On "M#y#" Edward C. Dimock, Jr. The Journal of Religion, Vol. 71, No. 4. (Oct., 1991), pp. 523-537.

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4189%28199110%2971%3A4%3C523%3AO%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L The Journal of Religion is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org Tue Aug 28 05:43:16 2007

On Maya*

Edward C. Dimock,Jr. /
University of Chicago

There are two lines in T . S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday that held particular interest for Christopher Isherwood:
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still,'

and in My Guru and His Disciple he comments on them: "Both softening and hardening of the heart can become vicious, [for they] allow a surplus of misery which is entirely subjective and unnecessary and helps no one."? It is difficult to argue with that. It is equally difficult to believe that Eliot is really asking for hardness of the heart. T h e subtlety of the matter reminds me of Krsna's instructions to Arjuna in the Bhagavad gita, to the effect that Arjuna should d o his duty as a warrior, despite the fact that he has relatives and gurus in the enemy's ranks. There is an amorality about these instructions, for Krsna seems to be saying: You must forget your scruples; pity is a bar to true understanding and to wisdom. He seems to be saying that to care, to have pity, is acceptable on some level of human interaction and understanding, but that this level is considerably below that of truth. Monier Monier-Williams, in his Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899; reprint, 195 I), and Jiianendramohan Das, in his Banglar abhidhan
' This was a paper prepared for a conference on "Time," held at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, November 1990. 1 want before anything else to acknowledge its heavy debt to Wendy Doniger because of the stimulus of her ideas and conversation and her customary great generosity in allowing me to read a manuscript she is preparing on the literary, psychological, and religious implications of "doubles." I have not quoted that insightful and delightful manuscript because it still exists only in draft form, but my indebtedness to it, especially in my references to the jekyll-Hyde theme, is very great. Another debt is to another colleague, Sheldon Pollock, who read a draft of the paper with his usual care and critical acumen, and many of whose suggestions have been finally incorporated. It goes without saying that I have been stubborn on some issues, and neither these colleagues nor anyone else can be blamed for my recalcitrance. And finally, I should like to express my gratitude to one of the Journal's evaluating readers, who very cogently pointed out that there is in India a long tradition of "philosophical texts that try to make conceptual sense of the apparent paradoxes present"; I have tried to follow that reader's suggestions and to take account of it in my notes. ' T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1 935 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1936), p. 110. 'Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 56. 1991 by T h e University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-41 89/91/7 104-0003f01 .OO

"

The Journal of Religion

(Calcutta, 1937), list "love, pity, compassion" among the meanings of maya (Das says karu?za, krpa-which come close to the "grace" of God), although they both attribute these meanings to lexicographical rather than philosophical o r literary texts. As the Gauriya Vaisnavas define the term, maya is an aspect, a iakti o r power, of deity and must, therefore, be true. But it is true in a way that is relational rather than intrinsic to the deity. It is as powers generally are to the possessor of powers-separate (bheda) and at the same time not separate (abheda), as if the flame to the fire; this has been discussed in detail e l ~ e w h e r e .This definition of ~ bhedabheda, simultaneous identity and difference, is the basic Vaisnava perception of the true nature of all relationships, between human and divine, infinite and finite, male and female, and in fact between all of what seem, to normal o r "classical" perception, to be opposites. "They are two essential entities," says the Caitanya-caritamrta (CC), the theological biography of the early sixteenth-century saint Caitanya in 1.4.82-84, "but they are not separate from one another. . . . As musk and scent are not divisible, as fire and flame are not divisible, so Radha and Krsna are always one in true form."4 T h e relationship is paradoxical only on the classical level, for its nature is acintya, unknowable by cognition, beyond o r aside from reason. On other levels, for example, those of divine or complete understanding o r of the unconscious, the paradox does not exist. Vaisnava theology takes the matter a step further and says that what allows the relationship to be perceived at all is God's mays-iakti, defined as his power of self-limitation, and this is the matter of the present concern. T h e definition of maya given in the canonical Vaisnava text Bhagavata purana (2.9.33) and accepted by most Vaisnava thinkers is "when something is cognized in itself without objectively existing, and (while existing objectively) is not c o g n i z e d . " O n this the authoritative commentator Sridharasvamin remarks that may5 is a power that makes it possible for an additional something without any corresponding reality to appear in the

"dward C. Dimock, Jr., "Lila," inHistory ofReligions 29, no. 2 (November 1989): 159-73. T h e text of the Caitanya-caritamyta (CC) has been edited by Radhagovinda Nath and pub1,ished in six volumes by Bhaktigrantha-pracara-bhandar of Calcutta in 1355 B s (B\ = Bangala Saka; this date is equivalent to 1949 c: ). T h e internal references here and throughout are to section (lila), chapter (pariccheda), and verse. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. T h e doctrine of bhedabheda is, as my evaluator has pointed out, very ancient, "certainly prior to Sankara," says S. N. Dasgupta, and "the dominant view of most of the puranas" (A History o f Indian Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196 11, 2:43). "he translation is Pollock's. T h e text reads: rte'rtham yat pratiyeta na pratiyeta catmani tad uidyad atmano mayam. A looser translation is given by Sudhindra Chandra Chakravarti in his Philosophical Foundations ofBengal Vai+nauism (Calcutta: Academic Publishers, 1969), p. 84: "that which cannot be manifested except through reality and yet is not manifested in the reality." T h e Bhagauata-purana, like all puranas of uncertain date (tenth century is the usual approximation), is one of the basic texts of Bengal Vaisnavism.

On Maya
very being of the deity who is omnipresent.6 While the phrase "without any corresponding reality" causes some problems, the Vaisnavas lay their emphasis on the other part of the comment and say that thus it is that he hides himself from himself: by his power of maya he makes himself subject continues to interpret Kr-na as to may&. "Except for me," ~ridharasvamin saying, "there is no maya; therefore there is no understanding. Yet through maya I am not understood." "The relationship," he says, "is that of darkness to light": light is known as relative to (i.e., in contrast with) the darkness. Both S. C. Chakravarti in his Philosophical Foundations and Radhagovinda Nath in his commentary Gaura-kypa-tarangini on the Caitanya-caritamyta7 seize on this with considerable delight. Chakravarti explains Qridharasvamin thus: "What appears outside the ultimate reality and ceases to appear as soon as the nature of the ultimate reality is realized is maya." It cannot, he goes on, "be perceived by itself. Without the support of the substratum it cannot manifest itself. Except as associated with What the ultimate reality it has no meaning what~oever."~ ~ridharasvamin means when he says that "maya should be understood as an abhasa [semblance]," says Radhagovinda Nath, is that it is like the reflection of the sun in an earthen pot of water, real but not real; it is as darkness on the outskirts of light. All of which leads, it seems to me appropriately, in two directions at once. The first loops back to Eliot. Arjuna's feeling of empathy and uncertainty does not seem to be, in Krsna's opinion, maya in the sense of "illusion," the usual translation of the word in texts of, let us say, the Vedanta, but maya in the sense of a lesser degree of reality, a level of reality that is associated with, exists because of, but is not the same as the true reality. T h e degree is less, perhaps, because pity involves ego; it is to feel an abstracted (but nonetheless real) pain and involves, therefore, one's self. "To care," as Eliot has it, is an egoistic act. "Not to care" is beyond egoism: the understanding is other than personal, although the two levels of understanding are related. Krsna, in this way, seems to be saying to Arjuna: "You complain to me of your pain in making an ethical decision, but ethics and, for that matter, pain are on a different level from that to which I am trying to raise your understanding." This statement of the multivalent nature of truth, which, despite all that has been recently written and said, is still slightly uncomfortable for this Westerner, lies quite easily in the mainstream of Indian thought. One of the rasa theories of

' Relevant verses are scattered throughout the text; the most extensive commentary is perhaps
at CC 1.1.24. Chakravarti, p. 85.

Chakravarti, p. 84.

The Journal of Religion

aesthetics, for example, contends that the depersonalized condition of aesthetic delight is of the same species as personal experience but of a different level: fear is related to pain o r terror but is not identical with it. In just such a way, maya seems to be the apparent, the particular, the personal. Maya-iakti is that aspect of God's power that allows him to be known; it allows a relationship between finite and infinite, and it allows a perception of that relationship, even though not fully understood. Implicit in Eliot's prayer is a view of the nature of both humanity and God as bivalent, which is quite in keeping with the basic Christian mystery. He asks God to grant us the power to stand beside ourselves and, in so doing, to understand that which human and divine share. A second direction in which we are led presents a rather different set of problems. O u r "classical" understanding, as it is defined by Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, permits the perception of only one of the two levels at a given time. "Archly," as Fred Alan Wolf archly describes it, "quantum physics requires the existence of that which isn't in order to explain that which is."g It is very like the principle of celestial navigation by which one assumes a position where one is not in order to ascertain where one is.lo Or, to quote Wolf again, "One cannot know and experience simultaneously all that is in principle knowable. . . . One thing is clear, though: self plays a role in what is seen to be not-self."" T h e selves are at least two. T h e first is the immediate self, the one that feels pleasure and pain both physical and psychological, the self that makes distinctions of time and space, the self that acts. A second, paradoxically (because it is a second), is not subject to space o r time. Its condition is what Wolf calls "the experience and knowledge of all that is knowable,"'* a condition of wisdom, perhaps. In the language of quantum physics, it is the condition called a "singularity," in which no measurement is possible. Change, then, involves time and space, but the condition of realization toward which change moves involves neither. Poets seem to see this. "Teach us to sit still," says Eliot. "Time enters only the unsteady mind," says the writer of the Carya-pada.'Vn order for particular experience to evolve into the abstract condition of understanding called rasa, there must be movement. But rasa itself is a condition in which there is no movement-no time, no space, thus no change. T h e condition might be that of atoms, in which the electrons are in superposition and everything is
"Fred Alan Wolf, Parallel Universes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 6 4 . "'See, e . g . , John P. Budlong, Sky and Sextant (New York: Van Nostrand, 1978), p. 1 1 . ' I Wolf, p. 8 1 . " Ibid. ' V a r y a 1: calicala cie paicho &la. T h e t e x t s have been published many times, e . g . , under the title Bauddhogan o doha, ed. Haraprasad Sastri (Calcutta: Bangiya sahitya parisad, 1326 B s [ I 9 2 0
L F

1).

potential. Only when there is change can there be measurement, for measurement is particular experience. It is this condition, of everything in potentia, toward which Eliot, and the Gitii, seem to point. Ways in which it is possible to describe the simultaneous manifestation in time and space of what seem to be opposites are limited. Metaphor is one. Painters try another: Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and the anonymous folk painter of Orissa, who shows a deer with one head peacefully cropping grass and another head looking back over its shoulder in alarm, a r e representing time in stasis. And that combination of art and psychology called myth, while similar to any literature taking time in an attempt to induce timeless understanding, sees in us such personalities as Narcissus, and in him a classical statement of paradox. For Narcissus is "pursued while h e pursues, and at the same time inflames and burns"; he says, "I burn with the love of myself, and both raise the flames and endure them."14 T h e myth is, as its translator so charmingly puts it, a paradigm of "the little reality that exists in so many of those pleasures which mankind so eagerly p u r s u e . " ' T h e unity is obvious; the duality is nearly palpable but incomplete: the two parts are not each wholes, and we are left with what Sudhir Kakar calls "the voracious hunger of the urge to merge."I6 T o this we shall return. Robert Louis Stevenson's intuition was of a slightly different sort, although its realization is equally incomplete. It was in one sense like that of the Bauhaus, where form follows function: Dr. Jekyll was "a large, wellmade, smooth-faced man . . . with every mark of capacity and kindness,"I7 while Mr. Hyde was "a d w a r f . . . abnormal and misbegotten . . . revolting."I8 "Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter, and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly upon the face of the other."lg What the two shared were "some of the phenomena of consciousness," and Hyde was "co-heir with Jekyll to deathU:*O death was their identity, and in life in one could not rid himself of the other. Although the paradox of two in the space/time of one is suggested, it is not fully developed, and space/time distinctions remain: where Hyde is present, Jekyll, in manifestation, is not. Jekyll "contains" Hyde, but not the other way round. T h e relation
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Henry T . Riley (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1899), 3:425,260. Ibid. '"udhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1989), p. 6 . l 7 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.), pp. 21-22. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 94.
l4

"'

T h e Journal of Religion
between the two is what structural linguists used to call "complementary distribution": the units of analysis do not appear together, and in some situations, therefore, they function for one another. Another suggestion is made by psychoanalysis. Wolf, in his imaginative fashion (although perhaps here following Bryce DeWitt), suggests an interpretation of schizophrenia in terms of parallel universe^.^' Psychoanalytically inclined friends, however, while considering as interesting the question of various entities occupying the same time and space, suggest that what Wolf is talking about is not schizophrenia but the rarer and considerably more weird problem called "multiple personality." That condition is described this way in one of the standard textbooks in the field, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o Mental disorder^:^^ "Each personf ality is a fully integrated and complete unit with unique memories, behavior patterns, and social relationships that determine the nature of the individual's acts when that personality is dominant." The observation about the function of unique and independent memory that, it is suggested, can be one of the definitions of personality, will be crucial to an understanding of the Vaisnava view of divine manifestation (avatara) and of maya, as we shall see shortly. But the manual goes on: "Usually the original personality has no knowledge or awareness of the existence of any of the other personalities (subpersonalities). When there are two or more subpersonalities in one individual, each is aware of the other in varying degree^."^" have been told, for example, of a patient whose personality as "enforcer" presents itself whenever any of the numerous other personalities is threatened.24The manual continues: "But at any given moment one personality will interact verbally with the external environment. . . . The individual personalities are nearly always quite discrepant and frequently seem to be opposites. . . . One or more of the subpersonalities may fact, report being of the opposite ~ e x . " ~ V n I am told by a psychoanalyst friend, there are times when one of her patients looks in a mirror and sees a reflection of the opposite sex.26
Wolf (n. 9 above), pp. 255, 291. See also Dimock (n. 3 above), p. 171, which quotes Bryce DeWitt, "Quantum Mechanics and Reality," in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ed. Bryce DeWitt and Neil Graham (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, ed. Robert L. Spitzer et al., 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), p. 257. 23 Ibid. 24 Personal communication from Dr. Kathleen Young of the Madison Center in South Bend, Indiana, June 1990. 'r L Spitzer et al., eds., p. 257. ' ' W n e of the most wrenching possible problems to arise from this condition was reported in the Chicago Tribune (June 17, 1990), sec. I , p. 3: one of a woman's selves reported to the police that she had been raped, while another denied it, saying that the sexual intercourse had been voluntary.

"

All of this is, while strange, comprehensible, for it would seem that the phenomenon of multiple personality, like some other psychopathological states, can be viewed as a dangerous exaggeration of that which is latent in all of us, as our good translator of Ovid says it i s z 7 We all carry different personalities into different environments, but we do not all develop complete sets of psychological paraphernalia for all of them. Nevertheless, we can comprehend the phenomenon to the extent that there is a basis for comprehension in common experience. Hinduism generally, of which the Orissan painter may be considered an example, has a graphic answer to part of this problem of epistemology: a divinity has eight arms, let us say, because divinity is both within and without ordinary experience. Arms, in other words, are familiar to us, but usually when they are grouped in lesser numbers. Or, it can be said, a deity is androgynous and is therefore on some level understood by at least half of h ~ m a n k i n dBut~however it is stated, our understanding of the problem .~ is classical and in accordance with Heisenberg's observation, which might here be rephrased: God has form (rupa), the abheda, comprehensible, nonseparate aspect of deity, and at the same time "true form" (svarupa"his own form"), which is bheda, particular to himself, separate, and therefore not fully understood. Measurement, and thus understanding, like complementary distribution or like the uncertainty principle, assumes units of analysis; where one personality is, another is not, although there is obviously a relationship between the two. At least a certain number of distinctive features of one or another of the personalities must be manifest in order for the observer to be able to determine who it is that is present. Sometimes this measurement may be aided by a mirror. In any case, God's form, his rupa, is real but does not fully describe God. All of which brings us once again to where the road first forked. God is of course not limited in his essence, it is our understanding that is limited. Krsna, says Vaisnava theology, inhabits all worlds at once as both subject and object: "The nectar of the rasa of various bhaktas is of various [corresponding] kinds, and [Krsna] is both the subject [vi:aya] and object [airaya] of the nectar of all these r a s a ~ . Our problem is finding a way "~~ to understand divine nature by means of a nondivine, finite mind, or, as
27 One of the wisest pieces of advice I have ever received was from a psychiatrist at the now and appropriately defunct Chicago State Psychiatric Hospital. When my wife and I, in 1953, were preparing to go to work on the back wards of that unhappy place, that doctor told us that we would do well to consider that the behavior we saw would be no more than an exaggeration of impulses and conflicts that we ourselves felt. 28 T O my knowledge, the best exposition of androgynes is by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). esp. sec. 5. 2y CC (n. 4 above), 2.8.1 1 1 .

T h e Journal of Religion
Paul Tillich put it, to "become actual under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them."" Krsna's problem, as it were, is to limit himself so that his nature can, at least in part, be understood. This iakti, this power of limitation, is maya, and by it he encases the timeless in time. It is a submission to measurement both voluntary (i.e., grace) and natural (i.e., maya-iakti, like his other iaktis, is intrinsic to him). And this is where the Vaisnava definition of maya leads: "In regard to me [i.e., with me as the subject-mo-visaye]: I shall be in the bhava3' of the lover of the gopis, and my power of maya will inspire their minds. But I will not know that it is y ~ g a - m a y a nor will the gopis know. T h e forms and qualities of ,~~ each of us will eternally steal the minds of the others. Abandoning dharma, each will unite with the other in a passion of love. We shall always i be in union, but never in union; this is the miracle of d i ~ i n i t y . " ~ T his s indeed a miracle of divinity: not only are "the gopis" (here and in many places it is possible to read "Radha," the prototypical gopi) aspects of Krsna, but because of his power of maya they d o not realize that they are aspects of him. Even more interesting, Krsna himself, although he is all knowing, does not know that they are aspects of him. If he did, there could be none of the unselfish giving that a true love affair requires. Radha and Krsna are the same and not the same, and Krsna is at the same time fully each: if maya is to be more than the mental construct proposed by the Vedanta, there must be separation in space (i.e., there must be different forms) and in time (i.e., each of the forms must have a separate memory and thus a separate personality). This might be suggested: if the worlds in which Radha and Krsna existed were parallel, each of the two parts would be, sometimes at least, "unobservable" o r independent. Jorges Luis Borges had such an insight into the human condition and expressed it in a moving way: "This web of time-the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, o r ignore each other through the centuries-embraces every possibility. We d o not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I d o and you d o not, and yet in others both of us exist."" In those worlds in which one exists without the other, each can (or must) ignore identity and thus establish the dynamic necessaiy for reahation. In those worlds in which they are together they react to one another as individuals-they fall in love, getjealous, irritated,
1963). 3:270. T h e term "bhaua" usually does not, in Vaisnava thought, have precisely the same meaning that it has in aesthetics. Here it means something like "transformed state," rather than referring t o the raw material of aesthetic experience, "feeling." :12 T h e power of "joining" (yoga) human and divine? "" CC 1.4.26-28. :'4 Jorges Luis Borges, "Garden of the Forking Paths," in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 100; quoted by Wolf (n. 9 above), p. 42.
"'

"' Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

angry, they yearn for one another, and so on; and when they are separated from one another they feel the disorientation that we all, at one time or another, even on what Kakar calls "our post-Freudian screen," Disorientation, or alienation, to make yet another loop, has its basis in commonality, and is not different from the pity and empathy from which we started. The matter is more comprehensible to me if I try to consider it in analogies based on nonclassical interpretations of phenomena; some of these are described in the various places mentioned in the "Lila" paper cited above. One thing that comes to mind is the unpredictability of the electron as demonstrated in the "double slit experiment": because it cannot be said with certainty which of the slits the electron will pass through, its condition is described as "superposition," to which concept we have at long last returned.36And since the electron is quite capable of passing through either or both of the slits, a conclusion that can be reached is that its nature is either particle or wave/cloud, or both. An interpretation, in Wolf's words, is this:
T h e wave of possibilities was composed of a number of particles-with each particle somehow existing in a separate world. . . . In the double-slit experiment, only two worlds were necessary. In one world, the particle passed through one slit. In the other world, the particle passed through the other. The two worlds would exist side by side, completely separate from each other until the particle reached the screen. Then the two worlds would overlap or merge. . . . T h e wave is composed of particles in parallel worlds. When the particle strikes the slits the world, indeed the whole universe containing it, splits into two (and in general a multiplicity of) mutually unobservable but equally real worlds.37

If Riidha and Kr-na existed in parallel worlds, it would allow for the independent action or the "mutual unobservability" of each. At the same time, both would be dependent on the reality of Krsna as the wave or cloud that fills all time and all space, as he invests all of his manifestations. The interaction of Radha with Krsna, or the devotee with God, and the experience that comes from it, is a form of measurement, a placement of God in space/time. And as the measurement of a particle provides a partial understanding of the nature of the wave, so experience provides a hint of God's nature.
s5 Kakar (n. 16 above), p. 6. The Gnostics would say that this is because of the separation of that part of us that is light from the Light, the pure source of our being. Tillich calls it separation from the 'divine Center";see vol. 2 of Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 47. 36 Sudhir Kakar (p. 84) describes Heinz Kohut's concept of "selfobject" in this striking way: "A seemingly odd apparition, a selfobject neither coincides with the contours of the self nor is unreservedly the other but leads a nomadic existence between the two." 37 Wolf, pp. 38-39.

The Journal of Religion

Radha and Krsna, then, are separate manifestations of the same reality, paradoxically occupying different spaces sitnultaneously. It might be argued that the relationship of Narcissus to Narcissus is of the same kind, but, it might also be rejoined, it is in fact not the same because reflection assumes light, and light implies time. It might be argued that the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde is of the same kind. But death is where their identity lies, and dying too implies time. R5dha and Kt-sna "interact" directly with one another within the same space/time, together constituting a divinity that is sinlultaneously fully each and fully both. T h e Vaisnavas, therefore, carried their descriptive imagery a step further, and they did this in two ways. T h e first was to explain the nature of the divine manifestation Caitanya as androgynous: he was fully Radha and at the same time fully Kt-sna, which also meant fully human and fully divine, God and the worshiper of God, complete and separate personalities with complete and separate memories, erriotions, experiences, mentalities, and all the rest, in a single human form; it is an observation that would have pleased the early Gnostic Christians. T h e second was in their understanding of Kt--na's dhaman, his environment. Caitanya "was Krsna, he was agopi [i.e., a devotee of KI--na]-this is the highest paradox; most impenetrable are the unimaginable actions [of Caitanya]. Let no one argue this, o r entertain doubts; this is the way of the acintya-iakti of the Lord."" T h e Vaisnavas see that to our normal o r classical understanding this theological truth is paradox, so they try to explain: "The body takes different forms, and has different reflections, and the name of this difference, in sentiment, emotion, and shape, is tadekatmarupa. "" This also describes the condition of Jekyll and Hyde, although in that case one-half of the duality is covert at a given time; Jekyll shares with Krsna the power to be himself and someone else The Vaisnava reading is complex, for it says that not only are both aspects of reality present at any time, but they are both manifest at any and all times. Male and female are there as Radha and Krsna, and the love between the two also implies separateness. O n some level of analysis the love is narcissistic, and the situation is that of a feedback loop. T h e appropriate image is not that of the mirror but of two mirrors opposed to each other. What is between them is reflected t o infinity:
When thegopis saw Krsna there was bliss, ten millionfold, even though they had no desire for bliss. Whatever joy Krsna felt at the sight of the gopis, the gopas
' V C I . 17.295-96. " V C 2.20.152.

4 0 L T h i ~ , was myself," says Jekyll when h e first looks in the mirror and sees Hyde. T h e too, notes that Hyde sends are also in Jekyll's handwriting; Doniger pays appropriate attention to the nature of hands and handwriting as keys to these problems in her discussion o f doubles.

On Maya
tasted it ten million times more. 'They were not seeking their own happiness, but even so their happiness increased. This is a paradox. . . . T h e gladness of Krsna grows at the sight of thegopzs, and so his sweetness grows, and there is no limit to it. And again, as the charm and beauty of Krsna increase when he sees the charm and beauty of the gopis, so the charm and beauty of thegopzs increase when they see the charm and beauty of Kysna. In this way they vie with each other and mutually augment one another, and neither becomes greater than the other.41

It is what might be called a self-consistent equation. And t o add to the complexity of the image, the charm of the stimulus to love, the form of the other, is described as "ever-new." T h e light that permits the reflection takes time. As Heisenberg observed, one can measure one reflection o r the other, not both at once: "The purity of the true prema of Radha is like a mirror; its brilliance and clarity grow greater moment by moment. Though there is no room in which my sweetness can grow, still it appears in ever-new forms before that mirror. . . . When I see my sweetness reflected in the mirror, I have a desire to taste it. But I cannot taste it. And when I muse on a possible means of tasting it, my mind runs to thoughts of identity with Radha."42 Krsna, then, is literally beside himself in love, although not, as Narcissus was, in space/time. H e represents a condition to which Narcissus aspired but never attained, a condition that Jekyll/Hyde accomplished, perhaps, only in death. Caitanya's perceptive disciple, Ramananda Ray saw this duality in unity and addressed Caitanya: "You have embraced the beauty and emotional condition (bhaua) of Radha; you have descended in order to taste your ra~a."~"he two personalities had taken one form, that of Caitanya, and it is no wonder that when Caitanya the devotee felt the pain of his separation from his God he was literally torn apart by the tension: "His body was unconscious and there was no breath in his nostrils. His arms and legs were each three hands long; the joints of his bones were separated, and over the joints there was only skin."44T o put it another way:
CC 1.4.157-64. CC 1.4.122-27. 43 CC 2.8.230. Ramananda addresses that aspect of Caitanya that appears to him as Krsna, even though on some level, as the rest of this passage shows, he perceives Caitanya's dual nature. The bhava/rasa terminology that he uses, complicating the matter still further, here does refer to aesthetic theory: experience or feeling (bhava, characteristic of Radha) is separable from but connected to rasa, which is pure abstract appreciation and understanding, Krsna's trait. 4' CC 3.14.59-60. This unusual, even terrifying, condition has been interpreted in a great variety of ways. It seems to me that what is being described is an epileptic seizure, the violence of the spasms making it seem that there is nothing but skin holding the body together. 'The fact that there is a well-known connection between epilepsy and intense religious experience does nothing to lessen the distress of some orthodox Vaisnavas at this interpretation; to them, of course, all such manifestations are indications of Caitanya's divine nature. But at many places in the CC, Caitanya is described as "afflicted with the mygi-roga," the "deer-disease,'' which probably meant then, as it does now, epilepsy. See the introduction, sec. 2, to the Caitanya-caritamyta of Krsnadasa
41

42

T h e Journal of Religion
unless one accepts the existence of tachyons, zero-time particles, space without time cannot exist. As we have seen, in theory Radha and Krsna occupy, in some scenes at least, the same time and different space; in others, as Borges describes it, they occupy different times and different space. T h e person of Caitanya becomes the final statement of the paradox: himself fully God (svayam bhagauan), he is both aspects of God in the same time and space. He is the worshiper and the worshiped; he is the experiencer of the greatest of all experiences (mahabhaua) and at the same time he is the abstract condition of experience itself (rasaraja). T h e CC 2.8.229 says: "Then, smiling, Prabhu [i.e., Caitanya] showed to Ramananda Ray his true form-rasaraja [i.e., Krsna] and mahabhava [i.e., Radha], and when he saw this Ramananda was faint withjoy." When, it seems, the worlds were perceived as separate, there was a disorientation, a literal splitting of the conjoint reality. In that space/time in which Caitanya was perceived by himself o r by others to be Radha alone, that is, "when the sorrow of separation became unbearable, it showed itself, and literal disintethen the derangement of Prabhu cannot be d e ~ c r i b e d , " ~ ' gration was one result. In the most usual interpretation of quantum theory, when a measurement is made, it is said that the wave of quantum reality has collapsed into a single conlprehensible form that can be located in space/time. It can be considered an intersection of time and the timeless, of the human and divine. Being measurable, it is also comprehensible and definable. But what is being measured is not the whole of reality, and the fullness of reality cannot be understood from the measurement. Krstja is a "singularity," "where values being exanlined become infinite." Krsna is, as it were, a point in space/time of which the radius is zero, its curvature and therefore its time, infinite.46 T h e parallel world idea, which Borges puts so poignantly and poetically, the Vaisnavas choose, as ever, to phrase theologically. In some worlds Krsna exists alone, absolute, omnipotent, in fact indifferent to (bheda) and thus of no immediate significance for o r concern with humankind. "Even if they saw his divine splendor, pure ones would not know it as splendor; thus bhava alone is greater than this splendor."47 In other worlds he is
Kaviraja; translation, introduction, and commentary by F.dward C. Dimock, Jr.; edited with revisions and addenda by Tony K. Stewart, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 51 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, in press), and esp. app. 2 to that introduction, "On the Relationship o f Divine Madness to Epilepsy," by Dr. Mitchell Weiss, who is both psychiatrist and Indologist. T h e measurement called the "hand" was that between the elbow and the tip o f the middle finger: a cubit. "' CC 3 . 6 . 4 . 4'i Wolf, pp. 153, 183-86. CC 3.7.27.

"

On Maya
together with Radha, and in some of these he makes himself known to humankind through love, that is, he limits himself and thus makes possible the condition that is called maya. Another kind of theological refinement says that in those worlds where time is invested with timelessness, Kr-na's whole dhaman, his environment, is in the same relation to Kr-na as Radha is: the cows and creepers and people and rivers of the Vrndavana of Krsna's myth are both Krsna and not KT-na. When the devotee participates in that environment, therefore-and such participation is the very object of devotional worship-one is with Krsna but not precisely in unity with Kr-na; the desire for that identity that is unity, and the possibility of it, are posited only by the mistaken, o r at least incomplete, Vedanta." In Vrndavana, despite the individual existence of gopis and cows and trees and the rest, Krsna's dhaman is superspace in which anything and everything are possible and may be manifest at any o r at all times. I suggested above that a bri&e across time o r space may be memory: one "remembers" someone o r something from whorl1 o r from which one is separated by either. T o use the metaphor of space, in which tiriie is implicit: the phenomenon described as a "quantum jump" is one in which there is movement "from one place to another, without going in between" and "where no one can predict with any certainty just where an object is going to be after appearing orn new here."^" There is a problerii here for us. If two states are indeed discontinuous, there is no history to connect them. Thus, there can be no recognition by either Riidha o r Kr-na of any former o r different state. If the states are discontinuous, manifest attributes of Kr-na such as Riidha, o r his dhaman, o r Caitanya do not exist. Yet texts of revelation, as well as our senses and the demands of our insecurity, say that they do. T h e usual interpretation of quantum theory, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, suggests that the solution may lie in the presence and the nature of the observer: "?'he observer [of the n~easuren~ent] soriie is gigantic memory unity that somehow lies outside the laws of quantum physic^."^" A better possibility at this point in the discussion, however,
4H CC 31.3.16 has "Bhaktas d o not look for sayujya, in which is unity with Brahma." This text, somewhat unusual in its lack of patience with alternative theologies, describes the Vedantins as mayauadin, by which, turning the Vedantin interpretation in o n itself, seems to imply both that they "follow the path of illusion" and that they delude others. O n the issue of dhaman, see the extensive discussion in Tony K. Stewart, "Biographical Images of Kr~na-Caitanya: Study in the A Perception ofDivinityM (doctoral diss., University of Chicago, 1985), pp. 197-2 10, esp. 205 ff. "Wolf., p. 32. Ibid., p. 59. Wendy Doniger calls my attention to C. G. Jung's ideas o n what he calls "synchronicity," which seem to spring from the same soil as d o those in the philosophy of science that this article uses (and the same soil, incidentally, that has stimulated the growth ofcontemporary sociologies of literature and history). These ideas can be found, among other places, in vol. 2

The Journal of Religion

might be the "many worlds" interpretation of Hugh Everett 111, which I have been touching on and which is at the root of Borges's previously ~ quoted i n ~ i g h t . T 'o restate Everett's idea somewhat: memory "exists in each parallel world as the sequence up to the moment." Quantum jumps, therefore, do not have to exist, for change in time o r space (i.e., in velocity o r position) is "a continual transformation, the growth . . . of branches of possibilities from a ventral trunk of initial conditions to a universe of all possible universes."" Everything is not only potential, everything is in fact manifested: "And in this way," says CC 2.20.187, "everything is manifested in the Brahma-worlds [i.e., created universes]." Each possibility is manifested at a given time in one o r another of an infinite number of separate universes. What we consider to be reality is agreement in the observation of any one of these; it is, then, a composite of parallel o r superimposed worlds. T h e Everett interpretation does not demand a theory of collapse in order that a measurement be made." Rather, in that interpretation, a particle exists all the time as a particle through memory (Mr. Hyde exists, regardless of the manifest presence o r absence of Dr. Jekyll), its unpredictable manifestation being dependent on the question of which world is being measured. Particles have different positions and velocities in simultaneously existing parallel worlds.54 And to come around in another loop: when the composite that we call reality is pulled apart, then the separateness of the parallel worlds becomes manifest, and then, as we have seen, Caitanya the devotee lies on the ground, literally disintegrated, his body blown apart. If the context were Christian, 3'illich might have called it a graphic example of man's separation from his divine center. A psychopathologist may see a nontheological explanation for the same phenomenon. Finally, then: the world is a superposition of possibilities while our experience of it is as a sequence of actualities. Or, if any given thing is happening at some place at some time, there is no such thing as history: "All the observable properties of real matter needed to explain the creation of the universe can exist only through the superposing of these separate possibilo f Jung's Collected Works, Psychology and Religion, West and East, Bollingen Series 2 0 (New York: Pantheon, 1958). O n p. 592, discussing the I Ching, Jung writes: " l ' h e assumption [i.e., that the hexagram was the exponent o f the moment in which it was cast] involves a certain curious principle which I have termed 'synchronicity,' a concept that formulates a point o f view diametrically opposed t o that o f causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort o f working hypothesis o f how events evolve in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence o f objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states o f the observer o r observers." Dimock (n. 3 above), pp. 170-73. 52 Wolf, p. 60; cf. Dimock, p. 170. 5"bid. 54 Ibid.

"

On Maya
ities. Each possibility niust occupy the same space simultaneously in order that these patterns of probability can be superiniposed together. . . . Such spaces are parallel universe^."^^ Or, as CC 2.20.315 has it, "the universes are infinite, and there is no counting of them, and each lila is manifested in each universe." The text itself suggests that the link across them may be memory, the only bridge across space/time. Caitanya the devotee rernembers other, more integrated states: "Ramananda's stories of K r ~ n aand , songs by Svarupa [one of Caitanya's intimate companions]-these saved the life of Prabhu, in the anguish of his pain of separation." It is when this link of meniory is broken that there are worlds in which Radha exists without Kr-na, the worshiper without God: "That condition in which thegopis were when Krsna went to Mathura [and deliberately separated himself from them] was the same condition born in Prabhu in his separation from Kr-na. Prabhu always experienced the bhava of Radha, and in that bhaua knew himself as Radha. Such is the way of divine madness."56Tinie seems to be a limited human way of ordering states of being, and if simultaneity, or the identity of that which we call past, present, and future, is in fact reality,57separation in space/time is unreality. Or, separation from one's self, or from God, without even memory, is madness.
55

Wolf, p. 174.

56CC3.14.13-14.
57 Wolf, pp. 205, 215.