Sahitya Akademi

Sahitya Akademi
Review: The Krishna Myth

Author(s): K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
Review by: K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2 (148) (March-April, 1992), pp. 109-121
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
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The Krishna Myth
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
The Betrayal of Krishna : Vicissitudes of a Great Myth, by KrishnaChaitanya

New Delhi : Clarion Books, 1991, pp. 556, hardbook, Rs. 360.
an institutionby himself,Krishna Chaitanya has

ALMOST
to his credit a ten-volume 'History of World Literature',
a five-volume 'Philosophy of Freedom', a four-volume 'History
of Indian Painting', a 'Profile' of Indian Culture, and a literary
study of the Mahabharata in which he has highlighted the
importance of the in-set Gita in any attempt to understand
the great Epic and its message to modern man caught in the
clutches of his own frightening technological breakthrough.
Chaitanya's more recent The Gita for the Modern Man
reiterates the same argument, bearing in mind the precarious
human predicament today. The Lord of the Gita has indeed
the right word for the hapless Arjunas of our time living under
the shadow of the ominous Doomsday Clock and the threa
tening Mushroom Cloud.
After the colossal labour involved in the authorship of forty
or more volumes, Chaitanya had the feeling that the Krishna
of Vyasa's epic, the Krishna who holds the key to the solution
of world problems, has been grossly devalued in post-Vyasa
times, and cultism, court poetry, Tamil Sangam poetry, the
7 10/lndian Literature
Puranic recitals, the proliferation of the stories of young

Krishna's Gokul and Brindavan sports and exploits, the increa
sing emphasis on Krishna-Gopis-Radha relationships with
their candid erotic reverberations, the rise and wide preva
lance of Bengal Vaishnavism, all have in their cumulative effect
managed—as Chaitanya puts it bluntly—to turn Krishna into
a Casanova.
Chaitanya's present work is a systematic attempt to lay bare
the decline and fall of the great Krishna who gives the solemn
assurance 'Ma sucha' to Arjuna (and to the Arjunas of all
time), to the Krishna of childhood pranks and miracles, boy
hood games and feats and the Brindavan autumnal music and
dance; and as the myth grew wings of fancy and fantasy in
later times, Krishna looming large as the role-model of the
Don Juans and Casanovas for whom promiscuous sensuality
was the law of life. With his characteristic thoroughness and
identification with the subject, Krishna Chaitanya has brought
to his task all his immense scholarship and deep-seated com
mitment to the Krishna of the Gita, and in the course of fifteen
weighty chapters and an Epilogue traces the history of the
Krishna myth through the ages, and accomplishes a strident
demonstration of his thesis that the authentic Krishna, the
Gita-charya, has suffered distortion, vulgarisation and worse
in post-Vyasa times.
Since early times, Krishna has figured mort or less simul
taneously as folklore hero, charismatic Prince Charming, des
cended God, and mankind's Guru Extraordinary, but it was
Vyasa's epic that projected Krishna with superb clarity as
Arjuna's teacher, and as teacher of mankind. Subsequently

the inexorable vicissitudes of time and history have had their
impact on the Krishna image as well. Chaitanya devotes a few
chapters to recall the process of Krishna's demotion from Guru
of the human race to a mere cult deity; the appropriation of
Krishna by the court poets; the mysterious induction of 'Radha'
into the Krishna story; the three references in Satavahana
Mar.-Apr. 1992
The Krishna Myth/111
Hala's Gathasaptasati with their erotic undertones; presently

the attempts in Harivamsa, Vishnu Purana, the Sangam and
Alvar poetry in Tamil, and above all in Srimad Bhagavatam
to highlight the childhood and boyhood exploits as well as
the miraculism of Krishna; the Vedantic Krishna of Sankara,
Ramanuja and Madhva; and the splendid if rather sidetracking
Krishna of Jayadeva's Gita Govinda. And anon, faster and
faster, the extravagances of Bengali Vaishnavism, the sudden
explosion of the personality of Chaitanya Mahaprabhou; and
soon the muddling together of the sensual and the spiritual,
and so on, the Krishna motif in lyric poetry, and the Krishna
of the Mahabharata, and especially of the Gita.
In his own way, then, Chaitanya has achieved a massive
sustenance of his thesis of the latter-day 'betrayal' of Krishna.
The Lord of the Gita is lost in the playboy of Gokul, Brindavan
and the Raasa Dance, in the Krishna-Radha extravaganzas,
and in the sheer descents to dilettantisms, libertinism and the
merely absurd.
Instead of taking one by one Chaitanya's illustrations of the
'betrayal' of Krishna, let me rather try to present in brief my
own reading of the problem. It seems to me that, when a story
or myth has had, say, a 3000-year old history, it is too much
to expect a wholly consistent or uniform understanding of the
theme, especially when spatially the entire Indian sub-conti
nent is involved. And notwithstanding the numerous received
variations in the 'Rama' or 'Krishna' story, the soul-essence
doesn't seem to have suffered any serious obscuration. The
problem with Krishna is that, for a thousand years perhaps,
we think of the birth,childhood of Krishna as in the tenth
Skanda of the Bhagavata, and of the statesman Krishna of the
Udyoga Parva, and particularly of the Bhagavan of the Gita
chapters of the Bhishma Parva.
The question of questions is
whether they are one and the same Krishna with a convincing
amplitude and fulness of delineation? That the flute-player
and the charioteer, the Charmer of the Raasa Revels and the
No. 148
112/lndian Literature
Bhagavan of the Gita are the same person, power and

personality is my view or ground of faith.
When we accept the Bhagavata as the basic source of
information relating to Krishna's childhood and boyhood, the
piece de resistance for many is the Raasa Dance in the
Panchadyayi (Cantos 29-33) in Book X. To view the Raasa
Revels as the drama of promiscuous carnal love is to do
violence to the great Purana and miss the cardinal intention
of the seer-poet of the Bhagavata. Towards an ethically,
aesthetically and spiritually elevating reading of the Raasa
Panchadyayi, then, the following may be urged.
The whole story is narrated by Suka (traditionally Vyasa's
crystal-pure and crystal-clear son), "the eternally pure Suka"
according to Swami Vivekananda, the seer-saint from whom
nothing even remotely impure can
be expected. And when
King Parikshit himself raises the question of the basic impro

priety of the Dance, Suka says that the question should not
rise since Krishna the visible Divine is at once "in the Gopis,
in their spouses, in all that lives, in fact, as the witness and
inner-controller" (Canto 33, 35ff.). It is all a part of Krishna's
Yoga Maya. As N. Raghunathan puts it, "There is a curioys,
dream-like quality about the happenings in those autumnal
nights which set them apart from sublunary reality"
(Srimad-Bhagavatam, Introduction to his English Translation,
p. xxxiii).
Let us now look at some of the other aspects of the non-age
Krishna's life in Gokul and Brindavan. Being a small cowherd
enclave, Gokul practises a good deal of communal living
together. As the adored child of Chief Nandagopa and his
wife Yasoda, Krishna is a universal favourite, the Gopis—
young, and not so young, and old—play with him and exer
cise almost a communal ownership of the extra-ordinary child.
And the shift from Gokul to the more spacious Brindavan
doesn't mean any radical change in the Gopis' attitudes and
behaviour. But, then, the move to Brindavan with its
Mar.-Apr. 1992
forestscapes and Govardhan Hill and flowing Yamuna means

a richer and more exciting background. There is also the new
factor, Krishna's flute with its enchanting appeal far and wide.
And autumn comes, and moonlight too, and communal music
and dance. The call of the flute is unearthly, irresistible; and
the Gopis respond, and gather round the beloved flute-player.
And as they dance, each of the Gopis has the exhilarating
illusion by her side, and the Raasa Revels thus
of a Krishna
leave all the Gopis in a mood of fulfilment. And these Gopis,
as visualised by the Puranic chroniclers, are by divine grace
touched with something uniquely their own. In Sri Aurobindo's
words:
The lila of the Gopis seems to be conceived as something which is
always going on in a divine Gokul and which projects itselfin an

earthly Brindavan and can always be realised and its meaning made
actual in the soul ... the writers of the Puranas took it as having been
actually projected on earth in the life of the incarnate Krishna, and

it has been so accepted by the religious mind of India (SABCL, Vol.
22, p. 426)
It is perhaps helpful to consider the Gokul and Brindavan

of the boy Krishna's time as an elected mid-region between
Heaven and Earth, the Divine firstcolonising Gokul-Brindavan
as a median step down the ladder of descent, a preparation
for plunging into the world of Kamsa, Jarasanda, Sisupala and
Duryodhana. All the laughter and the flute's music and the
ecstasy of the Raasa Dance are now to be left behind, and
we are ready for the shift to Mathura and the long long road
to Kurukshetra.
One relevant question in this context relates to Krishna's
age at the time of the Raasa Revels. In his Studies in the Epics
and Puranas of India, (p.78) A.D. Pusalkar gives the age as
11, as may be inferred from references in the Puranas. But
according to A.C. Bhaktivendanta (Krishna:
Supreme The
Personality of Godhead, Vol. 1, p. 188), Krishna was only 8
at the time of the Raasa Dance. Either way, the age rules out
No. 148
our conventional scenario of passion,

and seduction, and
orgiastic self-indulgence. And, besides, on a close reading of
the text, it should be clear that Krishna is never alone with
any single Gopi except once, and that is only to teach her a
lesson in humility, and through her to others as well. This is
also the meaning of Saint Tyagaraja's Nowka Charitram. Here
too Krishna is but 7 years old. In all the Raasa Revels, Krishna
is no single Gopi's exclusive captive; rather is he seraphically
free, and is yet the beloved of all. It may be added further
that, although young in years, Krishna in Brindavan is endow
ed with the sheer spiritual precocity of the boy-prodigies of
the Bhagavata: Kapila and Prahlad, and Dhruva and Vamana
(or Trivikrama).
What is reported as having happened—the night-long re
vels, with every Gopi feeling that Krishna was by her side,
and the men-folk (Gopas) certifying that their wives, sisters or
daughters were at home all the time—something like magic
or miracle or sovereign Yoga Maya is surely implied. This is
also the fascinating logic of the whole series of Bala Krishna's
sports and pranks and miraculous feats. The steady sequence
of pranks alternating with the miraculous, with the Raasa
Dance as.the culminating sport-cum-divine action: all this is
meant to hold together as the magnificent flowering of the
divine Bala Krishna. In N. Raghunathan's words:
The balalilas are so artfully contrived that every new and engaging
childish prank or pastime is followed by another miraculous exploit.
And being thus trained to accept and accommodate side by side the
charm of the human and the truth of the superhuman, the mind of
the reader surrenders itself completely and unquestioningly to the
denouement, the magic of the Raasa dance... (Introduction to

Srimad Bhagavatam, p. xxxiii).
Pastimes, pranks, miracles: because in th concept of divinity

associated with Krishna, God is laughter too, God is Delight
of Existence, God is Love and doesn't exclude practical jokes.
In E.M. Forster's words, "There is fun in heaven. God can
Mar.-Apr. 1992
play practical jokes upon Himself... All spirit as well as all

matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are
banned, the circle is incomplete" (A Passage to India, Penguin
edition, p. 280). No wonder in Brindavan, not the Gopis
alone, all flora and fauna respond to Krishna's flute, and enact
an Earthly on moonlight
Paradise autumnal nights, and
potentially anywhere, and at any time. Again, the splendorous
phenomenon of Krishna leading, controlling and sustaining
the Raasa Dance can perhaps be viewed as a variation of the
Dance of Shiva which (in Sri Aurobindo's
words) "multiplies
the body of the God numberlessly to the view" (SABCL, Vol.
18, p. 78). The whole scene is also like the fabulous Indra's
Net of Pearls, and not only Krishna is everywhere, but each
of the self-lost Gopis is also all her comrades as well.
And for a final exaltation and acceptance of the Raasa
Dance, there is Swami Vivékananda's grand affirmation:
Ah, the most marvellous passage of his life ... that most marvellous
expansion of lóve, allegorised and expressed in that beautiful play at
Brindavan, which none can comprehend but he who has become
mad, and drunk deep of the cup of love! Who can conceive the
throes of the love, love that wants nothing, love that even does not
care for heaven, love that does not care for anything in this world
or in the world to come?... People with ideas of sex, and of money,
and of fame, bubbling up every minute in their hearts, daring to
criticise or interpret the love of the Gopis!
That is the very essence of the Krishna incarnation. Even the Gita,
the great philosophy itself, does not compare with that madness, for
in the Gita the disciple is taught slowly how to walk towards the
goal, but there is the very ecstasy of enjoyment, the drunkenness of
love, where disciples and teachers and teachings and books, and
even the ideas of fear and God and heaven—all these have become
one ... In complete obliviousness to all else, the lover sees nothing
in the world except that Krishna, and Krishna alone for the face of
every being has become a Krishna ... That indeed was the great
Krishna (Quoted in Srimad Bhagavatam, translated by Swami
Prabhavananda, 1947, pp. 186-7).
For an anti-climax and strictly on a practical note, the Raasa
No. 148
7 /6/lndian Literature
Dance with its symphonic unity in the seeming scintillating

multiplicity is also Krishna's farewell, for Mathura calls him
peremptorily, and it has to be goodbye to the Gopis, goodbye
to Brindavan, and goodbye to Gokul, and goodbye to the
Flute and its haunting, captivating, love-inspiring, life-sustain
ing notes. Leaving Gokul and Brindavan behind, Krishna
(along with Balarama) will now move to Mathura to end
Kamsa's misrule, have formal education under Guru Sandi
pani, and presently assume the responsibilities of a Yadava
Prince, and play all-important roles as friend of the Pandavas,
and especially as Arjuna's charioteer on the field of fateful
Kurukshetra.
The Child
of Gokul, then, as the universal favourite; the
growing boy in Brindavan, charmer with his flute; the giant
killer of tyrant-Kamas; the founder and master-builder of
Dwaraka; the sterling statesman of Udyoga Parva and the
Bhagavan and World Teacher of the Gita: they are the same,
like early Dawn and bright Sunrise, and Forenoon, and mid
day Sun, and after. The sole underlying Truth behind the
seeming changes is Krishna the saviour-spirit, the Lord of Love
and Play, the breaker and maker of kingdoms, and the ordai
ner of the new order after the Kurukshetra holocaust. Others
may abide our questions, but Krishna is transcendently free!
One other question remains: Radha, and her role in the
Krishna story. Radha or Radharani is not mentioned in the
Mahabharata, Harivamsa, Vishnupurana or the Bhagavata.
Krishna Chaitanya cites from Satavahana Hala's Prakrit antho
logy, Gathasaptasati, three verses in which Krishna figures,
and one of them (No. 89) to Radha as well:
Krishna!
when you remove with the breath of your mouth
a particle of dust from Radhika's eye,
you take away at the same time
the pride of these other milkmaids.
Chaitanya's comment is that now, for the first time, Radha
Mar.-Apr. 1992
Radhika appears in a literary work (perhaps 2nd century A.D.)

"and as the favourite of Krishna":
She may disappear for quite a while after this first appearance, but
she will make up for it, by inspiring poetry and song, visual and
performing arts, which is all the good, but by generating a heady

mix of eroticism and spirituality which has not been so good.
For the past several centuries, Radha is inseparable from

Krishna in the popular consciousness, even as Sita from Rama.
Radha-Krishna is the name on our lips like Sita-Ram or Uma
Shankar. Krishna no doubt married Rukmini, Satyabhama,
and many others, but for the millions he is Radha-Krishna,
the beloved of Radha.
"Radha is the problem-child of our national imagination":
thus K.M. Munshi, in The Magic Flute, which is the first
volume of his Krishnavatara. For Munshi (as for Ramachandra
Dikshitar), Pinnai or Nappinnai is the Tamil variation of Radha;
and Pinnai is Krishna's wife, whom he has won by subduing
a bull and demostrating his strength. There is a reference to
this in the Tamil classic, llango's Silappadhikaram ('The Lay
of the Anklet'). For Chaitanya, however, Pinnai is "a new
figure", and her marriage to 'Mayon' (Krishna) only symbolises
the assimilation of the Krishna lore into the daily life of the
Tamils, and especially of the Tamil cowherd community. That
Pinnai is the accepted wife of Krishna and is not just one of
the Gopis, or the favourite Gopi, makes her perhaps stand
apart and unique.
If the Krishna-history is viewed as a whole, from his dazzling
birth in a Mathura prison to his passing on the hunter Jara's
arrow mistakenly hitting the out stretched leg of the resting
old warrior-saviour, we see it move from his childhood and
early boyhood years in Gokul and Brindavan, with their
paradisal rural aura, to the wider urban world of Mathura,
Dwaraka, Indraprasta, Hastinapura and Kurukshetra. If in the
earlier phase Krishna was the universal favourite of the Gopis
who loved him with a finality of surrender sustained by love
No. 148
118/Indian Literature
and devotion, during succeeding long years of his urban

princely responsibilities, he married Rukmini, Satyabhama
and several other eligibles with royal blood flowing in their
veins. Krishna, then, loved the Gopis for their candid and
open, simple-minded and single-hearted devotion that was
almost an end in itself. But Rukmini, Satyabhama, and the
rest of the wives were from the urban aristocratic
class, and
apt to speak on a wave length other than that of the Gopis
of Brindavan.
In this strangely and teasingly contrasted worlds of the Gopis
of Gokul-Brindavan and the privileged regal wives at Dwaraka,
isn't Radha—a Gopi with a difference, a Gopi who is Krishna's
chosen favourite; and a Gopi who is perhaps his wife too—the
ordained integrating link, verily the heart of the tantalising
situation?
The persistent tradition has been that Radha was also a
Gopi, but a Gopi with a difference. She hadn't seen Krishna
the growing child with his pranks and pastimes, nor the fast
growing boy. Some traditions present Radha as senior to
Krishna by some years, and as one already married (or at least
betrothed) to a shepherd called Aiyyan. It is implied thus that
Radha's is love parakeeya, outside marriage, and for its justi
fication and glorification needs much more than the normal
considerations of affinity and attraction.
In Kulapati K.M. Munshi's The Magic Flute, when Radha
meets Krishna first in Brindavan, she is aged 12, and he is 7.
In the course of the next eight years, they grow in love, and
it is at once human and divine. Just when, during the Raasa
Dance and after, they have wholly found each other, Krishna
confides to her that he is not a shepherd boy but a Yadava
Prince, and he has to leave for Mathura soon; and he asks
her to join him at Mathura. A moment's eloquent silence, and
Radha understands the implications, and says sadly but firmly
that she can have no place in his new life as prince and hero
warrior. She can no longer be his "twin-self", his partner in
Mar.-Apr. 1992
the Raasa. Krishna is frank enough to acknowledge the tran

scendent if currently bitter truth of her words. But he will
gladly undergo the wedding ceremony with her before leaving
for Mathura, and, as suggested, he will leave with her his
magic flute. Radha will remain (she does indeed, the faithful
say) in Brindavan; and she and the flute and the Raasa will
endure for ever.
It would seem, then, that the sensitive religious, poetic,
communal mind and conscience of India, feeling rather con
fused by the colourful plurality of Gopis who had surrendered
all, all, to their cowherd darling with the flute, their visible
God, their beloved Krishna; as also by the mind-boggling
scenario of Krishna's regal consorts—a thousand, or sixteen
thousand—it would seem that sometime
some gifted ones saw
behind all the mist andthe glare the master-clue to sanity,
certainty and even sublimity, the vision apocalyptic of Radha,
a Gopi with a difference, a wife too with a difference, a "twin
soul" of Krishna, the consort eternal and immanent, an identity
in seeming difference. Krishna, it is claimed, is the Purusha
in fulness of descent—no partial or fractional incarnation. And
perhaps Radha too is Prakirti's—Adya Shakti's—totality of
descent to advance, in alliance with Krishna, the adventure
of earth-evolution towards the backoning goals ahead.
It is hardly surprising that Radha as a person, a radiant
power and personality, didn't figure prominently in Indian
literature till the time of Jayadeva's Gita Govindam (12th
century A.D.), the Bengali Vaishnava poets, the coming of
Vallabha and the dynamic evangelism of Chaitanya Maha
prabhou. But variations, deviations, aberrations, perversions
cannot wholly nullify the quintessential simplicity, purity and
authenticity of the mystique of the divine descent of Radha
as complementary to that of Krishna. Together, or seemingly
separated, Krishna and Radha are the two-in-one; or jointly
the ONE without a second. In short, Radha is for Krishna what
Sita is for Rama.
No. 148
The question is often asked why Radha is not mentioned

in early texts or scriptures (like the Bhagavata, for example).
Here is an interesting suggestion by Osho (Rajaneesh) in his
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy (Jaico edition, 1990,
pp. 224ff.)
Radha is not a kind of relationship with Krishna; she is Krishna

herself.. she is invisible, like a shadow of Krishna ... No, we cannot
thinkof Krishna without Radha ... she is his song, his dance ... That
is why they become united and one, they become Radhakrishna."
And Osho compares Radha-Krishna to the Chinese symbolism

of Yin-Yang, the two fishes, one white and the other dark,
the tail of one in the mouth of the other, and these making a
full circle.
And for a final all-sufficing statement on the Radha-Krishna
relationship, thus Sri Aurobindo:
... the image has nothing to do with sex. The true symbol for it would
not be the human sex-attraction, but the soul, the psychic, hearing
the call of the Divine and flowering into the complete love and
surrender that brings the supreme Ananda. That is what Radha and
Krishna by their divine union bring about in the human
consciousness ...
Krishna with Radha is the symbol of Divine Love. The flute is the
call of the Divine Love. (SABCL, Vol. 23, 796, 980).
And thus the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram:
Surely she (Radha) has lived and is still living ...

Radha's consciousness symbolises perfect attachment to the Divine.
(Complete Works, Vol. 16, p. 16)
Beyond question, as Krishna Chaitanya has demostrated

with an impressive wealth of citation and sustained clarity of
presentation, there has been a 'betrayal' of the Krishna-Gopis/
Krishna-Radha relationships. The call of Krishna's flute is for
love, the love that can transcend the physical and attains the
Mar.-Apr. 1992
spiritual. Unfortunately, as the myth came to be handed down

and crudlely handled by the purblind or wilfully blind, 'love'
tended more and more to degenerate into lust, the merely or
promiscuously sexual. The human, instead of aspiring for and
achieving the spiritual, only gravitated all too readily to the
drunken meadows of shear sexuality. Even Krishna's child
hood and boyhood sports and pastimes seem now to have
attracted some bizarre Freudian elucidations. Krishna Chai
tanya, however, has done well to recall the magnificent tradi
tion of poetry inspired by the childhood and early boyhood
of Krishna from the Tamil Alvars to our time of Balamani
Amma's poems in Malayalam, "a tradition unique to India";
and by this means "ample amends have been made for all
the indignities visited on God by a tradition of poetry which
began as profane in the sense of secular and decayed into
profanity in the pejoratives sense, into sacrilege in fact."
Chaitanya's is a masterly historical survey of the vicissitudes
of the Krishna myth, and certainly there has been at different
times and places a regrettable devaluation of the Krishna myth.
These aberrations notwithstanding, on a total view embracing
a thousand and more years, the basics of the myth—the won
der-child Krishna, the boy flute-player, the divine dancer of
the Raasa Revels, the killer of Kamsa, the builder Dwarka, the
Pandava envoy to Hastinapura, the charioteer at Kurukshetra,
the Teacher of Arjuna and all mankind, these verities are with
us still. While the 'betrayals' are time-bound and locality
bound, and easily subject to satiety and revulsion, the adhe
sions to the authentic Krishna are touched with permanence
and universality. Krishna Chaitanya has done well to utter the
grave warning that to acquiescein the 'betrayal' will be
colossally suicidal, whereas an affirmation of faith in the true
and eternal Krishna may yet prove a solvent of the lunacies
of our time and inaugurate the beginnings of a new age of
sainty and sobriety, sweetness and light, in a self-adjusted
self-sustained and self-fulfilling Global Village.
No. 148

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Review: The Krishna Myth

K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar

The Betrayal of Krishna : Vicissitudes of a Great Myth, by KrishnaChaitanya

an institutionby himself,Krishna Chaitanya has

Puranic recitals, the proliferation of the stories of young

Vyasa's epic that projected Krishna with superb clarity as

Arjuna's teacher, and as teacher of mankind. Subsequently

Hala's Gathasaptasati with their erotic undertones; presently

Bhagavan of the Gita are the same person, power and

King Parikshit himself raises the question of the basic impro

forestscapes and Govardhan Hill and flowing Yamuna means

The lila of the Gopis seems to be conceived as something which is

always going on in a divine Gokul and which projects itselfin an

actually projected on earth in the life of the incarnate Krishna, and

It is perhaps helpful to consider the Gokul and Brindavan

our conventional scenario of passion,

denouement, the magic of the Raasa dance... (Introduction to

Pastimes, pranks, miracles: because in th concept of divinity

play practical jokes upon Himself... All spirit as well as all

expansion of lóve, allegorised and expressed in that beautiful play at

Brindavan, which none can comprehend but he who has become

goal, but there is the very ecstasy of enjoyment, the drunkenness of

For an anti-climax and strictly on a practical note, the Raasa

Dance with its symphonic unity in the seeming scintillating

Chaitanya's comment is that now, for the first time, Radha

Radhika appears in a literary work (perhaps 2nd century A.D.)

performing arts, which is all the good, but by generating a heady

For the past several centuries, Radha is inseparable from

and devotion, during succeeding long years of his urban

the Raasa. Krishna is frank enough to acknowledge the tran

The question is often asked why Radha is not mentioned

Radha is not a kind of relationship with Krishna; she is Krishna

And Osho compares Radha-Krishna to the Chinese symbolism

And thus the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram:

Surely she (Radha) has lived and is still living ...

(Complete Works, Vol. 16, p. 16)

Beyond question, as Krishna Chaitanya has demostrated

spiritual. Unfortunately, as the myth came to be handed down

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