Learning to Love Krishna: A Living Theology of Moral Emotions

ABSTRACT

This article explores what I describe as a living theology of moral emotions in the context of a multi-national community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. Against the backdrop of a rich history of moralisation of emotions, I outline how ISKCON’s philosophy has been informed by the context of its cross-cultural transmission to the West and back again to India. In particular, I focus on how devotees manage the seeming impossibility of the central spiritual goal of prema (‘pure love for Krishna’). Through a focus on moral narratives that cohere around understandings of emotion, I suggest that the careful aversion to displays, or indeed claims, of overt emotional experience in Mayapur is best understood by treating emotions as sites of moral self-cultivation. Whereas the anthropology of emotions has tended to privilege temporal episodes of rupture, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to how emotions are conceived and managed in the context of broader sustained projects of self-transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• ISKCON
• Vaishnavism
• moral emotions
• anthropology of ethics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

John Fahy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7669-4913

Notes

1 I borrow the term ‘living theology’ here from Tamal Krishna Goswami (2012).

2 Vaishnavism is one of the four major Hindu traditions and although it generally centres on Vishnu, in the case of Gaudiya Vaishnavism (or Bengal Vaishnavism) Krishna is held to be the Supreme Lord. The term Gaudiya is derived from the locative Gauda, which refers to pre-partition Bengal.

3 This refers to any sexual activity that is not within marriage, and exclusively for procreative purposes.

4  Ronald de Sousa (2001) has usefully outlined three philosophical approaches that can be grouped under the broader category of ‘moral emotions’. Firstly, the Stoics argued that all emotions should be purged, antithetical as they are felt to be to the virtuous pursuit of reason. This perspective is in line with Socrates’ intellectualist understanding of moral knowledge (Coplan 2010) that underpinned the Enlightenment, and continues to inform the category of emotion in the West today (Lutz 1988). In the Stoic tradition then, emotions are vices rather than virtues. The second position, espoused by the likes of David Hume, however, posits that some emotions are inherently moral insofar as they are conducive to moral consciousness (he uses the example of compassion). Not only are emotions inherently moral but against a pervasive assumption in the Western moral tradition that priorities rational judgment, reason is for Hume ‘the slave of the passions’. The third position is the Aristotelian conception of emotions as intrinsically relevant to ethics. This position suggests that, according to de Sousa, ‘the value of emotions to ethics lies not so much in what emotions can contribute to our moral behaviour, as in their nature as components of the good life, without which the very idea of morality would be pointless’ (2001: 110).

5 As part of his broader cultural phenomenological account of moral emotions, Throop defines moral moods as ‘temporally complex existential modalities that transform through time and yet often entail a durativity that extends beyond the confines of particular morally salient events and interactions’ (2014: 65).

6 Darshan refers to both looking at, and also being in the presence of, the deities.

7 In the broader Hindu context, prema (from Sanskrit) generally refers to love for the divine whereas in the theological categorisation of emotions in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, it refers specifically to ‘pure love for Krishna’.

8 There are nine key stages of spiritual advancement, from neophyte to exalted or ‘pure’ devotee. They are: sraddha (faith), sadhu-sanga (association), bhajana-kriya (devotional service), anartha nivrtti (ridding oneself of unwanted habits or vices), nistha (steadiness), ruci (taste), asakti (attachment), bhava (love) and prema (pure love for Krishna). While this does represent an archetypal spiritual trajectory, in practice the nine stages do not delineate a clear linear progression as much as they offer devotees a vocabulary with which to evaluate the trials and tribulations of their own spiritual journey.

9 Leela Prasad translates rasa as ‘distilled aesthetic emotion’ (2007:188). It translates literally as ‘sap’, ‘juice’ or ‘essence’ (Haberman 2007: 411) and refers in its original context to the emotional experience of an audience during a dramatic performance.

10 It should be noted that my observations in this article reflect fieldwork in Mayapur, which is often considered one of ISKCON’s most conservative centres. I have been told by devotees in America for example that there are notable exceptions to the aversion to the esoteric that I describe here.

11 The Gita-Govinda is a twelfth century devotional poem that spares no detail in its portrayal of Radha and Krishna’s conjugal encounters.

12 The rāsa-līlā (or the ‘dance of divine love’) involves Krishna dancing with Radha and the gopis (cowherd girls) in the forests of Vrindavan. Due to its erotic overtones, it has long been the subject of controversy and often used as a prime example of Krishna’s, and therefore Hinduism’s, moral degradation.

13 Cited in Brooks (1989:187).

14 While rāgānugā was an important, though certainly esoteric, feature of the particular lineage that ISKCON identifies with, there was a subtle but significant theological shift in the early twentieth century with Prabhupad’s own guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura. Bhaktisiddhanta was the son of a prominent late nineteenth-century Gaudiya Vaishnava theologian and spiritual leader, Bhaktivinoda Thakur. ISKCON looks to Bhaktivinoda, as do several sects, as the father of modern Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Where Bhaktivinoda’s accomplishment was arguably the revival and modernisation of Krishna consciousness, his son Bhaktisiddhanta pioneered its institutionalisation. It was from Bhaktisiddhanta that Prabhupad inherited the missionary zeal that would bring him to the West in the 1960s, and it was to him that Prabhupad remained fiercely loyal in terms of both his theological and institutional commitments. Throughout his mission Bhaktisiddhanta consistently privileged the exoteric and like Prabhupad decades later in America, often warned devotees against the dangers of prematurely practicing rāgānugā.

15 Prabhupad translates the Sanskrit prasādāt interchangeably as grace and mercy, typically preferring the latter. While grace has arguably been more central in Christian theology, as Mathew John (1970) has outlined, Hinduism has its own history with the concept (Clooney 2001; Kulandran & Kraemer 2004). As a particularly extreme example, the sixteenth-century acarya (spiritual leader) Vallabhacarya preached sole reliance on the saving grace (anugraha) of Krishna, ‘which placed absolute stress on the need for divine compassion rather than self-effort in the quest for salvation’ (Bennett 1993: 46).