṛńgāra, the ornaments decorating the body of the Rādhā, the heart of the heart of the Lord, they see the utmost, spotless, most potent expression of divine pleasure.
If the goal of spiritual practice is to realise and actively engage in the pure love of the divine (prema) then that experience can only described as the seamless union of outward beauty and inward beauty, outward emotion and inward bliss.
śṛńgāra expresses this sweet and mysterious double-life wherever it appears, beauty both superficial and profound, emotions both fleeting and ever-lasting.