Staying in one place since June (in my country retreat in Poland, due to the pandemic) has been good for the physical “system” after years of fairly constant travel. Like so many of us who are ensconsed in the Internet, much of our “travel” is digital. My earlier intention to travel to the U.S. at this time of year was in part to attend the annual American Academy of Religion meeting, meant to be held this year in Boston. Instead, the meeting was reorganized to be a virtual one, and my scheduled presentation in one of the panels of the Religion in South Asia section was two nights ago (10:00 to 11:30 Polish time).

          The theme of our panel of four presenters was “The Implications of Being Earnest: Sincerity in South Asian Contexts,” and my own all-of-15-minutes presentation was titled “Earnestness in Hearing and Reading the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.” In my paper, I suggested that prescriptions for proper hearing of the Bhāgavatam that are found within the Bhāgavatam give us clues how and why present-day readers of this “pre-modern” text find it so valuable and relevant. I refer to the religion scholar Paul J. Griffiths’ notion of “religious reading” as helpful for understanding this Bhāgavata reading practice. In his book Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (1999), Griffiths argues that when properly practiced, earnest religious reading will lead to a reading being able to “give a religious account of things” that has three features, namely, comprehensiveness, unsurpassability, and centrality.

          Anticipating a possible doubt about the appropriateness of such an account, I wrote a sort of “addendum” to my paper which I knew in advance I would not have time to read during the conference. So, I give myself the liberty to post it here, with apologies for not providing the entire paper to which the addendum applies.  

The time constraint for this presentation prevents me from discussing actual current Bhāgavata religious reading practices and how late modern sensibilities may be engaged in this premodern text in non-reductive ways. Rather, I have focused on two significant narratives (and one shorter narrative) in the text in order to suggest how religious readers might be drawn to experience the three features of a religious account, namely, comprehensiveness, unsurpassability, and centrality. But since these three abstract nouns may sound alarm bells, warning us of what Jean-François Lyotard called “the mutterings of the desire of a return of terror” arising from metanarrative—or “grand narrative”—oppressiveness, in these concluding remarks, I should mention two brief points in this regard, in defense of the Bhāgavata assemblage of narratives, which I would refer to as a “ dynamic polymorphic narrative” rather than a “metanarrative” in its negative sense.

A first point to make, following Huston Smith, is that the “uncompromising dichotomy that Lyotard erects between wholes and parts is unconvincing” (Smith 2000:359 [“Methodology, Comparisons, and Truth” in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Epub]). This is particularly true of the Bhāgavata, which has as one of its primary philosophical-theological projects to articulate plausible relationships between wholes and parts, thereby fundamentally questioning the dichotomy. This project is inseparable from its unapologetic exhortation (in its very first strophe) to contemplate (dhīmahi) ultimate truth (param satyam), as I have previously mentioned. The dynamic, ever-expanding character of the Bhāgavata’s ultimate—or absolute—truth (brahman, which is identified as nondual—advayam, is further identified as paramātman and bhagavān), points to its inclusiveness, its conscious reversal of marginalization, social marginalization being the basic moral objection to metanarratives.

The second point to make about the Bhāgavata as metanarrative is with respect to the ludic component to several of its narratives. While the Bhāgavata has its share of comedy that highlights human (or celestial) folly, of particular note is its celebration of divine comedy: Krishna reveals an ever-unfolding show of lightheartedness that draws religious readers to his gravitational field of charm as the most profoundly serious core of their sense that the text provides the basis for their religious account of things as being indeed comprehensive, unsurpassable, and central to their lives. Thus the practice of Bhāgavata religious reading sustains a center of intellectual and emotional gravity for present-day readers out of which arises a dynamic and newly unfolding connection between the world of the Bhāgavata and the Bhāgavata in the world.

A few days ago, I accepted an invitation by my friend Christopher Fici (who just a few
weeks ago successfully passed his doctoral dissertation defense at Union Theological
Seminary—congratulations to him!) to be a guest co-editor (or co-guest-editor?) for a
special issu of the Journal of Dharma Studies, on the subject of Dharma and Ecology. We two are also co-authoring one article for the same issue. Our working title for this article is “The Eco-theological Rasa of Bhakti: An Anticipatory Dialogue.” We’re structuring it like a dialogue, with ourselves as the interlocutors. One point we make is that dharma without bhakti is inadequate to effectively address the current human-generated environmental catastrophic direction of the world. Here is a short excerpt of what I added yesterday to the article (a work in progress; earlier in the article, Chris distinguishes between the “chaff” and the “kernel” of dharma, and I suggest that the “chaff” is the normative or prescriptive aspect of dharma, and the “kernel” is the descriptive aspect of dharma, that which identifies living beings as essentially non-temporal, spiritual beings):

Normative dharma, being concerned with what ought to be done, highlights the gap between what is and whatever is considered ought to be. Hence, this aspect of dharma is focused on difference. For this reason, it cannot, by itself, enable human beings to escape from the tendency to perceive the natural world in terms of difference, which translates into competitive terms. In this sense, normative dharma yields to the biotic reality acknowledged in some post-Vedic texts with an arguably “ecological” observation, namely, “One living being is food for another.” Therefore normative dharma—which is meant specifically for human beings—tends to uphold anthropocentrism—indeed unavoidably—even as it aims to guide us humans toward self-restraint as the starting point for realizing justice and sustainability on all levels. By the same token, normative dharma tends to affirm anthropocentrism even as it guides us—hopefully—toward the truth of our core non-material, brahman-centric (divine) being that is the object of descriptive dharma, dharma’s “kernel”, as you say. Within the limited scope of normative dharma, the hierarchical worldview will be in play and, indeed, has its limitedly rightful place. Show us a righteous, dharma-principled king with real power to institute appropriate state policies, and we could expect to see values such as ecological balance and sustainability being at least valued and pursued if not thoroughly realized and secured. Such a king’s efficacy, with the cooperation of all sections of human society, would turn largely on his affirming some degree of hierarchical social structure.

However, bringing to bear the bhakti paradigm, because of their connection (drawing on a core meaning of the term yoga as “connection”) with divinity, humans become enabled to go beyond the competitive aspect of the natural world to recognize, become situated in, and act on the basis of the cooperative aspect of the natural world’s ecological reality. Crucially, the bhakti paradigm opens us to the cooperative principle in nature. It is from the standpoint of bhakti that truly equal vision is experienced, without which effective action in pursuit of sustainable human thriving must remain burdened by shortsightedness.

This thought concerning competitive versus cooperative aspects of nature in relation to dharma and bhakti came to me during a walk in the adjacent forest (I’m now at my home in Poland, after ten weeks of lockdown in India and two weeks of quarantine in Germany). One area of the forest that I’ve been visiting each day is a large clearing, where recent lumbering has left a cemetery of silent tree stumps. While surveying this field of destruction, I ask myself, “Had there been a bhakti-infused harvesting of these trees, could they have gone for better, devotional use, like making paper for printing devotional literature rather than for printing sensationalist media? Could less trees have been cut down, or maybe no trees? In reply, the surrounding, still-standing trees only shiver their leaves with the soft breeze. But I like to think that just to ask this question is the beginning of making a positive difference for the environment, inspired by the devotional spirit of bhakti that sees divine presence in all living things and thereby invokes reverence for all life.