‘Eyes Tinged by the Salve of Love’ – Forming of Gaudiya Vaiṣṇava Canon and the Hermeneutics of Bhaktivinoda

Presenter:

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Abstract

This essay examines what is ‘canon’ within Gaudiya Vaiṣṇavism and argues that the hermeneutics of this tradition presupposes that the affective dimension in reading sacred texts overshadow its primary or even secondary meaning. The metaphor of ‘salve’ derives from the Brahma Saṁhitā verse 38, a text of unknown antiquity said to have been discovered by Caitanya (1486-1533). When the eyes of the hermeneut are ‘tinged’ with the ‘salve of ‘love’, s/he is said to be able to perceive an affective transrational reality that goes beyond the scope of human logic. This paper offers three examples of such hermeneutics, and the role of canonical texts such as the Bhagavad Gītā, Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), and the biographies of the founder Caitanya-caritāmṛta and Caitanya-bhāgavata. Of the three examples, the first one is a reading of the first three words of the BhP 1.1.1 derived from the Vedānta Sūtra ‘janmadi asya yataḥ’ which in the conventional sense refers to the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of the cosmos. But in Jīva Gosvāmin’s Kramasandharbha it happens to mean the ‘birth and activities of Kṛṣṇa’ instead. The second example is from BhP 11.05.32 which is reframed without reference to context and interpreted by a series of Gauḍīya commentators to be a prediction of the avatarhood of Caitanya. The third example is from the Caitanya Bhāgavata where such a hermeneutical tradition continues in the colonial period in the works of Bhaktivinoda (1838-1914). He uses the term ‘prithivi’ from its sixteenth-century context, but interprets it to include the Americas and Australia, new global spaces where bhakti-rasa needed to be introduced.