পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/৫৪

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46 INTIRODUCTION. great emotion and fell into a trance. The lamentation of Rādhā at the sight of a cloud or a Tamāla tree may appear too visionary. But with the Vaisnavas in this country, it is far from being such. Chaitanya, during his tour in southern India, seeing a Tamāla tree at a village named Chandipur embraced it in ecstasy, and lay in a trance for a long time. The ripple of the sea, the chirp of a bird, the dark-blue waves of a river all made him delirious with joy and heightened in him a desire for communion with his God whom he saw symbolised in every object of sense. That this melo-drama is only a tale of the life of the Great Master is indicated in the Gaura Chandrikā, the preliminary verses in praise of Gaura Chandra (Chaitanya). It is an index of the contents of the book. When we lose ourselves in the enjoyment of communion with the Deity and become one with Him, we have an experience of the nondualistic aspect in religion. In the dualistic aspect we yearn for Him and bewail our separation from Him. Both these dualistic and non-dualistic aspects are co-mingled in Chaitanya. The Vaislavas say that it is god's cry for communion with himself—to taste the joys that are within him, that takes the form of Chaianya Deva. On p. 65, we have it again that Krisna himself, whose colour is dark, promises to assume the fair-colour of Rādhā. This is merely an expression of the general belief of the Vaisnavas that Krisna was incarnated in Chaitanya for the sole object of realizing the joys of Rādhā’s ecstasies, and in fulfilment of a promise to her he adopted her colour. The religious aspect of the poem is again emphasised on p. 66, where the author appears on the scene himself and interprets the Rādhā-Krisna love. Krisna is always present in the devotee's soul. When the latter vividly realises His presence, he thinks that He is in the Vrindå groves with him, but when the vision fades away he thinks that He has gone to Mathurā. The book is full of passages from the authoritative works on Vaisnavism, assimilated into the happy poetic language of our author. Those who are versed in the Chaitanya-lore will, when reading this drama, forget all about princess Rādhā, and follow the tale as one of Chaitanya's fine frenzies. The lines on p. 56, in praise of love for Krisna as typified in Rādhā, is a repetition of what Chaitanya Deva said to Rây Rāmānanda.* The dark-blue colour is the craze of the Vaisnavas and there seems to be a historical reason for this attachment for the The dark-blue. dark-blue. The images of Väsudeva (Krisna) in Bengal were generally made in black stone with a bluish tint. The supply of this stone came from the Raj Mahendri hills in North Bengal and Nilgiri hills of Orissa. In other parts of India statues were generally

  • see Chaitanya-Charitāmrita, Madhya Khanda.