Secret Lessons from Vrindavan

(Please notice that I am not use diacritics in Sanksrit transliterations because Papers does not reproduce them well.)

            In December of 2015, I travelled to the North Indian town of Vrindavan. I didn’t know at the time that this was the last research trip that I would make to India in the process of writing my book Savoring God, which compares a Hindu Vaishnava and a Christian Catholic mystical text alongside their theological commentaries. That was my fourth visit to Vrindavan. The first time, in 2009, a friend had taken me to the home of Shrinath Shastri, an elderly teacher and retired Bhagavata Katha (oral storyteller of the stories narrated in the Bhagavata Puranas). Shrinath was a hidden jewel in Vrindavan, someone that everybody knew was a genuine Vaishnava.

            At Shrinath’s house, which was also a Bhagavata school, I felt quite lost culturally and linguistically. Not only was I unaware of how to behave in front of a traditional teacher, but the communication was difficult. He didn’t know English; I didn’t know Hindi. We somehow spoke in Sanskrit, but that too was limited. The conversations required an interpreter, either the friend who had taken me there, or Shrinath’s grandson, also a disciple of his grandfather and a Bhagavata Katha himself. Despite being so out of place, I had rarely felt so welcomed at a home in India. In his genuine pedagogical vocation, Shrinath didn’t much care that I was a woman or a foreigner. He only paid attention to my sincerity in wanting to learn about the Bhagavata Purana. He felt that commitment in me, and that made him want to help me. Like those real teachers one seldom finds, Shrinath had all that knowledge within, and he was always ready to share it.

            Thus, since 2009, every time I went to Vrindavan, I would pay a visit to Shrinath, bring him some sweets as gifts that he rapidly distributed among everybody in the room, and ask him some question about the Rasa Lila (the 5-chapter passage from the Bhagavata Purana that I was studying for my research). Since he had a busy schedule and was so elderly, I saved one or two questions for Shrinath, the kinds of questions for which one may be able to find an answer in books or articles, but remain unclear.

            As I prepared to go to India at the end of 2015, I wrote to Srinath’s grandson. He told me that his grandfather was ill. He had been in the hospital because his legs were quite swollen. He was now at home, though, and looking forward to seeing me again. The question that I brought to him that time was about the commentaries of Shridhara Swami on a verse of the Rasa Lila that describes how the god Krishna danced and made love for thousands of years with the village cowherd girls, or gopis. In his commentaries, Shridhara writes that Krishna accomplished this amazing deed while “keeping his seed.” While it wasn’t hard to guess that the “seed” was referring to Krishna’s semen, it was nonetheless puzzling to find this precise phrasing in a commentary where similar references were rare, or non-existent. It wasn’t that I was unable to find in the dictionary that the Sanskrit word used in the verses (vija) meant both seed and semen, but I couldn’t quite grasp its entire meaning in Shridhara’s commentary. 

            That day I had to go alone to Shrinath’s home, without my friend serving as an interpreter. His grandson was busy with other guests. I sat there on the floor of Shrinath’s bedroom, next to his swollen legs, pointed at the commentary, and just asked “why” in Sanskrit. Shrinath look intensely into my eyes, and repeated what was written in Shridhara’s commentary. He read three times the word vija. It was the way he said it, and the way he looked at my eyes that removed all my doubts about this passage from Shridhara’s commentary. Shrinath died less than a week later. His grandson called me, weeping. I wished I could have been there, but that was not my place. His last lesson for me, one that he imparted beyond words, was about the erotic mysticism of Rasa Lila.

            This event, which I kept from the written book, contains all the questions that I want to address in this presentation: Where do we, scholars of mysticism, situate ourselves, ontologically speaking, when writing words about words or events that point to that which cannot be described? What are the scholarly spaces, other than ethnography, to examine the transformations we experience in the process of learning and writing about mysticism? (That is, where can we talk about “the things that we don’t talk about”?) And lastly, what are the limits of those spaces in a mostly white academy which prides itself of objectivity?

            While such questions may invite larger interdisciplinary conversations, here I will address them using self-referential materials taken from the process of writing my book Savoring God. I will talk not about what the book says but about how it was made. I will refer to how I dealt with those parts that remained invisible, in the margins; those unsaid events that transformed me while writing, and that will stay with me as I write other books, and as I live. This reflection, which can only be completed post-factum (or post-writing), takes a life of its own.

            Because it cannot be ignored, I will also speak of how my own positionality affected what I dared or dared not to include in the book. A Latino woman in her early career writing in a language that is not her own feels more hesitant to become vulnerable (in Kripal’s way) than a white person. Ten years ago, I would not give this presentation. But since my book and I are now older, I can stand closer to myself to see and savor the secret lessons I learned in Vrindavan.