Playing Straight into God’s Hands
By Advait Praturi, originally published by Christian Scholar’s Review.
As reflected in Hindu monotheisms, lila can first be described in cosmological terms with reference to divine activity and delight. Properly understood, god does not create the world out of “acquisitive desire” but rather in a spirit of “freedom, spontaneity and playfulness”; as twelfth-century philosopher Ramanuja argues, “the great monarch, who has no unsatisfied desire, sports enthusiastically for his own amusement.” Indeed, playfulness is viewed as a critical attribute of the creator god. In early Vaishnavite thought, for instance, the Bhagavata Purana suggests that the “central focus of god’s activity [in creation] is in Krishna’s … Lila.” In Kashmiri Shaivism, the idea of play is constructed around the self-manifesting and self-concealing activities of the Hindu god, Shiva. Lila is here “operative at three levels: cosmological, aesthetic and mystical.” Shiva’s playful, spontaneous freedom is integral to the creation and destruction of the cosmos, even as the faithful worshipper, through their own worshipful play, “becomes an active participant in Shiva’s delight” and a recipient of Shiva’s “liberating grace.” Another example emerges in the Bengali Shakti tradition. Nineteenth-century Bengali poet Ramprasad’s articulation of the goddess Shakti’s lila stresses this idea:
All this [creation] is the mad Mother’s play,
The Three worlds are deluded by her maya [illusion].
In Ramprasad’s poetry, the goddess Shakti is paradoxically presented both as a kind, benevolent goddess and as an uncontrollable, chaotic force. The worshipper should not expect to control Shakti’s lila; for Ramprasad, “life itself is a participation in the goddess’s Lila.” In these various Hindu traditions, the creation, preservation and destruction of the world are presented as the “spontaneous, free and playful” lila of the gods; worshippers are freely invited to receive, respond to, and participate in this lila, and in doing so, experience freedom from spiritual bondage. In short, the lila of the gods can be understood in terms of delight and creativity and as a source of salvation.
This emancipatory understanding of lila is significant and offers an invitation to reflect on the role of divine presence in lila, especially with regard to salvation. If one’s ultimate problem was spiritual bondage, a robust theology of lila in a Hindu context perhaps serves as a “philosophical and religious alternative to renunciation.” For those such as Adi Sankara, an influential Indian philosopher and theologian who was a proponent of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, renunciation from worldly and material desire was the ultimate means by which one could gain “transcendence of consciousness.” To suggest that god is “present” in play would constitute, for Sankara, a problem that threatens to confuse the relationship between god and humans. For Sankara, one is to leave behind this world of illusion through a practice of renunciation and realize their oneness (non-duality) with the divine. Robert Goodwin, a scholar of Sanskrit literature, notes that this “genteel ascetism” of Sankara made it “prominent” amongst the elite—namely, “educated Brahmins.”
Ramanuja, however, countered this ascetic tendency and the rejection of materialism in Sankara’s teachings. Through lila, Ramanuja believed, the “liberated soul” could encounter god’s divine presence in the maya world (illusory world) as if it were a “playground,” in which the liberated soul would be free to “create worlds out of its own power and imagination.” For Ramanuja, passages like those found in the Chandogya Upanishad regarding delightful sensuality undermined Sankara’s non-sensory immateriality:
In the same way, the joyful-self arises from the body and, attaining the light of the Cosmic Self, appears in his own form. This is the Paramātman, the Cosmic Self. He then freely moves about eating, playing, or enjoying himself with women, carriages, or relatives, not remembering at all the body in which he was born…
What is notable in this passage and in Ramanuja’s lila philosophy is a “reluctance to turn one’s back completely on the world of experience.” For Sankara, lila largely served “not as a metaphysical category but a metaphor” to defend the “freedom of a dispassionate Absolute from any motive of action.” But for Ramanuja (and other Hindu schools of thought like Kashmiri Shaivism), one’s lila—delightful, playful and spontaneous worship of deity—could ultimately serve as devotion to god. In challenging the high-caste tendency to overemphasize renunciation, philosophers such as Ramanuja offered a “qualified non-dualism” in which an individual could encounter the divine in a state of worshipful playfulness within the physical world. Ultimately, Ramanuja’s philosophies would provide the foundations for the “bhakti [devotion] tradition in India.” Indeed, the Indian Christian theologian A. J. Appasammy would be so moved by “the intense longing for communion with a personal God expressed in bhakti devotional poetry,” he would base his own Christo-centric bhakti theology on the “theological framework of Ramanuja.”
This article was originally published at Christian Scholar’s Review and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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