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Maternal Affection for a Divine Son: A Spirituality of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Daniel P. Sheridan
Daniel P. Sheridan*
Affiliation:
Loyola University, New Orleans
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Abstract

Love for God as an actual concrete activity of a human being is sometimes obscured in contemporary American Christian culture. This essay studies the role of maternal affection for the divine child Kṛṣṇa, humanly embodied as a male child, in order to serve as a cross-cultural catalyst for the traditions of Christian love for Christ. The focus is the tenth-century Hindu Vaiṣṇava text, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Vaiṣṇavas promote the experience of loving God through imaginative participation in narratives of Kṛṣṇa's loves and by identification with human women who loved him, particularly his mothers. They are the exemplars of a maternal love for a divine child. This imaginative participation and identification is open to both men and women. This study illustrates the roles of gender, narrative, and imagination in the experience of loving God with one's whole heart, soul, and might.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 65 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1989

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References

1 This reduction has been promoted by a misinterpretation of an important theme in contemporary theology: that, for the Christian, love for God and love for neighbor ought to be joined in actual practice. See Rahner, Karl, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations 6 (New York: Seabury Press. 1974), pp. 231–49.Google Scholar But see also Rahner, Karl, The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor (New York: Crossroad, 1983)Google Scholar where he carefully distinguishes the two loves in order to clarify the role of love for God. More importantly, at the level of popular religion, this reduction is part of the American cultural canon. See the provocative discussions in Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 93–97.Google Scholar

2 Sheridan, Daniel P., “Devotion in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Christian Love: Bhakti, Agape, Eros,” Horizons 8/2 (Fall 1981), 273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For a similar chart, see the provocative study of Ramanujan, A. K., “On Women Saints” in Hawley, John Stratton and Wulf, Donna Marie, eds., The Divine Consort: Rādhā and the Goddesses of India (Boston: Beacon, 1982), pp. 316–24.Google Scholar

4 See Sheridan, Daniel P., The Advaitic Theism of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986).Google Scholar

5 For a selection of these stories with many variants, see O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated From the Sanskrit (New York: Penguin, 1975), pp. 175–237Google Scholar, and Dimmitt, Cornelia and van Buitenen, J. A. B., Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), pp. 100–46.Google Scholar

6 See Kakar, Sudhir, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (2d ed.; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 83.Google Scholar

7 Hardy, Friedhelm, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 514–15.Google Scholar

8 Kakar, , The Inner World, p. 153.Google Scholar

9 See Archer, W. G., The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry (New York: Grove, 1962)Google Scholar and Kinsley, David R., The Sword and the Flute: Kālī and Kṛṣṇa, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Divine in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar

10 The affection of a father fora divine son, although present, is not a major theme of the Bhāgavatu Purāṇa. Again Kakar notes that perhaps this is due to a “culturally prescribed pattern of restraint between fathers and sons … widespread in India, sufficiently so to constitute a societal norm” (Kakar, , The Inner World, p. 131).Google Scholar However, such a judgment cannot be based on texts and ought not to be extrapolated back to the tenth century.

11 Translations, occasionally modified, are from Tagare, Ganesh Vasudeo, The Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978).Google Scholar

12 Compare the study of “Maria Lactans” in Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex (New York: Random House, 1976);Google Scholar also Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

13 For a controversial treatment of this theme, see O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 33–64, 99–105.Google Scholar

14 For differing views of the role of imagination, see Harris, Maria, Teaching and Religious Imagination: An Essay in the Theology of Teaching (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).Google Scholar

15 This interpretation is strongly indebted to O'Flaherty's treatment of bodily fluids in Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Also see O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

16 Sheridan, Daniel P., “The Nārada Bhakti Sūtras: Catalyst for Christian Love for God,” Studies in Formative Spirituality 6/1 (February 1984), 117–29.Google Scholar