Mind–body continuum

Terms such as antashchintita deha (the inner-thought body), bhavajogya deha (the body that is worth cognizing, or worth emoting), sadhak deha (the practising body), siddha deha (the perfected spiritual body), sthul sharir (the gross, physical body), shukkho sharir (the interiorized subtle body), karan sharir (the body that stays awake when the physical body is asleep), smaran (memorizing or imagining a particular form of the body), manas (heart/mind), manas-sarovar (the heart/mind lake in which one drowns oneself), antahkaran (interiorized doing in the mind), mon (which can mean a number of things such as the heart; a kind of sense-organ or, more precisely, sensory energy, known as manas-indriya, which balances between our action upon the world and the world's impact upon us through the senses; the intellect that raises questions; and even processes of memory and ego) and proverbs like ‘sadhak dehe bhabibe jaha, siddha dehe paibe taha’ (‘What one thinks of with the practising, physical body is < tex − math/ > what one shall also attain in the spiritual body’) were amply in use among my interlocutors during 15 months of intensive fieldwork.

I carried out ethnographic work in the vaishnava temple-town of Navadvip, in the Nadia district of West Bengal. In Bengal, Vaishnavism primarily refers to the worship of the Hindu deity, Krishna; his cosmic partner, Radha; their enactment of sexual trysts in the celestial site, Vrindavan; and the medieval saint, Chaitanya (1486–1533). Navadvip has been a site of immense cultural significance in eastern India since the medieval period, renowned primarily as the birthplace of Chaitanya, a living place of thousands of devotees, and an erstwhile centre of Sanskrit higher learning. I worked with starkly different kinds of vaishnavas, including householders, ascetics, orthodox practitioners, tantrics, and the globalized international organization, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

For this article, I focus on two kinds of devotional groups, both of which represent very important religious traditions of Bengal. The first is a claimant to an orthodox Vaishnavism. They comprise Brahmin householders (goswamis) and renunciate men living in ashrams (babajis), who own temples/ashrams, and are mostly literate if not moderately educated. They focus on participating in the erotic sports of the deity-consort Radha-Krishna in/through imagination. The second group consists of quasi-tantric practitioners, known as sahajiyas, who hail from the lowest classes and castes of Bengal, live in thatched huts in the fringes of Nadia, are mostly illiterate, and who claim to apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience.

The abundance of such splintered terminologies used for describing and analysing mental and bodily religious states by practitioners of both groups made it critical to ask basic questions of ontology and representation. First, and most obviously, why at all would there need to be so many different (kinds of) terms for the body or mind? How can the body be thought about or cognized? How can the cognized and emotional body be the same? Is the spiritual body separate or different from the physical body? When a body is interiorized, how is it different from the mind? Is an imagined body a body at all, or an expression of cognitive capacities? Does such a body inhabit space? If not, can it still be a body? How can action be interiorized? Simply, how should one identify and represent the ‘mind’ and ‘body’ in Asian religious contexts? These were some pressing concerns when writing about Bengal-Vaishnava practices, especially in English.

In trying to answer these questions, ethnography needed to be reflected upon through painstaking engagements with theological expositions and textual readings. In most cases, these theological discourses constituted a part of the ethnography itself insofar as the practitioners have a most active culture of reading texts and/or learning about them from gurus through oral transmission, knowing about sectarian theological debates and uniqueness, and discussing them during sermons. Thus their narrations of religious experiences are often framed within textual understandings. However, in many instances of practitioners’ experiential accounting, the logic of the narrations superseded sectarian theological claims. So religious experience got grounded in but also challenged theology. The phenomenological states of these vaishnava religious practices, I hope to demonstrate therefore, complicate Western theoretical categories not only of the mind, body, thought, and experience, but also of claimed theological oppositions between sectarian devotional modes. Thus I also argue that a productive engagement of religious studies with anthropology sophisticates our understanding of complex ethnographic contexts. The more we are able to probe the logic(s) of theology and phenomenology in these specific situations, the more we are sensitized to the overlaps and transgressions they inhabit and afford.

While a large corpus of historical and ethnographic research has been dedicated to the study of both mainstream and subversive Asian religious practices, these traditions have often been read in terms of Western (Cartesian) philosophical tropes.Footnote ¹ If the mind is imagined as having no spatial existence, but a temporal one—in being coextensive with the lifespan of an individual—and the body as having a real physical spatial existence and also a temporal one, then the very diverse uses of the Bengali and Sanskrit terms by Bengal-Vaishnavas already indicate many possible understandings of extension and space, and therefore of mind and body. The main difference lies in the ordinary idea of the body as being only a physical one, and the vaishnava conceptions of the body as being also cognitive. So, the vaishnava body, when in cognition, does not occupy any real physical space; and the spiritual body, being eternal, does not have any physically identifiable spatial-temporal co-ordinates. Nevertheless, these are deemed as bodies in equal right by Bengal-Vaishnavas.

I heavily borrow from Murphy Halliburton's (Reference Halliburton2002) critique of anthropological studies of the body that proceed from a naïve criticism of the Cartesian mind–body dualism, however. He argues that these studies, to dislodge the predominance of a Western mentalist bias in studying cultures, end up identifying a series of non-Western contexts that experience embodied states. So, in a shift from representationalism to embodiment, which he concedes is important, they end up reproducing the binary of the West as the domain of thought and the non-West of embodied experience. In his study of mental patients and possessed people of Kerala, he persuasively shows how they very self-consciously use terms representing states of mind–body continuum, rather than dualism; and that these terms seamlessly travel among notions of the mind, body, consciousness, and self or soul. Halliburton's informants find the reference to Indian philosophical discourses especially helpful in describing these states. Thus he argues that it becomes critical to think of ‘local phenomenologies’, ‘constituted both by local analytic theories of experience and lived experience itself and assume these influence one another to some degree’ (Halliburton Reference Halliburton2002: 1125).

I use this very productive idea of Halliburton and conduct a form of ‘local phenomenology’. I show that, although the two vaishnava groups rest their identities on opposed practices, their experiences fall on a scale of mind–body continuum. For instance, I analyse two particular kinds of classifications of the body used by practitioners—a religious one: which speaks of the journey from a sadhak deha to a siddha deha, namely a ritual body to a perfected body; and a phenomenological one: which talks of the shift from a sthul deha to a shukkho deha, namely a gross body to a subtle body—and argue that, among them, only notions of a physical body approximate the idea of the body as a spatio-temporal extension.Footnote ² The cognized or spiritual bodies do not conform to such a visualization. I also extend Halliburton's assertions about < tex − math/ > intensely rarefied states of the mind and body, to argue that, in such imperceptible movement between states such as body, mind, consciousness, and self, it indeed becomes difficult to discern the mind or body as contained truths. My informants, like his, are very proficient users of philosophical texts/ideas and thus, in my doing of ‘local phenomenology’, I have had the rare opportunity to problematize already heavily theorized experiences.

However, I introduce another level of complication in the narrative by arguing that, in certain ethnographic contexts, even though their (narrations of) religious experiences may exemplify a mind–body continuum, informants may still stress on correlates of the ‘pure’ categories of mind or body (and their dualism) as markers of their sectarian or theological distinctiveness or difference. Such quasi mind–body distinctions may be emphasized for a number of reasons: for instance, due to a hangover of Cartesian ideologies popularized in the colonial period by religious reformers and rationalists, exemplified for instance in opposed notions of purity and immediacy, or abstraction and density. In the case of Bengal-Vaishnavas, such contradictions between narrations of experience and theology arise because the two kinds of devotional groups co-opt the primacy of the mind and body and their associated connotations of cleanliness and actuality, to establish their ideological specificity in a hyper-contested milieu. Theological oppositions serve political claims to identity and legitimacy.

So, while both forms of religious practices that I analyse in the article thrive on indiscernible phenomenological states between cognition and corporeality, the orthodox vaishnavas, in their claim to a ‘sanitized’ form of religiosity, stress on ‘mindful’ religions, while sahajiyas, whose practices are based on different kinds of body fluids, excreta, and sexual rituals, pride themselves on an ‘immediate’, embodied religion.Footnote ³ The two Bengal-Vaishnava groups have had a very long history of intense theoretical enmity, with orthodox vaishnavas asserting that the sahajiyas have corrupted ‘original’ vaishnava doctrines in a way that facilitates their obnoxious licentious practices, and sahajiyas in turn emphasizing that the conservative vaishnavas, in their puritanical pretensions, have deflected sacrality from ‘original’ involvements of the body (Sarbadhikary Reference Sarbadhikary2015).Footnote ⁴

So sahajiyas draw a distinction between the orthodox groups and themselves, saying that the former are practitioners of the anuman path (who intuit deities’ activities in their imagination and thus practise indirect inference with the mind), while they are bartaman panthis (followers of the path of bartaman, which literally means the present, and, in this context, the immediacy and sensory efficacy of bodily practices in making Radha-Krishna's sexual relationship apparent). So the two groups’ own assertions of difference based on relative primacies of the mind and body serve their claims to distinct and even superior forms of vaishnavite religiosities. Throughout the article, I demonstrate however that both devotional modalities thrive (also) on similar experiences of mind–body continuum. I argue therefore that religious experiences, in certain Asian contexts, have the capacity to not only support, but also exceed, theological claims.Footnote ⁵

In the process, I also argue that terms such as ‘mind’ and ‘body’ may serve as only tenuous approximations of non-Western religious states and practices, and need to be seriously recast in nuanced terms, so as to be able to talk about vernacular religious traditions in English < tex − math/ > and, indeed, in Western philosophical terms. Am I then simply saying that one cannot translate non-Western religious states and discourses into English? Yes and no. Yes, because one cannot assume that Western philosophical terms in their obvious vernacular forms (if at all they may be identified) exhaust experiences pertaining to mental and corporeal levels. They can only approximate different and similar states of non-Western experience. No, because I think, however, following Sarukkai (Reference Sarukkai2001), that translation does not become a redundant exercise. The phenomenological states have ‘translatability’, and that is why practices and discourses hover around them. That is, they have a certain quality by which they make themselves amenable to a desire to articulate. Of course, there are then differences in what is identified as mind or body in different traditions, how these traditions hierarchize between these states of experience for different political purposes, and there may also be states that are difficult to articulate at all. But there are still states that desire to be articulated and that, in my opinion, comprises their ‘translatability’. What constitutes a sincere ethnographic exercise in such a situation, I propose, is a keen and sensitive thinking-through of multi-linguistic approximations of experiential and discursive states, the concurrences and slippages among them.

Manas: mind–body continuum

A babaji once told me: ‘Only when one is blessed with divine grace (ashirvad) are his subtle senses (sukkho indriya) able to feel Vrindavan lilas (divine plays) in the manas. This is not to be confused with kolpona (unreal). It is as true as perception (anubhuti).’Footnote ⁶ He was referring to the key devotional practice known as manjari sadhana performed by Bengal-Vaishnava goswamis and babajis, in which the devotee's manas, or mind-heart, is deemed to be < tex − math/ > a veiled-Vrindavan, which unveils or manifests Radha-Krishna's erotic activities in the celestial place through practices of imagination.Footnote ⁷

The way in which this experience is effectuated is quite specific: it is a process of placing the practitioners’ imagined body and self as a handmaiden of the deities’ erotic lilas in a particular kind of imagined space. Radha and Krishna enact their sexual play in celestial Vrindavan. Goswamis and babajis claim that, through their spiritual practices, these sexual plays manifest in their imagination, or simply that their manas or imagination then become Vrindavan. What is involved here is thus a radical form of gendered devotion in which practitioners focus on cultivating feminine subjectivities in order to experience the deities’ lilas in imagination.

However, while there is a definite aspect of mental visualization involved here, the word ‘imagination’ also needs to be readjusted, since the practice is not just about attaining a glimpse of Vrindavan, but bringing the whole place into being—a process that involves not only cognitive vision, but the entire body's visceral, affective capacities.Footnote ⁸ Also, the term manas itself points to the equal importance of mind and body, cognition and emotion, in imagination. Thus I use the word ‘mind’ as a shorthand, in line with Ingold's idea of the ‘embodied mind’, which both develops through practices of and impacts upon the vaishnava ‘enminded body’ (Reference Ingold2000: 171). Also, when viewed as a phenomenological performance, imagination mediates between body and mind, percept and concept, senses and cognition (Casey Reference Casey2000: 16–17; Csordas Reference Csordas1993: 148).

What practitioners cultivate as embodied spiritual practise is, however, also connected with long-standing philosophical discourses that are discussed in sermons and taught by gurus. Vaishnava imagination is therefore a ‘hypercognised emotion’ (Levy Reference Levy, Shweder and LeVine1984: 30) and a thoroughly discursive, mindful experience. So the devotee's imagination follows a predetermined script given by his guru, which describes his/her perfected spiritual body and personhood in celestial Vrindavan (Haberman Reference Haberman1988: 1–7)—where he/she will travel to in his/her afterlife and which he/she can also apprehend in this life's religious practices. My interlocutors referred to this body as the antashchintita deha (inner-felt -thought body),Footnote ⁹ the bhavajogya deha (the body that is worth cultivating through practice and imagination), or simply the siddha deha (the perfected body-self).Footnote ¹⁰

Irrespective of the practitioner's real physical gender and age, the self that inhabits the mind-heart is cultivated and imagined as an ego-effaced, subservient, young girl, who remains enraptured in serving the deities’ sexuality. The manjari self's chief predicament is that it must never desire divine sexuality for itself, while its imagination-as-Vrindavan must manifest the most intensely intimate divine sensuous activities.

Thus practitioners argue that those whose imagined selves as deities’ handmaiden influence their ordinary selves completely travel after death to celestial Vrindavan. Otherwise, even for the temporal span that they imagine intensely, they are transported there. The felt reality of their mind-heart can be ascribed to the experience of imagination itself as a ‘somatic mode of attention’ (Csordas Reference Csordas1993; Reference Csordas1994: 80), which brings the place into bodily being at every instance of performative utterance. Casey's phenomenology is useful insofar as it demonstrates that the element of manifestation or ‘appearing’ that accompanies imagination implies its ‘total transparency’ and affective, bodily certainty (Casey Reference Casey2000: 169, 98; see also Csordas Reference Csordas1994: 162; Reference Csordas2002: 34).Footnote ¹¹ In Indian philosophy, too, there are elaborate discussions on the impossibilities of ascertaining ontological differences between dream life and waking life, which can be extended in this context as that between the life of imagination and the waking life, the imagined/cognized body and the physical body (see Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2009).

Goswamis’ and babajis’ practice of imagination involves prior meditation (smaran). While meditation practices are common among other religions, practices of imagination in this case use meditation as a step towards further spiritual goals of emplacement and emotion. Simply, the mind is used for the cultivation of a spiritual/emotional body. Thus, while Buddhist meditative practices aim at cultivating a sense of non-self, and yogic meditation seeks to dissolve the self in the Universal Self or Atman,Footnote ¹² both sharing the premise that practitioners must forego their sexuality, my interlocutors assert their difference from such religions that stress meditation, dissolution of the self, and corresponding purging of the sensory body as ends in themselves. A common saying among them goes: ‘Our sadhana begins where yoga stops.’ Vaishnavas emphasize the importance of retaining a qualified self without an ego, whose bodily desire and volition are not eradicated, but refashioned to be directed towards Vrindavan deities. Thus Bengal-Vaishnavas practise meditation as a necessary but not sufficient condition, to cultivate the physical senses and their creative potentials.

The Bengali composite verb mon-e kora used by my interlocutors to describe higher spiritual stages thus reveals three simultaneous senses: to do or practise in the mind-heart (antahkaran), to remember one's perfected self during spiritual practice (smaran), and to imagine oneself in Vrindavan (sadhana).

Vaishnavas associate their pre-sadhana lives with a spiritual forgetting. ShyamsundarFootnote ¹³ said during an evening sermon: ‘We have forgotten our eternal beautiful bodies/selves and place . . . Just as sometimes when we know but have forgotten something, it comes back in dreams, so also in sadhana. Spiritual essence lies in this remembering (smaran).’ Thus the Bengal-Vaishnava perfected body has an essential cognitive feature—it is both recognized and realized in imagination. Hayes (Reference Hayes2012) also analyses the processes of a practitioner's ‘remembrance’ as a blending of different senses, textuality, and ritual, which together constitute, what he calls, a ‘reverse amnesia’.

However, the smaran of the siddha deha, or imagination and realization of one's perfected self, is attained only after elaborate physical discipline. These disciplinary practices, once again, work at both the corporeal and mental levels. Following diksha (initiation), the vaishnava devotee is given shiksha (elaborate training) by his guru and engages himself in a number of daily rituals that form the 64 tenets of spiritual discipline (vaidhi bhakti). Of these 64, there are nine compulsory ones, including smaran Footnote ¹⁴:

• • sravan (hearing about gods’ lilas);

• • kirtan (repeating gods’ names and lilas);

• • smaran (remembering/memorizing Radha-Krishna's daily lilas by reading scriptures and learning to practise the remembrance in meditation);

• • vandan (singing praises of deities);

• • padasevan (serving deities’ feet);

• • dasya (developing subservience);

• • archan (learning intricate worship rules);

• • sakhya (developing friendship with deities);

• • atmanivedan (surrendering oneself to the deity-couple's service).

These nine disciplining practices form the practitioner's ritual body (sadhak deha). The sadhak deha thus more or less corresponds to the Western conception of the body as being extended in space and having material senses, propensities, and capacities. But, in its dimensions of smaran, dasya, sakhya, and atmanivedan, it also already begins to approximate cognitive faculties, including memory, and learned emotional responses. The body, therefore, is not only one that acts, but also that which thinks, remembers, and emotes.

However, after sustained practice of vaidhi bhakti, when suddenly a pining develops in the devotee's heart to visualize her essential self in Vrindavan, his guru, through developed intuitive/imaginative powers, and on the basis of the devotee's natural propensities, helps him approximate her essential feminine form and service. The sadhana is thus an introspective journey turning from one's given self (the ordinary, material body), through the disciplined ritual body (sadhak deha), to finally the eternal, essential, forgotten body/self (siddha deha). Only the first bodily level corresponds to the body as normally envisioned in Western philosophy.

On reaching a desired level of spiritual–emotional maturity, the guru teaches the practitioner the most difficult element of sadhana: memorizing the deity-couple's daily pastimes in Vrindavan. It is an intensive temporal engagement with the cosmic sacred place—a meditation < tex − math/ > technique known as asta-kaliya-lila-smaran (remembering pastimes of the eight daily periods).Footnote ¹⁵ A babaji thus said: ‘We translate our manas-service in temple-service. Say while we do the incense-rounds during the evening-arati, we think in detail of what Radha-Krishna are doing then in Vrindavan and services we are offering.’ Thus, through practised remembering, the devotee sharpens his imagination, which will transport him to the always-simultaneous times of cosmic Vrindavan. Repeated remembering augments perceptual attentiveness to the object of remembrance, hones ‘imagination inflation’ (Beuke et al. Reference Beuke, Garry and Sharman2004), and enhances the sense of imaginative reality. Thus smaran thoroughly infuses the ritual body with cognitive elements.

At this point, we find the discursive introduction of another kind of classification of the body: a phenomenological one.Footnote ¹⁶ So practitioners say that they do their daily rituals with the sthul deha (physical, acting body) and practise cognitive translocations with the shukkho deha (subtle, dreaming/imagining body). While the sthul deha is engaged in knowing the external world, in case of all bodily levels after the sthul one, the process of knowing and the object being known are both interiorized: their direction is turned towards the mind.

However, the mnemonic technique is dependent on physical yogic discipline, especially breathing routines that affectively pacify the mind.Footnote ¹⁷ Without this, the calm concentration required for imagination is impossible. Thus, once again, we find the very potent interplay of physical and cognitive faculties in the devotee's experiences. After weeks of visit, a very experienced and well-read practitioner, Kunjabihari, explained the phenomenology of breathing:

So practitioners speak of three embodied states that are active during sadhana: sthul deha or sthul sharir, which performs bodily rituals; sukkho sharir, which meditates and imagines; and causal body (karan sharir), which witnesses these activities as overseer. This approximates Merleau Ponty's description of the body which ‘simultaneously sees and is seen. < tex − math/ > That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognise, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching’ (Johnson 1993: 124, cited in Tilley Reference Tilley2008: 25).

Thus the sthul, shukkho, and karan sharir together compose the sadhak deha. The interplay of these different bodies helps the devotee apprehend the perfected body or siddha deha. Right after the level of the sthul sharir, all further corporeal states are infused with cognitive capacities, and are thus not really material ‘bodies’ in the ordinary usages of the term in Western philosophy.Footnote ¹⁹ But, while one might think they are similar to the mind or spirit, none of them exactly corresponds to the English term ‘mind’ either, since they are thoroughly embodied simultaneously.

So most practitioners metaphorically explain that the gross sthul deha, heavy with unreflective materialities, is like ice, which, through breathing practices and yogic contemplations, transforms into lightweight vapour-like clarity and passes through the causal body (karan sharir) into Vrindavan's essential self (siddha deha). The subtle and causal bodies have a paradoxical ontological status. Although they are not primarily sensory, they can be grasped only through intuitive affective perception.

The final dissolution of the causal body confirms the suspension of egohood. Once again, Kunjabihari clarified with a calm confidence. He said:

Through these rarefied affective processes of the body–mind, the thinking ego/imaginer as subject, the process of imagination, and the imagined thus merge, and what is left is imagination as indistinguishable from the place, Vrindavan.

The different levels of this mind–body continuum, however, have very interesting transformations. Thus devotees assert that intense imagination often affects the material body; < tex − math/ > the cognized self transforms the physical self. Radheshyam cited a metaphoric instance to explicate these transformative processes. There is an insect known in Bengali as kumor-poka. They hunt in swarms. Once they get hold of some other insect, they encircle it and buzz around, although not attacking it. The other insect is, however, consumed with fear of being attacked at any moment. Due to this constant thought about kumor-poka, it too is changed into one. He said: ‘The relation between the essential body/self (siddha deha), the hunter, and the ritual body (sadhak deha), the hunted, is similar. Constant thought leads to physical transformation.’ So cognition affects the material body. He shivered mildly and was having goose bumps while describing this, and his eyes flooded with tears.

Any ‘social’ thrives on its distinction from others. The ‘others’ in this case are the sahajiyas, whom goswamis and babajis detest as morally repugnant. They say sahajiyas are members of an apasampraday, literally outcastes, and not vaishnavas at all. Spiritual practices involving imagination are clean and respectable, they assert, because, although intensely sensuous, they reserve the sexual act itself for the deities, their own selves imagined as only serving them during the intimate process. Thus their chosen site to experience the spiritual place, they say, is the sanitized mind-heart and not the body. Thus, although practitioners admit both the corporeal basis (bodily practices preparing for imagination) and bodily receptions of imagination (imagination's impact upon the senses), their experience in imagination is intimately related to the avoidance of carnal possibilities. This is the prime theological factor that distinguishes goswamis and babajis from sahajiyas, who locate their spiritual experience within the physical body, which unveils Radha-Krishna's sacred erotics through direct sexual relationships. This assertion of a ‘mindful religion’ (opposed to a bodily sacrality), as mentioned earlier, thus constitutes goswamis’ and babajis’ identitarian claim, although the phenomenology of their religious practices clearly demonstrates a mind–body continuum.

Deha: body–mind continuum

Sahajiyas, on their part, claim to be the best kind of vaishnavas, and the authentic practitioners of raganuga bhakti (passionate devotion). While they talk about the anuman-bartaman distinction in claiming difference from the other vaishnava groups’ practices, I argue however that their preoccupation with the body is never divorced from conceptual concerns. That is, their ‘bodies’ do not stand as unmediated oppositions to the goswamis’ and babajis’ ‘minds’. Their practices also fall on a mind–body continuum. The mental dimensions in this case manifest as thorough conceptual criss-crossings of the body. Sahajiyas’ theorizations about their bodies are known as dehatattva, literally knowledge of the body. Thus, from concerns of a vaishnava ‘embodied mind’, I now analyse sahajiyas’ ‘enminded body’. The other critical ways in which dimensions of mentalism (in)form the sahajiya body are through practices of intellectual and emotive control of the mind and cognitive nuances of abstract breathing.

Like other vaishnavas, sahajiyas also use terms like sthul, shukkho, and siddha, but refer to a generic term, desh, to incorporate these varied terms of corporeality. While desh literally means a place of intimate inhabitation (which could be the native village or the nation), in this case, it pertains to different levels/sites of the spiritually cultivated body. The four desh-s (lands/places) or stages of spiritual progression that sahajiyas refer to are sthul (gross), pravarta (transformation through physical discipline), sadhak (practising stage), and siddhi (perfected stage). I argue that all these different stages are to do with the material body but, with regular physical discipline, the mentality towards physical activities changes, and that constitutes corporeal perfection. Such a perfected body, rather than the gross material body, is the vessel of sahajiyas’ spirituality.

For instance, the crucial idea of raksha (control/withholding) changes the meaning of all physical acts. Sahajiyas’ rhetoric of being ‘samsare thekeo tyagi’ (a cryptic way of signifying being a renouncer even while indulging in sexual relationships, namely involving oneself in non-ejaculatory sex) depends on the cultivation of a very specific mentality. This in turn depends on thorough cultivation of bodily disciplines. So sustained practice of prescribed corporeal disciplines alters mentality, which in turn gives a completely different ontological status to the body itself. The body–mind complex thus constitutes an intricate efficacious whole in the sahajiya context.

After their initiation, when sahajiyas are told by their initiation-gurus ‘vaishnava jano’—that is, literally, ‘know (what constitutes a true) vaishnava’—this learning/thinking/conceptualizing implies a change in mentality that alters the significance of the physical body itself. The body then no longer remains the body we refer to in English. It evokes a nuanced mind–body continuum. So the identifying feature of sahajiyas is their reception of shiksha mantra (the mantra of ‘knowledge’), in addition to the initiation mantra. This is also why other vaishnavas heavily criticize the reception of shiksha mantra, since sahajiyas’ shiksha refers to their gurus teaching them detailed philosophies of sexual arousal.

These arguments will become clearer with the analyses of sahajiya practices. Sahajiyas define their religiosity in terms of passionate love for Radha-Krishna, intense desire to experience the deities’ love-play in Vrindavan, cultivating egolessness and femininity as prerequisites for the purpose, and their sensuous experiences of the deities’ arousal within their own selves. Hardly would these devotional principles seem different from goswamis’ and babajis’ practices, until one comprehends sahajiyas’ interpretations of these tenets.Footnote ²¹ Their practices primarily focus on yogic techniques of specified movement of breath and body fluids in the corporeal interior.

Sahajiya practices focus on five bodily emissions—semen, faeces, urine, menstrual blood, and female sexual fluid—and the devotee learns techniques of retaining these within the body through interrupted flow and non-emission, or taking them back into the body after release.Footnote ²² Body substances along with the practitioner's breath and cranium are venerated as cosmic < tex − math/ > equivalents of natural elements: earth, water, fire, air, and sky.Footnote ²³ A common sahajiya proverb proclaims that ‘What is not there in the body, is not there in the universe’ and, in a practice known as pancha ras-er upasana (worship of five fluids), sahajiyas ingest these excreta: their consumption associated with maintenance of cosmic rhythm. Sahajiyas deify body fluids as embodiments of vaishnava deities. The male principle, Krishna, is embodied in semen and Radha in menstrual blood/female sexual fluid. Thus sahajiyas conceptualize these fluids’ unification through consuming them together and pulling them up through yogic practices as the union of Radha-Krishna and preservation of Vrindavan's pleasures within the body. Hayes refers to this as ‘indwelling’ of male and female powers within the physical body-space (Reference Hayes and Beck2005: 20).

Sahajiyas equate ejaculation with self-seeking pleasures and thus conceptualize egolessness as non-ejaculatory spiritual practices. They say that a body in lust (kama) ejaculates, but a body in love (prem) retains Vrindavan (body fluids) inside. Thus sahajiya practices of ingestion and fluid retention thrive on paradigms of internal absorption. Most sahajiyas explained that, since penetration is the hallmark of male pride (purushabhiman) and, simultaneously, absorption, the symbol of femininity (naritva), thus both male and female practitioners embody feminine subjectivities by retaining fluids. By cultivating these feminine sensibilities, both partners imagine themselves to be Krishna's egoless lovers.

Thus, just as sahajiyas distinguish their practices from other vaishnavas’ on the basis that they can apprehend Vrindavan's pleasures through methods of directness (bartaman), as opposed to others’ anuman, similarly they interpret vaishnava discourses through direct bodily/sexual metaphors. Just as their religion is corporeal, so also their semantics are rendered fleshy. A fleshy philosophy, expressed through a sophisticated tradition of sahajiya language (including poetry), is able to apprehend cognitive/linguistic mechanisms as reflections of the body's perceptions, sensations, and relations. Sahajiya metaphoric language, like their practices, can thus be seen as an interplay of the discursive and affective, of mental and bodily dimensions.

Metaphors in general bridge the distance between the abstract and immediate, sense and sensation (Low Reference Low and Csordas1994: 140–143). Hayes argues with respect to the use of metaphors in expressing sahajiya religiosity that they represent alternative ‘cognitive topologies’. For instance, drawing on Mark Johnson's concept of ‘body schema’ (Hayes Reference Hayes2014: 689), he speaks of ‘verticality schemas’ embodying yogic acts of urethral suction or pulling up sexual fluids, ‘container schemas’ evoking the body's spatial sense as holding various body substances, and ‘hydraulic metaphors’ embodying sexual fluids of the corporeal economy (ibid. 2005: 21–26; see also ibid. 1999: 85; Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999: 28–32). He further argues that the ‘fluidic nature of the Vaisnava Sahajiya yogic body’ mirrors the ‘riverine topography’ of their living region (ibid. 2012: 12).

The entire orthodox vaishnava vocabulary thus takes on new meanings in sahajiyas’ cosmology. Krishna and Radha become the seminal essences of man and woman, respectively; yugal-sadhana, or worshipping the deity-consort, becomes veneration for the sexual relationship between partners; lila, or divine play, becomes the natural encounter between sexes; seva, or service towards deities, means ingestion of sacred/sexual fluids; the woman practitioner is known < tex − math/ > as manjari, and manjari sadhana becomes her sexual encounter with the guru-Krishna; and Vrindavan, the corporeal space that witnesses affective excesses of sexual abandon.

Sahajiya gurus also give them instructive tabular charts of ritual progression. These charts are in the form of poetry and are classifications of the different stages of practice. While discussing their philosophy, most sahajiyas recited the charts by heart, as if they had become the summary of their spiritual lives—an involuntary body memory. The four ritual stages described in the charts are entitled as lands/places (desh).Footnote ²⁴ They describe the practitioner's spiritual development, rituals to be performed, and his/her corresponding emotions. It is difficult without initiation to discern exact parallels between charts and ritual stages of practice, and almost impossible to be sure of ritual details. However, that does not detract from the main arguments.

Mind/body, monism/dualism

One critical question remains with respect to the analyses above: can the mind–body continuum be characterized and described in (Indian) philosophical terms? One way to address this is through philosophical debates on yogic–devotional or monist–dualist divides. These debates help account for different perspectives on how mental and embodied states are entangled and parsed.

I will briefly discuss two important texts: the Yogavasishta Sara (YS n.d.),Footnote ²⁸ for ideas on monism; and Vaishnava Vedanta (VV 1994), for a dualist perspective. While monism is associated with a cognitive predominance, dualism maintains the importance of the sensory body. I argue that the practices of both vaishnava groups are couched within the distinctive Bengal-Vaishnava paradigm of achintya-bhed-abhed (see below), such that they fall on < tex − math/ > interfaces of what are characterized as dualism–monism. Thus there are comfortable fits between Bengal-Vaishnava theology and experiences of body–mind continuum.

The basic difference between monists and dualists is that the former believe that every phenomenal existence is only an embodied reflection of a shining universal consciousness and essential oneness, while dualists think of every existence as discrete, and things in themselves as distinct from the cognition about them. Thus yogic ontology aims at the dissolution of both body and mind, albeit through cognitive techniques, to realize cosmic oneness and consciousness, while the dualist principle takes a further step. It maintains difference between divinity and humanity, and the importance of an emotional being with a spiritually refined body with which to worship divinity. This body (in the Bengal-Vaishnava context) includes both the cosmic body (siddha sharir) and physical effects of spiritual practices on the real sthul body. So monism is taken to be akin to mental processes and dualism associated with the retention of a bodily paradigm.

The defining theology of Bengal-Vaishnavism rests in the doctrine of achintya-bhed-abhed, or the unthinkable distinction between difference with Krishna (dualism) and oneness (monism) with him.Footnote ²⁹ I argue that, in vaishnava practices, this relative indistinction between monism–dualism translates as mind–body continuum; theology translates as phenomenology. So, as explicated by Kunjabihari, through the dissolution of shukkho and karan sharir in manjari sadhana, practitioners embody monist principles until a certain stage but, in their realization of their (sensory and emotional) selves as different from Krishna in cosmic Vrindavan, they are dualists par excellence. Similarly, the sahajiyas’ shukkho sharir, in its breathing or ingestion practices, wades between the inner and outer, vessel-ness and spaciousness, discreteness and oneness, dualism and monism.

Vaishnava practitioner and scholar, Mahanambrata Brahmachari (Reference Brahmachari1994), finely elaborates this Bengal-Vaishnava specificity. This subtle negotiation (between monism and dualism) is exemplified in a reading of (four) states of consciousness. The YS and VV have similar understandings of the waking or gross state, dreaming or subtle state, and deep sleep or causal state; but they differ fundamentally about the realization following these three states.

The YS says about the mind that ‘Like the experience of one's own death in a dream it ceases to exist when scrutinised’ (n.d.: 13, sloka 4). This corresponds to the suspension of the subtle body in manjari sadhana. Similarly, when the YS says that ‘Abandoning the ideas of seer, seen and sight along with latent desires of the past, we meditate on that Self which is the primal light that is the basis of sight’ (n.d.: 32, sloka 6) or ‘When one thinks “I am pure consciousness” it is called meditation and when even the idea of meditation is forgotten it is Samadhi’ (n.d.: 35, sloka 25), we clearly find resonance with the way vaishnava practitioners claim that the phenomenological body state following the subtle one, namely the karan sharir, is dissolved. < tex − math/ >

According to the VV, the karan sharir knows about ‘not-knowing anything’ with ‘a consciousness to witness’ (Brahmachari Reference Brahmachari1994: 19). This ‘pure self-consciousness’ (Brahmachari Reference Brahmachari1994: 21) is what the YS also talks about. So, in its yogic elements, Bengal-Vaishnavas may be said to be monist in approach.

However, vaishnava practice dissolves the body–mind complex initially, but restores it in a refined form eventually. The shining knowledge that the devotee reaches is thus not of the disembodied oneness of consciousness (as described in the YS), but of an embodied celestial space where she exists as distinct from (but also consumed by the love of) Radha-Krishna. Thus, from here, the VV shifts from purely monist assertions, with its explication of a ‘fourth’ state of consciousness: turiya, or ecstatic experience. Ordinary self or ego (ahamkar) gives way to abhimaan, or to an ‘ennobled, enriched and totally transformed’ (Brahmachari Reference Brahmachari1994: 35) (manjari) self. So,

Thus practices of the mind–body first dissolve ordinary bodily and cognitive capacities, and then reinstate a religiously cultivated self with a refined mind–body complex. In other words, we have a theological interplay of monism–dualism that gets its embodied life in practitioners’ experience of mind–body continuum.