Radha the Intriguing Mystery : 1. Swami Krishnananda

25/08/2018
Radha the Intriguing Mystery : 1.  Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Radha Ashtami on September 14, 1983)

Last month there was the celebration of the coming of Bhagavan Sri Krishna, and today the country observes the coming of that mysterious counterpart in the life of Bhagavan Sri Krishna who devotees everywhere adore as Radha – a principle whose association with Bhagavan Sri Krishna is as important and unique as the message that is delivered to mankind by the life of the Lord himself. There is some intrinsic peculiarity between creation and the Creator of this creation. The impossibility to intelligently comprehend the dramatic relationship between God and His manifestation has been highlighted in many ways by philosophers and devotees, and till this day nobody has ever been successful in knowing how the world came about. This secret is always hidden from the eye of man by an operation which keeps man severed from God because if this mystery is to be known, there would be no world for anyone to experience.

A sort of illusory relationship is essential even to enjoy the enactment in a dramatic theatre. It is not logically possible for a person to explain the relationship between the act and the actor. We may think that we know it very well, but it is not easy to understand it. The person who acts in a theatre is one person, and the part that he plays is another thing altogether. There is practically no known relationship between these two elements. The one who acts is certainly different from the role the actor puts on because the actor behaves in a manner totally different from the manner in which he would normally behave in the world. Hence, in that sense we may say the acting is totally different from the actor but, at the same time, we know they are identical. We cannot keep the acting somewhere in a corner and the actor in some other place, two kilometres away.

Such is the relationship between God and this world. We cannot know whether it is one, or it is not one. Many a time people, even sincere devotees, are likely to have a subtle unconscious feeling that the relationship between Krishna and Radha is something like the relationship between Narayana and Lakshmi or between Siva and Parvati. That is not the relation. Here itself we have the mystery. The Puranas, the epics and the glorified expositions of the creative process highlight the relationship between Siva and Parvati as the power and the wielder of the power, Shakti and Shakta, and a similar relationship may also be attributed to Lakshmi-Narayana. We understand them as inseparables in an obviously known manner. Such a relationship cannot be introduced here between Krishna and Radha. The world can easily comprehend, from the point of view of the accepted mode of understanding things, the relation between Narayana and Lakshmi. It is an intelligible, acceptable and glorious relation. Here we have something altogether different. Radha was not the spouse of Sri Krishna, nor can we consider Radha as a Shakti in the sense we consider Parvati or Shakti as a power of Siva.

To be continued ..