Chapter Three: The Madhura Disposition in India's Inner (Esoteric) Religious Disciplines

The most affecting and savour-filled culmination of the sahaja doctrine thus occurred in the innate devotional practice of Sant literature.¹

In Madhyakālīna Dharma-sādhanā, Acharya Hazari Prasad Dwivedi discusses a once-renowned sect whose literature is no longer available: the Nilapatas, or Blue-Robed. They preached an extremely low form of pleasure-centred religion. “Eat, drink, and make merry” was their ideal. A naked man and woman remained wrapped together in a single blue cloth.

Explaining their doctrine, Dwivedi writes that King Bhoja's daughter once asked such a couple about religion. The “visionary” instructed her:

Drink and eat, O lovely-eyed one; what has passed does not return.
Do not be afraid: this fair body is merely a compound of matter.

Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself. What has passed can never return. If you practised austerity and suffered hardship, it was entirely wasted, for what is gone is gone. The truth is that the body is merely a conjunction of inert elements, with nothing beyond it.

When King Bhoja learned this, the account says, he destroyed the sect, searching out and eliminating every Nilapata pair. The doctrine appears to be an extraordinary mixture of Charvaka materialism and Sahajiya practice.

D. The Vaishnava Sahajiyas

Love as parakīyā-rati

While tracing the development of Buddhist Sahajiya practice, we saw that great bliss was understood as the union of wisdom and skilful means, or emptiness and compassion. Under different names, these are the Shiva and Shakti of the Tantrics. The meeting of Avadhuti in the uṣṇīṣa lotus corresponds in Tantra to suṣumṇā entering the sahasrāra and producing the harmony of Shiva and Shakti.

Wisdom and skilful means, Shiva and Shakti, Radha and Krishna are one principle. Differences of path, method, and qualification have given different names to the same root reality.

Vaishnava Sahajiyas made the parakīyā disposition the goal of love. Divine love was conceived through human love. Love becomes ideal where, for love alone, it breaks the chains of social convention and Vedic authority and chooses its beloved. In the love of a married wife, lifelong cohabitation and deep familiarity largely destroy love's mystery and savour—