Chapter Two: The Nature and Scope of Madhura-rasa
Sri Krishna's descent itself occurred for the relish of rasa.1 A woman in parakīyā love may be unmarried or mature and married. From the worldly standpoint this disposition may be condemned, yet it became the Vaishnavas' highest ideal. Taking it as their basis, souls have naturally continued to offer themselves wholly to Sri Krishna. On the strength of this disposition, the Vaishnava scriptures describe him as complete in Dvaraka, more complete in Mathura, and most complete in Vraja.
When hero and heroine, despite being utterly "another's," meet through the intensity of rāga, a wondrous blissful rasa flows between them. This is parakīyā-rasa. The love of the gopīs and Sri Krishna attained the highest condition of parakīyā precisely because of its density, its hidden desire, and the absence of an openly acknowledged marriage.2
It must be remembered that Sri Krishna's conscious līlā is eternal. Entry, by Krishna's grace and in a divine body, into the eternal conscious līlā of eternal Goloka will be discussed in the appropriate place. Here it is enough to state that Sri Krishna exists within the three-quarter manifestation in the conscious world, while the material world is the one-quarter manifestation. The one-quarter manifestation consists of the material universe with its fourteen worlds. Between the material universe and the conscious world flows the river Viraja; beyond Viraja lies—
Footnotes
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Rasa-niryāsa-svārtham avatārāṇi—"The descents take place for the sake of the very essence of rasa." Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, p. 547. ↩
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Regarding parakīyā-bhāva, Visvanatha Chakravarti says that in Gokula the women appear like others' wives, though they are truly Krishna's own, because of apprehension concerning parents and elders. Jiva Goswami discusses the issue at length in Prīti-sandarbha, pp. 676–686. He says that Krishna's recreation with the gopīs is not material desire but pure love, and that the question of wedded and unwedded love arises only in the manifest līlā: "In reality, the goddesses of Vraja are supremely his own, though regarded as others' wives in the manifest līlā." In the Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha, he interprets the Vraja līlā philosophically: the women of Mathura and Dvaraka are Krishna's essential power, and the gopīs' parakīyā condition is only an appearance within the manifest Vrindavan līlā. The women of Vraja never united with their apparent husbands: na jātu vraja-devīnāṃ patibhiḥ saha saṅgamaḥ.
"Even if orthodox poetics deprecates love to a married woman she is according to Vaiṣṇav's idea, the highest type of heroine and forms the central theme of the later parakīya doctrine of the school in which the love of the mistress for her lover becomes the universally accepted symbol of the soul's passionate devotion to God." —S. K. De, Vaiṣṇava Faiths & Movement, p. 54. ↩