impropriety of attributing such a gesture to his Lord, the poet set aside his stylus and palm leaves and went to bathe. “Right there,” the pandit, pointing to the ocean, divulged with conviction. Upon returning home from that beach, Jaya·deva discovered that the line had been written: “To purge me of passion’s potent poison, place your noble foot upon my head, a crowning jewel.” In the poet’s absence, Krishna himself had come, disguised as Jaya·deva, to finish composing the song. Padmavati bore witness to it. Through the legend that verse became a synoptic imprimatur on the text. God had given the devotee license to write about him in intimate erotic terms.

The Chaitanya school of Vaishnava devotion maintained that erotic emotions and sentiments were sacred if, and only if, the object of sexual desire and source of sexual pleasure was Krishna. The proponents of the rival Sahajiya tantric school, on the other hand, postulated that an erotic relationship between a man and woman could be sanctified to the degree that the man realized himself an embodiment of Krishna, the woman realized herself a manifestation of Radha, and that couple, in both separation and union, recollected and consciously acted out the love play of Radha and Krishna, experiencing human, carnal, and transient pleasure not as their own, but as the divine, spiritual, and eternal bliss of the god and goddess. The songs of the medieval Sahajiyas, who considered Jaya·deva a guru, one of the founders and principal proponents of their school, bear a striking resemblance in both form and content to those of the “Gita·govinda.” And the Bauls of Bengal, as inheritors of a Sahajiya musical, poetic, and theological legacy, ________