Chapter Five: Avatāra Doctrine and Rama Worship
Rama worship thus first appeared in the relation of servitude—servant and served—with sacred propriety as its chief inspiration and foundation. Gradually servitude developed into friendship, friendship into parental affection, and parental affection into sweetness. For approximately four hundred years, the sweet current of Rama-bhakti has flowed through North India: at first hidden like the Gupt Godavari, then slowly becoming visible and explicit.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the disposition of the female companion was never expressed here with the same freedom found in the Krishna-bhakti branch. Sacred propriety remained predominant even within sakhī-bhāva.
Most temples in Ayodhya today are named “grove” or “forest.” Besides Sri Kanak Bhavan, the principal sacred places worship the Divine Couple in the sweet manner. Most of Ayodhya’s saints and practitioners bear spiritual identities ending in Lata, Priya, Ali, or Sakhi. Modern psychologists might call this a reaction against the strict proprieties and rules of the beginning. We shall examine the matter in a later chapter: the influences through which sweetness entered Rama-bhakti; its actual form today; the relationship between its outer and inner discipline; and the degree to which its theology and practice have affected, and continue to affect, literature.
One point must be emphasized: sweetness did not enter and develop in the literature of the Ramavat tradition merely by imitating Krishna-bhakti, as many thoughtful critics and respected scholars maintain. Servitude itself blossomed there and culminated in sweetness. It is possible that other disciplines of the period—the Krishna-oriented Sakhi tradition, Vaishnava and Buddhist Sahajiya currents, Kashmir Shaivism, and Raseshvara philosophy—also exerted influence in various forms.
The truth is that sweet worship forms the dominant tone of nearly every medieval discipline—Vaishnava, Shakta, Shaiva, or Buddhist—while the remaining dispositions are secondary. Whatever the nature and degree of external influence, sweet worship in the Ramavat tradition flowered from within itself as an independent discipline and spread across North India. Yet the primacy of sacred propriety denied it space for uninhibited expression. It therefore remained compressed, hidden, and supremely secret; even today it remains deeply esoteric.