The Ramananda Samvada

When Chaitanya Mahaprabhu set out from Jagannatha Puri on His long tour of South India in 1510, Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya, newly and completely His, gave Him one specific piece of advice. Somewhere on the Godavari, in the town of Vidyanagara, there was a man He must meet. Sarvabhauma had said honestly that he himself did not know the topics of Lord Krishna — those, he said, were known to Ramananda Raya. The Lord took the advice seriously enough to say afterwards that He had come to that stretch of river for no other purpose. The conversation that followed, spread over ten evenings on the bank of the Godavari, is the single most important theological dialogue in Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Krishnadasa Kaviraja states that his account of it is taken from the notebook of Svarupa Damodara Goswami, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's confidential secretary in later years — which is to say that the tradition preserved it as a record rather than as a memory.

Ramananda Raya was a most unlikely partner for it. He was a government officer: governor of the southern province of the Gajapati kingdom of Maharaja Prataparudra, based at Vidyanagara on the Godavari, in the district the Chaitanya-charitamrita calls Madras. He was the eldest son of the devotee Bhavananda Raya. He was a poet and dramatist of real accomplishment, the author of the Sanskrit play Jagannatha-vallabha-nataka, deeply read in the literature of rasa, and a musician. He was also, by birth, not a brahmana — a member of the karana or scribal community, which orthodox opinion of the day classed as sudra. He travelled by palanquin with a retinue of Vedic brahmanas. When he came down to the river to bathe and offer oblations to his forefathers, and saw an extraordinary sannyasi sitting a little way from the bathing place, brilliant as a hundred suns, he came over and fell flat on the ground.

Mahaprabhu asked whether he was Ramananda Raya. Ramananda answered that he was His most fallen servant and that he belonged to the sudra community. The Lord embraced him, and both of them lost their composure entirely — trembling, weeping, the word "Krishna" coming out of them in broken syllables — until Mahaprabhu, noticing the scandalised faces of the ritualistic brahmanas standing around, checked Himself. The brahmanas were thinking exactly what one would expect them to think: that a sannyasi with the lustre of Brahman was weeping in the arms of a fourth-caste man, and that the grave and learned governor was behaving like a lunatic. It is worth noticing that the whole conversation which follows takes place in the shadow of that scandal, and that the Lord addressed it directly before it was over.

They arranged to meet in the evening, privately. When Ramananda came, with a single servant, Mahaprabhu gave him a question and a method: recite a verse from the revealed scriptures concerning the ultimate goal of life. Ramananda began where any responsible Vedic scholar would begin, with the verse from the Vishnu Purana stating that Lord Vishnu is worshipped by the proper execution of prescribed duties within the system of varna and asrama, and that there is no other way to satisfy Him. The Lord's answer was two words that would be repeated all evening: this is external. Say something further.

Ramananda went a step in. If mere performance of duty is external, then let all the results of one's work — whatever one does, eats, sacrifices, gives in charity, or performs as austerity — be offered to Krishna. That is the teaching of the Bhagavad-gita, and it converts ordinary duty into worship. External, said the Lord. Go on.

The third proposal was the renunciation of occupational duty altogether: one who has examined the duties enjoined in the scriptures, understood their merits and their defects, and abandoned them entirely in order to serve the Supreme Person is a first-class man. Ramananda supported it with Krishna's own final instruction in the Gita, to abandon all varieties of religion and simply surrender. This is the most radical position available within the standard hierarchy of paths, and the Lord rejected it too.

Next Ramananda offered devotional service mixed with knowledge — the state described in the Gita in which a man, transcendentally situated, realises the Supreme Brahman, becomes joyful, ceases to lament or hanker, sees all beings equally, and in that condition attains pure devotion to Krishna. Since the Absolute is here reached first as Brahman and only afterwards as the Lord, Mahaprabhu again set it aside as external.

Only with the fifth proposal did the Lord's reply change. Ramananda now offered pure devotional service untouched by speculation, quoting Lord Brahma's prayer that those who set aside the endeavour to know God by their own mental effort, who instead live by hearing about His name, form, qualities and pastimes from realised devotees, and who surrender with body, words and mind, conquer the unconquerable — and may do so remaining in whatever social position they happen to occupy. The Lord did not call this external. He said it was correct, and asked for more. Everything before this point had been rejected; everything after it would be an ascent rather than a correction.

What Ramananda added next was that devotion is not merely a duty but a taste — that as hunger makes food pleasurable, so love makes the acts of worship themselves a source of transcendental bliss — and that this cannot be purchased by piety accumulated over millions of lifetimes. The only price it has is intense greed for it, and if it can be found anywhere, one should buy it at once without delay. That verse is among the most quoted in the whole tradition. Hearing it, the Lord acknowledged spontaneous love as a genuine advance and asked to be taken further still.

From here the dialogue climbs through the relationships in which love of God becomes personal. Ramananda described dasya, service, in which the devotee knows himself as the Lord's eternal servant and asks for nothing beyond permanent employment in that service. Above it he placed sakhya, friendship — the cowherd boys of Vrindavana, who play with Krishna as an equal and whose fortune, the Bhagavatam says, is beyond the comprehension of those who know the Lord only as Brahman or only as master. Above that he placed vatsalya, parental love: what pious acts had Nanda Maharaja performed to receive Krishna as his son, and what had Yasoda done that the Absolute Truth should call her mother and take milk from her breast — a favour, the Bhagavatam observes, never obtained by Brahma, by Siva, or by the goddess of fortune herself. Each time the Lord said that this was very good and that something still surpassed it.

The summit of that ascent is madhurya, conjugal love, and Ramananda argued for it structurally rather than sentimentally. The five relationships are not five parallel options; they accumulate. As the material elements from ether to earth gain their qualities one upon another until earth possesses all five, so each successive relationship with Krishna retains the qualities of those below it and adds its own — neutrality, then service, then the confidence of friendship, then the protective intimacy of a parent, and finally, in conjugal love, the offering of oneself entirely. Because it contains all the others, its taste is the fullest; and because Krishna reciprocates with each devotee in proportion to the way that devotee approaches Him, He acknowledges Himself unable to repay the gopis of Vrindavana and remains eternally in their debt. Krishna's own beauty, Ramananda added, is the height of sweetness, and yet it increases when He stands among the gopis, as an emerald increases in beauty when set in gold.

This, said Mahaprabhu, is certainly the limit of perfection — and then asked him to speak further if there was anything more. Ramananda's answer at that point is one of the moments the tradition treasures: until that day, he said, he had not known anyone in this world who could inquire beyond that stage. And then he went beyond it. Among the gopis, the love of Srimati Radharani for Krishna is supreme. He argued it from the rasa dance itself: when Krishna treated all the gopis alike, Radharani in Her pride and pique left the circle, and Krishna, unable to relish the dance without Her, abandoned hundreds of thousands of gopis and went alone into the forest to search for Her, lamenting. If the Lord who is satisfied in Himself is not satisfied in that vast assembly and goes out after one person, the tradition reads that as the strongest possible statement of who She is.

At this point Mahaprabhu pressed for the underlying truth of Radha and Krishna and the nature of rasa itself, and Ramananda protested. He did not know these things, he said; he was a parrot repeating what the Lord Himself was making him speak, a stringed instrument with the Lord's hand on it, a puppet dancing on the Lord's strings. Mahaprabhu answered that he should stop flattering Him as a learned sannyasi, and then made the statement that settled the question the brahmanas by the river had raised that morning: whether a man is a brahmana, a sannyasi or a sudra makes no difference — whoever knows the science of Krishna is, by that fact, qualified to be a spiritual master. That single line has done more than any other in the tradition to detach spiritual authority from birth.

So Ramananda spoke on the underlying tattva. Krishna is the original Personality of Godhead, the source of all incarnations, eternally youthful in Vrindavana, attractive even to Cupid and even to Himself. His energies are three — spiritual, material and marginal — and of these the internal is supreme; the internal potency itself appears as eternal existence, knowledge and bliss, and the bliss-portion, the hladini, is the potency through which the Lord tastes His own pleasure and gives it to His devotees. The essence of that pleasure potency is prema, and the essence of prema, its most concentrated form, is mahabhava — and mahabhava is personified as Srimati Radharani. She is therefore not one gopi among many, but the source of love of Krishna, of whom Lalita, Visakha and the rest are expansions. Ramananda described Her ornaments as a catalogue of ecstasies, Her dress as shyness and affection, and concluded that even Krishna cannot reach the end of Her qualities.

Then he mentioned that there was one further topic, called prema-vilasa-vivarta, and warned that he did not know whether the Lord would be pleased to hear it. He began to sing a song of his own composition on the transformation of love in separation — the attachment that began in an exchange of glances and grew past all limit, in which neither is enjoyer nor enjoyed, and which in separation becomes something that cannot be explained at all. Mahaprabhu covered Ramananda's mouth with His own hand.

The last question was the practical one, and it produced the most consequential answer in the dialogue. The goal is one thing; by what process is it reached? Ramananda replied that the pastimes of Radha and Krishna cannot be entered through servitude, friendship or parental affection. Only the gopis have the right to them, and therefore only one who worships in the mood of the gopis, following in their footsteps, can enter. This is not sentiment but a rule with a stated consequence: the goddess of fortune herself, encumbered by her knowledge of Krishna's majesty, desired to join the pastimes of Vrindavana and could not, because awareness of opulence cripples intimacy. The Upanishads personified, the sruti, are cited as having attained the lotus feet of the son of Nanda Maharaja precisely by following the gopis. And the mood of the gopis is defined by what it excludes: it contains no trace of desire for one's own enjoyment, and Radharani's own happiness increases tenfold when the gopis are engaged with Krishna rather than herself.

By now Ramananda had understood who he was speaking to. Seeing the Lord sometimes as a sannyasi and sometimes as Syamasundara with a flute, he begged Him to stop concealing Himself: he could see that this was Krishna having accepted the mood and the golden complexion of Srimati Radharani, in order to taste His own sweetness from Her side. Mahaprabhu revealed that combined form to him, and Ramananda lost consciousness and fell. When he came round, the Lord embraced him, told him that no one else had ever seen it, and asked him to keep the whole matter secret, since people would only laugh at behaviour that looks like madness. And then, disarmingly: I am a madman, and you are also a madman, so we are on the same platform.

Ten nights passed in this way. On other evenings the exchange took a lighter, catechetical form — what is the highest education, the greatest wealth, the sharpest suffering — with Ramananda answering that of all distresses he knew none more unbearable than separation from a devotee of Krishna, and concluding that those who taste only dry philosophy are like crows chewing the bitter fruit of a nimba tree, while devotees are cuckoos eating the buds of the mango. Krishnadasa Kaviraja compares the whole conversation to a mine from which copper, bell metal, silver, gold and touchstone are dug out one after another, each better than the last. At parting the Lord gave Ramananda an instruction that reveals what He thought of him: give up your government post and come to Jagannatha Puri. Ramananda did, and for the rest of the Lord's life he was one of the very small circle, with Svarupa Damodara, admitted to His most confidential moods.

The Ramananda Samvada matters to Gaudiya Vaishnavism in three distinct ways. It is the tradition's own map of the spiritual path, arranged as a ladder with every rung named and every rung below the top explicitly refused, which is why later acharyas treat it as the standard against which any claimed goal of life is measured. It is the primary scriptural basis for the theology of Srimati Radharani as the hladini-sakti and for the practice of following the gopis. And it establishes, in the person of a non-brahmana provincial governor teaching the Supreme Lord in the guise of a sannyasi, that the qualification to speak about Krishna is knowledge of Krishna and nothing else — a principle the movement has acted upon ever since.