Chapter Three: The Madhura Disposition in India's Inner (Esoteric) Religious Disciplines
—and no longer retains the same intense attraction, mystery, longing, and other qualities found in parakīyā love. In svakīyā, love is dominated by duty, dependent upon social bonds, pale in colour, and melancholy in savour. In worldly experience, parakīyā love alone appears to reach its summit through intense longing, mystery, and fierce attraction, casting aside public shame and family honour. Vaishnava Sahajiyas made the intensity of this parakīyā disposition their ideal of love-practice.1
Tradition says that Sri Chaitanyadeva himself performed sahaja practice with Sathi, Sarvabhauma's daughter.2 It further claims that nearly every Vaishnava devotional poet practised with some maiden. Besides Jayadeva, Vidyapati, and Chandidas, the list given includes Rupa Goswami with Mira; Raghunath Bhatt with Karma Bai; Sanatan Goswami with Lakshmi Hira; Lokanath Goswami with a Chandala girl; Krishnadas Goswami with the Vraja woman Pingala; Jiva Goswami with Shyama the barber-woman; Raghunath Goswami with Mirabai at Radha Kund; Gopal Bhatt Goswami with Gauripriya; and Raya Ramananda with a temple dancer.
The Ānanda-bhairava alludes to Shiva undertaking sahaja practice with various Shaktis in the land of Kuchanisa. Buddhist Sahajiyas likewise say that the Buddha himself practised with his beloved Gopa. We shall consider later what this practice in the parakīyā disposition means.
Following the fall of the Palas, Buddhism declined and Vaishnavism rose under the Senas. Jayadeva, court poet to King Lakshmana Sena, appeared in the later twelfth century. Vidyapati, the “cuckoo of Mithila” and a contemporary of Chandidas, became exceptionally popular through songs of Radha and Krishna's love.
Tradition says that large Vaishnava assemblies of the time staged fierce scriptural debates between the svakīyā and parakīyā positions. The svakīyā side was always defeated. Its advocates not only acknowledged defeat orally, but supplied the opposing side with a written admission.
We must therefore consider what innate worship within parakīyā-rati means. It should never be forgotten that this is presented as a path of discipline, not indulgence. Even enjoyment must be elevated and given the divine, auspicious form of practice. In sahaja discipline, the pleasure of sexual union is conquered and made one's obedient servant, then divinised and turned into a means of transcendent loving bliss and play—