5  Vraja-Dhāman as Place-Avatāra

From Geographic Place to Transcendent Space

The geographic region of Vraja (Hindi Braj) in North India is celebrated as the dhāman, abode, of Kṛṣṇa, the land where he resided during his sojourn on earth in Dvāpara Yuga. As discussed in the Introduction, Vraja has been a major center of pilgrimage since the sixteenth century and is represented as a maṇḍala, or circle, formed by an encompassing pilgrimage circuit, the Vana-Yātrā (Hindi Ban-Yātrā), that encircles the entire region. The Vana-Yātrā was established in the sixteenth century and schematized as a circular journey through twelve forests that is eighty-four krośas,¹ or approximately 168 miles, according to traditional calculations. This encompassing pilgrimage circuit comprises a diverse array of sites, including villages and towns, temples and wayside shrines, bathing places along the Yamunā River, and geographic features such as forests (vanas) and ponds (kuṇḍas). During their circumambulation of the entire region of Vraja as part of the Vana-Yātrā, pilgrims may also traverse the three smaller pilgrimage circuits, or parikrama paths, that unfold from the major nodes of the encompassing circuit: the Mathurā parikrama, Govardhana parikrama, and Vṛndāvana parikrama.

Prior to its establishment as a major center of pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, Vraja existed primarily as a literary construction embedded in narratives of the life of Kṛṣṇa in brahmanical Sanskritic scriptures such as the Harivaṃśa (c. second century CE), Viṣṇu Purāṇa (c. fourth to fifth century CE), and Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. ninth to tenth century CE).² As mentioned in the Introduction, among the earliest known religious authorities to perform pilgrimages in Vraja are Caitanya and Vallabha, who subsequently directed their followers—the six Gosvāmins of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the leaders of the Puṣṭi Mārga—to carry out the “reclamation” of Vraja. The process of reclamation involved identifying certain locations within the region of Vraja with specific events from Kṛṣṇa’s youth that had been recorded in the Purāṇic narratives of his life. Having “rediscovered” the “lost” līlā-sthalas where particular episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā are held to have occurred, the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya, Puṣṭi Mārga, and other Vaiṣṇava schools³ then established temples and shrines to visibly mark these sites as tīrthas. One of the idealized notions of the sacred space of Vraja is thus as scriptural narratives mapped onto a landscape, transforming the geographic region into a place of pilgrimage. This mapping of authoritative scriptural narratives onto specific geographical locales occurred throughout Vraja. Haberman, in his illuminating study of contemporary pilgrimage in Braj, remarks regarding the process of reclamation:

Whether the developments of the sixteenth century were a “reclamation” or amounted to a new creation, vast amounts of work went into the cultural construction of Braj. These developments can be viewed as a process of externalization: that is, in the sixteenth century a world that had existed primarily as an interior world, described in Vaishnava scriptures and realized in meditation, blossomed into an exterior world of material forms, and this culture was expressed physically. The sixteenth century was the time of a great “coming-out” party in which the material forms of Braj culture were “uncovered” and “revealed.” In this regard the activities of Braj in the sixteenth century provide us with a rare glimpse into a process whereby myth directly influences history.⁴

In this chapter I will begin with an analysis of literary constructions of Vraja found in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, and the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa. I will then turn to a consideration of the contributions of the early Gauḍīya authorities, first, in transforming Vraja from a mythic space into a place of pilgrimage and, second, in providing an analytical framework to support their discursive reimagining of Vraja as a bimodal domain that functions simultaneously as a geographic place in North India and as a transcendent space beyond the material space-time continuum. As we shall see, these constructions of Vraja assume a central role in the Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment, in which on the transcosmic level the transcendent Vraja is represented as an extension of Kṛṣṇa’s absolute body (vigraha) and on the material level the earthly Vraja is celebrated as the body (deha or vigraha) of Kṛṣṇa in the form of a geographic place.

Mythic Space, Pilgrimage Place, and Meditation Maṇḍala: Purāṇic Constructions of Vraja

Maura Corcoran, in her study of constructions of Vṛndāvana and Vraja in Vaiṣṇava literature, has identified three distinctive types of representations: Vraja as a mythic space, represented in narratives as the setting for Kṛṣṇa’s līlā; Vraja as a symbolic space, represented as a maṇḍala or yantra, a geometric diagram that functions as an aid in meditation; and Vraja as a geographic place, which constitutes a center of Kṛṣṇa worship and pilgrimage.⁵ Although there are problems with Corcoran’s analysis of this threefold model in relation to specific texts, the model itself provides a useful means of differentiating among the principal modes of representing Vraja in Purāṇic sources. My analysis will focus on constructions of Vraja in three major Purāṇas: (1) Vraja as a mythic space in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa; (2) Vraja as a pilgrimage place in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa; and (3) Vraja as a meditation maṇḍala in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa.

Vraja as a Mythic Space

In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa Vraja functions as a mythic space, a literary construction embedded in the Bhāgavata’s narrative that provides the setting for the life and līlā of Kṛṣṇa. The Bhāgavata’s account of Kṛṣṇa’s life in the tenth book presents the paradigmatic scriptural narrative of his līlā on earth, which, as discussed in Chapter 3, is modeled after the narrative of Kṛṣṇa’s life in the fifth book of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa but expands on and reconfigures the earlier material, investing it with its own distinctive valences. The Bhāgavata’s narrative unfolds through time in a linear sequence of events—beginning with Kṛṣṇa’s descent to earth and concluding with his return to his transcendent abode (parama dhāman)—in which the discrete events constitute the syntagmatic units, or episodes, of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā. The narrative is mapped onto space in a twofold configuration of categories: the puras, cities, of Mathurā and Dvārakā where Kṛṣṇa’s life on earth begins and ends; and Vraja, the cowherd encampment and broader pastoral arena where Kṛṣṇa’s life as a cowherd boy unfolds.

The Bhāgavata’s use of the term Vraja differs from the usage of the term that developed later, in the sixteenth century. With the establishment of Vraja as a major pilgrimage center in the sixteenth century by the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the Puṣṭi Mārga, the terms Vraja and Vraja-maṇḍala came to be used interchangeably with Mathurā-maṇḍala as designations for the encompassing rural area that surrounds the city of Mathurā and includes twelve forests, or vanas.⁶ As has been emphasized by both Alan Entwistle and Corcoran, in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, as well as in the Harivaṃśa and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, the term Vraja is often used in a narrower sense to designate a cowherd encampment or settlement.⁷ More specifically, in the Bhāgavata the term Vraja is frequently used to refer to the nomadic cowherd encampment across the Yamunā River from the city of Mathurā where Kṛṣṇa’s father, Vasudeva, took him after his birth and placed him in the care of the cowherd Nanda and his wife, Yaśodā. The terms Vraja and Gokula are often used interchangeably to refer to the particular cowherd encampment in which Kṛṣṇa and his brother Balarāma grew up, which is called Nanda’s Vraja (nanda-vraja) or Nanda’s Gokula (nanda-gokula) because Nanda, their foster father, served as its headman.

The Bhāgavata’s narrative distinguishes Vraja, as a nomadic cowherd encampment, from fixed inhabited places such as puras, cities, and grāmas, villages. Nanda’s Vraja, as the setting of the Bhāgavata’s central narrative concerning Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral life as Gopāla Kṛṣṇa, is distinguished in particular from the two cities that are associated with his royal status as Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa and that frame the central narrative: Mathurā, the city where he is born as Vāsudeva, the son of Vasudeva and Devakī; and Dvārakā, the city where, in his post-Vraja life, he establishes his kingdom and carries out his duties as the prince of the Yādava clan. Nanda’s Vraja is represented as a cowherd encampment that moves from one vana, forested area, to another, seeking fresh pastures in which to graze the cows. The term vana is used in the Bhāgavata to designate a large forest that includes woods, groves, and rivers, as well as meadows and hills for pasturing cows. Two forests are of particular importance in the Bhāgavata’s account of Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral life: Bṛhadvana is the “great forest”—called Mahāvana in the earlier account of the Harivaṃśa and in later lists of the twelve forests from the fourteenth century CE onward—where Nanda’s Vraja is located during the first five years of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood, and Vṛndāvana is the forest to which the encampment subsequently moves and where Kṛṣṇa enjoys the later phase of his youth, up to the age of sixteen.

Vraja, as an inhabited cowherd encampment, is thus often distinguished in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa from the vana, uncultivated forest, that surrounds the cowherd encampment and to which the cowherds go forth each day to pasture their cows. However, as we shall see, there are a number of instances in which the Bhāgavata uses the term Vraja in a more general sense to refer to the “land of Vraja” (Vraja-bhū) that is the pastoral arena outside of the city of Mathurā where Kṛṣṇa’s līlā unfolds, encompassing not only the cowherd encampment but also the surrounding forests—Bṛhadvana and Vṛndāvana—where Kṛṣṇa engages in his playful exploits with his cowherd buddies and cowmaiden lovers.

Vraja as the Pastoral Playground of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa

An extended analysis of the terms Vraja and Gokula in the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa reveals that the two terms, along with the term goṣṭḥa (literally, “cow-station”), are often used interchangeably to refer to a station, or encampment, of cowherds and their cows. The terms nanda-vraja, nanda-gokula, and nanda-goṣṭha are also used interchangeably to refer more specifically to the cowherd encampment of Nanda,⁸ who is celebrated as the lord of Vraja (vraja-pati, vrajeśvara, vrajādhipa, or vraja-nātha),⁹ while his wife, Yaśodā, is extolled as the mistress of Vraja (vrajeśvarī).¹⁰ While the residents of Vraja (vrajaukases, vraja-janas, or vraja-vāsins) are at times distinguished in the Bhāgavata’s narrative from the denizens of the forest (vanaukases),¹¹ at other times they themselves are deemed to be residents of the forest because they live apart from cities (puras) and villages (grāmas) and do not dwell in houses (gṛhas), but rather they move from forest to forest and set up their encampment in the midst of the forest, arranging their carts in a semi-circle.¹²

The residents of Vraja, as represented in the Bhāgavata’s narrative, are the gopas, cowherds, and gopīs, cowmaidens, who abide in their nomadic pastoral settlement along with their gos, cows. The gopas include the cowherd elders (gopa-vṛddhas), headed by Nanda, who oversee the well-being of Vraja,¹³ as well as the cowherd boys of Vraja (vraja-bālakas or vrajārbhakas) with whom Kṛṣṇa engages in his boyhood adventures.¹⁴ The gopīs are celebrated as the women of Vraja (vraja-strīs, vraja-yoṣits, or vraja-vanitās), who are renowned for their fine-limbed beauty (vrajāṅganās or vraja-sundarīs) and are distinguished from the women of the cities (pura-vanitās or pura-yoṣits) because of their special status as the lovers of Kṛṣṇa in Vraja (vraja-ramaṇīs or vraja-vallabhīs).¹⁵ Vraja is adorned by the cows of Vraja (vraja-gos or vraja-paśus), who are the constant companions of Kṛṣṇa and his cowherd friends.¹⁶

Although the term Vraja is thus frequently used in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to refer to the nomadic cowherd encampment in which Kṛṣṇa and his brother Balarāma grew up, I would argue that the term is not exclusively used in this limited sense. Entwistle has suggested that compounds such as Vraja-bhūmi, “land of Vraja,” are first used by the early Gauḍīya authorities in the sixteenth century to denote “the general area near or around Mathurā in which Krishna’s adventures took place.”¹⁷ However, contrary to Entwistle’s assertion, the use of such compounds is not a sixteenth-century development but stems from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa itself, which uses the compound Vraja-bhū three times to refer to the “land of Vraja” where Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Bhagavān, appears in the guise of a human being, a cowherd boy, and unfolds his līlā, divine play.¹⁸

How sacred (puṇya) is the land of Vraja (Vraja-bhū) where the primordial Puruṣa—whose feet are worshiped by the guardian of mountains [Śiva] and by Ramā, the goddess of good fortune [Lakṣmī]—wanders about disguised in human semblance (nṛ-liṅga-gūḍha) and engaged in play (vikrīḍā), adorned with a garland of variegated forest flowers, tending the cows along with Balarāma, and playing his flute. What tapas did the gopīs perform by virtue of which they drink with their eyes his form (rūpa), which is the essence of beauty, unequalled and unsurpassed, difficult to attain, self-perfect, ever young, the singular abode (dhāman) of renown, splendor, and divine majesty?¹⁹

In this passage and several others, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa celebrates Vraja as a sacred (puṇya) land whose sacrality derives from its special status as the site of Kṛṣṇa’s birth (janman) and manifestation (vyakti) and the abode (nivāsa) where the supreme Godhead dwells during his sojourn on earth.²⁰ Vraja is revered as the sacred place where Bhagavān, the supreme Godhead, appears in human semblance (nṛ-liṅga), in the guise of a cowherd boy (gopāla-chadman), as an object of vision (dṛg-viṣaya) before the eyes (sākṣāt) of the residents of Vraja.²¹

While the two [Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma] were playing (root krīḍ + vi) in Vraja in the guise of cowherd boys (gopāla-chadman) by means of their māyā, the season came that is known as summer, which is not very agreeable to embodied beings (śarīrins). However, due to the special qualities (guṇas) of Vṛndāvana, where Bhagavān, Keśava [Kṛṣṇa], is present before one’s eyes (sākṣāt) along with Balarāma, it appeared as though it were spring.²²

In this passage the Bhāgavata uses the terms Vraja and Vṛndāvana interchangeably to designate a place that is invested with special qualities (guṇas) because Kṛṣṇa is embodied there in a visible form that can be discerned with the eyes (sākṣāt). Elsewhere the Bhāgavata suggests that Kṛṣṇa’s bodily investment in the land of Vraja extends beyond his visible presence there to the direct engagement of his hands, knees, and feet with the soil. In his early childhood, he crawls about on his hands and knees, moving his infant body across the dusty ground of Vraja (Vraja-kardama).²³ As he romps and plays in his later youth, Kṛṣṇa adorns the land of Vraja with the imprints of his feet, which bear the distinguishing marks of a flag, thunderbolt, goad, and lotus.²⁴ Moreover, the Bhāgavata maintains that the soft soles of Kṛṣṇa’s feet, which resemble the petals of a lotus, soothe the land of Vraja (Vraja-bhū), relieving the ground of the prickling pain caused by the hooves of cows constantly treading upon it.²⁵ According to the Bhāgavata, the pure dust of Kṛṣṇa’s lotus-feet adorns the crowns of the guardians of the worlds (loka-pālas) and is not attained by yogins even after countless lifetimes of austerities, and it is this dust that renders sacred the land of Vraja.²⁶ Even Brahmā the creator longs to be born in this sacred place so that he can bathe in the dust of the residents of Vraja, who themselves revel in the dust of the lotus-feet of Bhagavān:

How very fortunate are the cows and the cowmaiden lovers of Vraja (vraja-go-ramaṇīs).… How great is the good fortune of the residents of Vraja (vrajaukases) headed by the gopa Nanda, whose friend is the complete (pūrṇa) and eternal (sanātana) Brahman consisting of transcendent bliss (paramānanda).… My greatest fortune would be to take any birth whatsoever here in this forest [Vṛndāvana], in Gokula, where one can bathe in the dust of the feet of any [of the residents] whose entire life is Bhagavān, Mukunda [Kṛṣṇa], the dust of whose feet is sought after even to this day by the Vedas (śruti).²⁷

Vraja is thus celebrated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a place consecrated by the bodily traces of Kṛṣṇa, and these bodily traces in turn mark the sites of his līlā, the sites where he engages in play (vihāra, krīḍā, or vikrīḍā), during his sojourn on earth. Kṛṣṇa’s līlā in Vraja is represented as occurring in two main phases: the kaumāra phase, Kṛṣṇa’s early childhood from his birth to the age of five; and the paugaṇḍa phase, Kṛṣṇa’s later youth from the age of six to sixteen.²⁸ The kumāra-līlā of Kṛṣṇa that unfolds in his kaumāra phase in Vraja encompasses his childhood antics (bāla-ceṣṭita) as an adorable, mischievous child who engages in exuberant, uninhibited play with his buddies, the cowherd boys of Vraja.²⁹

Giving delight to the residents of Vraja (vrajaukases) with their childhood antics (bāla-ceṣṭita) and melodious words, the two [Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma] in due time became caretakers of the calves. Equipped with various playthings, they pastured the calves nearby, in the land of Vraja (Vraja-bhū), together with the other cowherd boys. Sometimes they played on the flute. Sometimes they hurled [stones] with slings and at other times with their feet, which were adorned with ankle bells. Sometimes, acting like bulls with others pretending to be bulls and cows, they fought with one another, bellowing. Imitating animals with their cries, they wandered about like two ordinary mortals (prākṛtas).… In this way the two spent their kaumāra phase in Vraja in childhood games (kaumāra vihāras) such as playing hide-and-seek, constructing dams, and jumping about like monkeys.³⁰

In his paugaṇḍa phase in Vraja, Kṛṣṇa and his brother Balarāma attain the status of full-fledged cowherds, moving beyond their earlier role as small boys caring for calves into the role of young men tending herds of cows.³¹ It is during his paugaṇḍa phase, as we shall see, that Kṛṣṇa engages in various heroic exploits, rescuing the residents of Vraja from demons and a series of other calamities. It is also during this period that he engages in passionate love-play with the gopīs, the women of Vraja, in the rāsa-līlā.³²

The land of Vraja, as the pastoral playground where Kṛṣṇa manifests his bodily presence and unfolds his līlā, encompasses Nanda’s cowherd encampment along with the two forests where the encampment is located during the two main phases of Kṛṣṇa’s youth: Bṛhadvana, the forest where the cowherd encampment is located during Kṛṣṇa’s kaumāra phase, from the time of his birth to the age of five; and Vṛndāvana, the forest to which the encampment moves when Kṛṣṇa is five, which provides the setting for the final year of his kaumāra phase and for the playful exploits of his paugaṇḍa phase, from the age of six to sixteen. I will now turn to a brief analysis of the Bṛhadvana and Vṛndāvana periods of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā in Vraja in which I will highlight in particular those līlā episodes that are ascribed special significance when the scriptural narratives are mapped onto specific geographic locales in the Māhātmya literature of the later Purāṇas and in the works of the early Gauḍīya authorities.

Gopāla Kṛṣṇa in Vraja I: The Butter Thief of Bṛhadvana

Bṛhadvana is represented in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as the “great forest” where Kṛṣṇa grows up during his kaumāra phase, his early childhood years, from the time of his birth, when Vasudeva takes him from Mathurā to Nanda’s cowherd encampment and places him in the care of Nanda and Yaśodā, to the age of five, when the encampment moves to the forest of Vṛndāvana. Bṛhadvana, as the forest where Nanda’s cowherd encampment is located during this period, is portrayed as the site of many “wonders” (adbhutas) as well as the site of “ominous portents” (mahotpātas).³³ In the episodes of the kumāra-līlā that unfold in the Bṛhadvana period of his life in Vraja, as recounted in chapters 5 to 11 of the tenth book, Kṛṣṇa is represented as a “wonder baby,” who slays demons, overturns carts, and performs other marvelous feats, and as a mischievous butter thief, who steals the products of the cow, breaks butter-churning pots, and uproots trees in his insatiable quest for fresh butter.

Wonder Baby. One of the most renowned feats of the wonder baby is his slaying of Pūtanā, the infant-slaying demoness, who was sent to Vraja by Kaṃsa, Kṛṣṇa’s evil uncle, to kill him. Disguised as a beautiful woman, she picks up the baby Kṛṣṇa and gives him her poison-smeared breast. Kṛṣṇa squeezes her breast tightly with both hands and sucks out the poison together with her life-breath, after which her body reverts to its demonic form and the infant plays on the huge corpse of the demoness.³⁴ In another līlā episode, which occurs during the festivities following the ceremony celebrating the baby Kṛṣṇa’s first turning in the bed, Yaśodā places the infant in a cradle under a cart (śakaṭa). The baby Kṛṣṇa subsequently begins to cry, desiring his mother’s breast, and kicks up his feet. With a single kick by his tiny feet, the wonder baby overturns the cart, shattering its yoke, inverting its wheels and axle, and smashing the metal pots filled with various liquids that were on the cart.³⁵ In a later līlā episode, soon after Kṛṣṇa has begun to walk, Balarāma and the other cowherd boys complain to Yaśodā that he has eaten dirt, which he denies. Kṛṣṇa then opens his mouth, and Yaśodā is struck with amazement to see the entire universe, including Vraja as well as herself, in the body (tanu) of her young son, in his wide-open mouth.³⁶

Mischievous Butter Thief. Kṛṣṇa is celebrated in the kumāra-līlā as an adorable butter thief who delights in the products of the cow. Yaśodā and the other cowherd women of Vraja are not able to restrain the mischievous prankster and his cowherd playmates from repeatedly stealing their milk, butter, and yogurt—even when the milk products are hidden in pots hanging high up on the ceiling.³⁷ In one līlā episode, after Yaśodā discovers that the playful butter thief has broken her butter-churning pot and finds him sharing the fresh butter from a hanging pot with a monkey, she binds her young son with a rope to a heavy mortar to keep him out of mischief. He drags the mortar between a pair of arjuna trees (yamalārjuna) and uproots them, thereby liberating two celestial beings (guhyakas) who had been forced to incarnate as trees due to a curse by the celestial ṛṣi Nārada.³⁸

Departure to Vṛndāvana. In the course of the various episodes of his kumāra-līlā, Kṛṣṇa, in his guise as a wonder baby and mischievous butter thief, is represented as lifting the veil of māyā momentarily and revealing to his foster parents Nanda and Yaśodā and the people of Vraja his wondrous powers as the Lord of the universe who contains the entire cosmos within his body. However, through the illusory power of his māyā he then causes them to forget his cosmic nature in order to preserve their intimate loving relationships with him as an adorable, mischievous child. Amazed and confounded by the wonders (adbhutas) and the ominous portents (mahotpātas) that they have observed during their sojourn in the forest of Bṛhadvana—the threat of the infant-slaying Pūtanā, the overturning of the cart, the uprooting of the arjuna trees, and other potential calamities—the cowherd elders of Vraja become fearful for the safety of their children and decide to move the cowherd encampment from Bṛhadvana to the forest of Vṛndāvana.³⁹

Gopāla Kṛṣṇa in Vraja II: The Cowherd of Vṛndāvana

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa represents Vṛndāvana as the forest where Nanda’s cowherd encampment is located during the later phase of Kṛṣṇa’s youth, from the age of five, the final year of his kaumāra phase, to the age of sixteen, the conclusion of his paugaṇḍa phase. In contrast to Bṛhadvana, which it does not describe in any detail, the Bhāgavata provides lavish representations of Vṛndāvana as a large forested area to which Nanda and the gopa elders decide to move the cowherd encampment because it “has fresh groves, sacred (puṇya) mountains, grass, and plants and is suitable for habitation by gopas, gopīs, and cows.”⁴⁰ Vṛndāvana is represented as abounding in groves, meadows, mountains, hills, and rivers and includes within its pastoral arena Mount Govardhana and the Yamunā River.⁴¹

While Vraja in its narrow sense as the cowherd encampment is distinguished from the forest of Vṛndāvana that provides the setting for the encampment,⁴² in its broader sense as the land of Vraja it encompasses both the encampment and the forest, and in this context the terms Vraja and Vṛndāvana are at times used interchangeably to refer to the place where Kṛṣṇa is visibly embodied and unfolds the later phase of his līlā. For example, in one passage, quoted earlier, the terms Vraja and Vṛndāvana are used to designate a place that is endowed with special qualities (guṇas) because Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Bhagavān, is present there before one’s eyes (sākṣāt) and plays (root krīḍ + vi) there in the guise of a cowherd boy (gopāla-chadman). The special qualities (guṇas) of this place manifest in the nature of the seasons, in which summer appears as though it were spring.⁴³ The passage goes on to provide a luxuriant description of this pastoral playground of Kṛṣṇa, with its sensual display of verdant woods and meadows, rippling streams, cascading waterfalls, cool breezes, fragrant blossoms, dancing peacocks, buzzing bees, and crying cuckoos.⁴⁴

In another passage the Bhāgavata emphasizes the existential qualities of Vṛndāvana, which, like Vraja, is celebrated as the abode (āvāsa) of Kṛṣṇa:

Immediately looking around in all directions, he [Brahmā] saw (root dṛś) spread before him Vṛndāvana, which was filled with trees that provide a livelihood for the inhabitants and was pleasant throughout the year, where those who bear natural enmity for one another, such as human beings and wild animals, lived together as friends, and from which anger, desire, and so on had disappeared because it is the abode (āvāsa) of Ajita [Kṛṣṇa]. The supreme deity [Brahmā] saw there the transcendent (para), limitless (ananta) Brahman, who is without a second (advaya) and possessed of fathomless knowledge, playing the role of a boy (śiśutva-nāṭya) in the lineage of a cowherd.…⁴⁵

In this passage, as in the aforementioned passage, Vṛndāvana is invested with special qualities because Kṛṣṇa, the transcendent Brahman, makes his abode (āvāsa) there and plays there, enacting the part of a cowherd boy (śiśutva-nāṭya). The special qualities of Vṛndāvana are again manifested in the seasons, which are pleasant all year round. However, in this passage the idyllic nature of this bucolic world extends beyond the external qualities of the environment to the existential qualities of those who dwell there, who are portrayed as free from vices such as enmity, anger, and desire.

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa represents the forest of Vṛndāvana, like the land of Vraja that encompasses it, as consecrated by the bodily traces of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa is held to have “rendered Vṛndāvana extremely sacred (puṇya)” by his footprints,⁴⁶ and Vṛndāvana in turn “enhances the glory of the earth because it has been graced by the lotus-feet of the son of Devakī [Kṛṣṇa].”⁴⁷ The trees of the forest are portrayed as bowing down, laden with fruits and flowers, to touch his lotus-feet as he consecrates the ground with his footsteps.⁴⁸ Within the pastoral domain of Vṛndāvana, the Bhāgavata suggests that Mount Govardhana is particularly blessed, for it not only delights in the touch of Kṛṣṇa’s feet,⁴⁹ but it is also graced by the touch of his hand when, as I will discuss subsequently, he uproots the mountain and holds it up with one hand as an umbrella for seven days in order to protect the inhabitants of Vraja from the torrents of Indra’s rain.⁵⁰ Moreover, as we shall see, the Bhāgavata goes even further and suggests that during this līlā episode Kṛṣṇa assumes the form (rūpa) of Mount Govardhana.⁵¹ Mount Govardhana thus not only bears the imprint of Kṛṣṇa’s cowherd body but is itself represented as an embodiment of Kṛṣṇa.

In the līlā episodes that unfold in the Vṛndāvana period of his life in Vraja, as recounted in chapters 11 to 39 of the tenth book, Kṛṣṇa is represented as a heroic friend, who rescues the cowherd boys and other residents of Vraja from various demons and a series of other calamities, and as a passionate lover, who dances and frolics with the cowmaidens of Vraja in the rāsa-līlā in the groves of Vṛndāvana.

Subduer of the Serpent Kāliya. One of the most renowned of Kṛṣṇa’s heroic exploits in the Vṛndāvana period of his līlā in Vraja is his subduing of the serpent Kāliya. One day Kṛṣṇa perceives that the Yamunā River has become polluted by the poison of the serpent Kāliya, who has taken up residence there in a hrada, pool. He climbs a towering kadamba tree and plunges into the pool of poisoned water, where he becomes caught in the coils of the serpent. Freeing himself from the coils, Kṛṣṇa dances on the many heads of the serpent and, crushing them with the blows of his feet, subdues Kāliya. The wives of Kāliya pay obeisance to Kṛṣṇa and propitiate him to spare their husband’s life, after which he releases the serpent, banishing him and his family to the ocean.⁵²

Upholder of Mount Govardhana. In another of his wondrous feats, Kṛṣṇa rescues the residents of Vraja from the wrath of Indra, king of the gods, and becomes renowned as the upholder of Mount Govardhana (Govardhana-dhara). Kṛṣṇa convinces Nanda and the other cowherds to stop their preparations for the annual sacrifice (yāga) in honor of Indra and to make ritual offerings instead to Mount Govardhana. He then assumes the form (rūpa) of Mount Govardhana and consumes the offerings. Along with the people of Vraja, Kṛṣṇa then pays obeisance to himself in the form of the mountain. Indra becomes angry when he discovers that the people of Vraja have ceased to worship him, and he retaliates by unleashing torrential rains, hail, thunder, and lightning to punish them. Threatened with destruction, the gopas and gopīs approach Kṛṣṇa for help. He immediately uproots Mount Govardhana with one hand and holds it up as an umbrella without stirring from his position for seven days, providing refuge to the cowherds, cowmaidens, and cows of Vraja.⁵³

Slayer of Demons. In the course of his romps through the forest of Vṛndāvana, Kṛṣṇa encounters numerous demons and quickly and effortlessly disposes of them. For example, in one līlā episode the demon Agha assumes the form of a huge boa constrictor, one yojana (eight miles) long⁵⁴ and as vast as a mountain, and lays down on the path. Kṛṣṇa’s cowherd friends, mistaking it for a beautiful land formation with caves and mountain peaks, venture into the cavernous mouth of the boa-demon along with their calves and perish. Kṛṣṇa then enters the mouth of Agha and expands in his throat until he chokes him to death, after which he revives the gopas and calves.⁵⁵ In another līlā episode the demon Ariṣṭa assumes the form of a huge, ferocious bull and enters the cowherd encampment, bellowing loudly, terrifying the gopas and gopīs and causing the cows to flee in fear. Coming to the rescue of the inhabitants of Vraja, Kṛṣṇa challenges Ariṣṭa, and the bull-demon charges his cowherd adversary, who grabs him by the horns and drives him back. When Ariṣṭa charges again, Kṛṣṇa seizes him by the horns, hurls him to the ground, and after tearing out one of his horns, bludgeons the bull-demon with it until he expires.⁵⁶ Among the other demons with whom Kṛṣṇa grapples is the demon Keśī, who assumes the form of a gigantic horse for the purpose of slaying him. Shaking the earth with his pounding hoofs and causing terror in the cowherd encampment with his neighing, the horse-demon charges Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa playfully thrusts his arm into the mouth of the horse-demon, and as Keśī tries to bite his arm, it expands more and more until the demon chokes to death.⁵⁷

Rāsa-Līlā. The rāsa-pāñcādhyāyī, chapters 29 to 33 of the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, celebrate Kṛṣṇa’s festival of love with the gopīs, the cowmaidens of Vraja. With the intoxicating sound of his flute, Kṛṣṇa calls the gopīs to play, dance, and make love with him in the groves of Vṛndāvana. Captivated by the alluring sound of Kṛṣṇa’s flute, the gopīs drop whatever they are doing—whether milking cows, serving their husbands food, or nursing their infants—and rush to meet their beloved, ignoring the protests of their husbands and relatives. With intoxicating, unrestrained exuberance Kṛṣṇa frolics with the gopīs in the groves of Vṛndāvana, sometimes with one, sometimes with five or six, sometimes with all the gopīs at once. When the circle dance commences, the gopīs array themselves in a maṇḍala, or circle, to form the rāsa-maṇḍala. Entering into the rāsa-maṇḍala, Kṛṣṇa multiplies himself by means of his inconceivable power and assumes a separate form for each gopī. In this way he dances with all of the gopīs individually at the same time, expressing a paradigm of love that is simultaneously communal and personal.⁵⁸

Kṛṣṇa’s Transcendent Abode

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa distinguishes Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abodes—Mathurā, Vraja, and Dvārakā—where he resides during his sojourn on the material plane in Dvāpara Yuga, from his transcendent abode, or dhāman, to which he returns at the end of his earthly sojourn.⁵⁹ The dhāman of Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Bhagavān, is also called his loka, pada, gati, or kāṣṭhā⁶⁰ and is at times designated by the name Vaikuṇṭha.⁶¹

Kṛṣṇa’s dhāman is represented in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a transcendent (parama) domain, which is the supreme (para) realm above (upari) all other lokas, including not only the earthly domain of mortals (nṛ-loka) but also the celestial worlds of the gods. In contrast to Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abode in the land of Vraja, where his līlā unfolds within the finite boundaries of space and time, his transcendent abode is extolled as beyond the material realm of prakṛti constituted by the three guṇas and beyond the reach of time (kāla) and the illusory power of māyā.⁶² Moreover, the residents of Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode are held to have nonmaterial forms (mūrtis) similar to that of the Lord of Vaikuṇṭha himself.⁶³

A distinction between Kṛṣṇa’s terrestrial and transcendent abodes is established in Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.28.11–17 in which the gopas, who reside with Kṛṣṇa on the material plane in Vraja, ask him to reveal to them his imperceptible abode. He complies by revealing to them his transcendent loka beyond the three guṇas that constitute the material realm of prakṛti. In this passage the loka of Bhagavān is identified with the loka of Brahman and is represented as a limitless (ananta), eternal (sanātana) domain beyond the guṇas where Kṛṣṇa is perpetually glorified by the Vedas. As I will discuss in a later section of this chapter, this passage is commented on by Jīva Gosvāmin and serves as a critical prooftext in his analysis of the relationship between the earthly and transcendent dimensions of Kṛṣṇa’s dhāman.⁶⁴

Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10.28.11–17 suggests that, in contrast to Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abode in Vraja, which is visible to the material senses, his transcendent abode is not accessible to ordinary perception. However, the Bhāgavata emphasizes in this passage and several others that Kṛṣṇa’s loka can be directly “seen” (root dṛś) by becoming established through meditation in a state of samādhi beyond the guṇas. Great bhaktas such as Uddhava are held to have attained through meditation ecstatic absorption in the transcendent loka of Bhagavān.

For the period of a muhūrta (approximately forty-eight minutes), he [Uddhava] remained silent, deeply satisfied, immersed by means of intense bhakti-yoga in the nectar from Kṛṣṇa’s feet. The hair of his body was bristling all over and tears flowed forth from his closed eyes.… He slowly returned from the loka of Bhagavān to the realm of mortals (nṛ-loka).…⁶⁵

The ultimate goal of bhakti-yoga, according to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, is to attain the transcendent abode of Kṛṣṇa as a permanent state of realization, reveling for all eternity in the bliss of Bhagavān.⁶⁶ The gopīs of Vraja are represented as the paradigmatic exemplars of this path, for their passionate, all-consuming devotion to the cowherd of Vṛndāvana in his earthly abode ultimately found fruition in the bliss of eternal union with Bhagavān in his transcendent abode.⁶⁷

Vraja as a Pilgrimage Place

While the Bhāgavata Purāṇa celebrates Vraja as a mythic space, a literary construction embedded in its narratives of the life and līlā of Kṛṣṇa, other Purāṇas extol Vraja as a place of pilgrimage. Among the extant Purāṇas, five Purāṇas contain Māhātmyas celebrating Mathurā or Vṛndāvana:⁶⁸ Varāha Purāṇa, Skanda Purāṇa, Nārada Purāṇa, Ādi Purāṇa, and Padma Purāṇa. My analysis in this section will focus on the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa, which provides the most detailed representations of the region of Mathurā as a pilgrimage place. I will then turn in the following section to an analysis of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa, which incorporates elaborate maṇḍala imagery into its representations of Vṛndāvana as an object of meditation.⁶⁹

Among the Māhātmyas extolling the glories of Mathurā as a pilgrimage place, the oldest datable version is included in the Kṛtyakalpataru, an extensive digest (nibandha) of scriptural verses compiled by Lakṣmīdhara in the twelfth century ce. As Entwistle notes, all but the last six verses in Lakṣmīdhara’s Mathurā Māhātmya are ascribed to a version of the Varāha Purāṇa that is no longer available and that differs significantly from the extant Varāha Purāṇa. A number of the later Māhātmyas, including the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa and the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin, appear to have drawn some of their material from this original version of the Varāha Purāṇa.⁷⁰

The Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa is an independent unit consisting of twenty-nine chapters (150–178) that appears to be one of the latest sections interpolated into this Purāṇa. The Māhātmya was most likely composed by the beginning of the sixteenth century, prior to the landmark developments later in the century that led to the transformation of the landscape and culture of Vraja by the leaders of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya and the Puṣṭi Mārga. In contrast to the more systematically organized Māhātmyas that derive from the middle of the sixteenth century, such as the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin, the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa is a haphazardly arranged compilation of verses based on older material that may derive in part from the original version of the Varāha Purāṇa that has since been lost. Its eulogistic verses extol the fruits (phala) of pilgrimage to the city of Mathurā and the surrounding area and provide a randomly ordered litany of sites associated with the līlā activities of Kṛṣṇa, but they do not present a coherent vision of an encompassing pilgrimage circuit that traverses the entire area.⁷¹ Regarding the provenance and date of the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Entwistle concludes:

The detail it contains about places in Mathura and the immediate vicinity, its lack of any concept of a circuit encompassing the whole of Braj, its retention of “archaic” material, and the inclusion of passages in praise of the local Chaturvedi brahmins suggest that it is a revised version of an earlier māhātmya made by a pilgrimage priest (tīrthapurohita) of Mathura who had not been influenced by the works of the Vrindaban Goswamis.… [I]n the absence of any evidence to the contrary, a plausible and cautious estimation of its date of composition would be around 1500 or somewhat earlier.⁷²

The Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa is presented in the form of a conversation between Pṛthivī, the goddess of the earth, and Varāha, the boar avatāra, in which she asks him which is the greatest of all tīrthas. Varāha then proceeds to extol the unsurpassed glories of the region of Mathurā, where the supreme Godhead, of whom Varāha himself is a partial manifestation, will be born when he descends to earth as Kṛṣṇa in Dvāpara Yuga:

O Vasuṃdharā [Pṛthivī], neither in the heavens nor the nether regions nor the earth is there a place equal to Mathurā, for it is dear to me.… Hear in full, narrated by me, why my supreme abode (kṣetra) known as Mathurā, which is the highly lauded and delightful place of my birth (janma-bhūmi), is dear to me.⁷³

The region of Mathurā, which includes the city of Mathurā along with the surrounding area that is designated as Vraja in the works of the Gosvāmins, is celebrated in particular as the geographic place where the ṛṣis established temples and shrines to visibly mark as tīrthas the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s play (krīḍana or krīḍā) with the gopas and gopīs during his sojourn on earth, transforming the landscape into a place of pilgrimage.⁷⁴ The entire ground is considered sacred because it has been purified by the touch of his lotus-feet:

There is no place greater than Mathurā in the three worlds, O Devī, for I reside eternally (sarvadā) in Mathurā. Among all the tīrthas, O Devī, Mathurā is unsurpassed in its greatness because Kṛṣṇa played (root krīḍ) there and purified it, step by step. The entire land is marked by the footsteps of Kṛṣṇa.⁷⁵

Mathurā-Maṇḍala as a Lotus

The region of Mathurā is represented in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa as a maṇḍala, or circle, with a circumference of twenty yojanas (approximately 160 miles) that surrounds the city of Mathurā. Mathurā-maṇḍala is depicted in the shape of a lotus, with mūrtis (ritual images) of five manifestations of Kṛṣṇa stationed at key locations on the lotus as the presiding deities of Mathurā-maṇḍala: the mūrti of Keśava at Kṛṣṇa’s birthplace (janma-bhūmi) in the city of Mathurā is located in the pericarp (karṇikā), the seed-vessel in the center of the lotus; the mūrti of Harideva in Govardhana is on the western petal; the mūrti of Govinda in Vṛndāvana is on the northern petal; the mūrti of Viśrānti at the Viśrānti-tīrtha on the Yamunā River is on the eastern petal; and the mūrti of Varāha is on the southern petal.

My Mathurā-maṇḍala is twenty yojanas, and this lotus bestows mukti (liberation) on all, O most fortunate one. Keśava, the destroyer of afflictions (kleśas), is stationed in its pericarp (karṇikā), O Devī. The pericarp is one yojana, and I abide there perpetually (sadā). Those people who die while in the pericarp are eligible for mukti, O Vasuṃdharā [Pṛthivī], and those who die while anywhere in [the lotus] also attain mukti. Having seen the deity Hari, the Lord of lords, who resides in Govardhana on the western [petal], one’s mind is purified. Having seen the most auspicious deity Govinda on the northern [petal], one does not fall again into saṃsāra until the time of the final deluge. Having seen the deity known as Viśrānti who is stationed on the eastern petal, a person attains mukti, of this there is no doubt. On the southern [petal] there is an image (pratimā) of me [Varāha], which is divine in form, great in stature, and beautiful, resembling the appearance of Keśava. Having seen that image, O Devī, a person delights in the company of Brahmā.⁷⁶

This passage, which is also found in the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin,⁷⁷ presents an incipient “maṇḍalization” of the region of Mathurā that is more fully elaborated in formulations found in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa and in Jīva Gosvāmin’s commentaries on the lotus-maṇḍala imagery of the Brahma Saṃhitā, which I will discuss later in this chapter.⁷⁸ In this passage from the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, the image of a lotus-maṇḍala is superimposed on the geographic area of Mathurā, investing the area with the qualities of a transmundane space, but at the same time the overall emphasis in the Māhātmya’s representations of the Mathurā region is on its role as a pilgrimage maṇḍala, a circuit of pilgrimage sites to be circumambulated on foot, not on its role as a meditation maṇḍala to be visualized in the mind. The simple image of the four-petaled lotus stands in stark contrast to the later formulations of the Padma Purāṇa and Jīva Gosvāmin in which, as we shall see, the lotus is represented as a complex geometric diagram that functions as a meditation maṇḍala to facilitate experiential realization of Kṛṣṇa in his transcendent abode.

This passage, which is also found in the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin,⁷⁷ presents an incipient “maṇḍalization” of the region of Mathurā that is more fully elaborated in formulations found in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa and in Jīva Gosvāmin’s commentaries on the lotus-maṇḍala imagery of the Brahma Saṃhitā, which I will discuss later in this chapter.⁷⁸ In this passage from the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, the image of a lotus-maṇḍala is superimposed on the geographic area of Mathurā, investing the area with the qualities of a transmundane space, but at the same time the overall emphasis in the Māhātmya’s representations of the Mathurā region is on its role as a pilgrimage maṇḍala, a circuit of pilgrimage sites to be circumambulated on foot, not on its role as a meditation maṇḍala to be visualized in the mind. The simple image of the four-petaled lotus stands in stark contrast to the later formulations of the Padma Purāṇa and Jīva Gosvāmin in which, as we shall see, the lotus is represented as a complex geometric diagram that functions as a meditation maṇḍala to facilitate experiential realization of Kṛṣṇa in his transcendent abode.

Pilgrimage Networks

The Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa emphasizes the extraordinary fruits (phala) that can be obtained by visiting the pilgrimage sites associated with the five mūrtis on the lotus-maṇḍala: Keśava in the pericarp, Harideva on the western petal, Govinda on the northern petal, Viśrānti on the eastern petal, and Varāha on the southern petal.⁷⁹ Although the Māhātmya does not provide a coherent vision of a single encompassing pilgrimage circuit that interconnects all the sites in Mathurā-maṇḍala, it does discuss a number of discrete pilgrimage networks in different regions of the maṇḍala, and four of the five mūrtis on the lotus function as key nodes in these networks: Keśava and Viśrānti are associated with the pilgrimage network of the city of Mathurā, Govinda is associated with the pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana, and Harideva is associated with the pilgrimage network of Govardhana. With respect to the mūrti of Varāha that the Māhātmya locates in the southern area of the lotus-maṇḍala, the specific location and role of this mūrti in the pilgrimage itinerary are not defined and the mūrti itself appears to have since been lost.⁸⁰

The Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa devotes three chapters (156–158) to the procedure and benefits of circumambulating (pradakṣinā or parikrama) the city of Mathurā, which is represented as the center of the lotus-maṇḍala. It begins by extolling the benefits of circumambulating the mūrti of Keśava at Kṛṣṇa’s birthplace (janma-bhūmi) in Mathurā, which is celebrated as the center of the center: the central node in the pericarp of the lotus-maṇḍala,⁸¹ the navel of the universe from which the supreme Godhead himself is born. Having circumambulated the mūrti of Keśava and obtained his darśana, the pilgrim is enjoined to perform pūjā to the deity with ghee lamps and other offerings and to sing his glories in kīrtana.⁸²

The mūrti of the “deity known as Viśrānti” on the eastern petal of the lotus-maṇḍala is represented in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa as another major node in the pilgrimage network of the city of Mathurā. This mūrti has not survived, and hence we do not know which specific manifestation of Kṛṣṇa is intended when the text speaks of the “deity known as Viśrānti.”⁸³ The Māhātmya identifies the mūrti’s location as Viśrānti-tīrtha, which is represented as the center of a network of twenty-four bathing tīrthas that are arranged in the shape of a half moon on the western bank of the Yamunā River, with twelve tīrthas lying to the south of Viśrānti-tīrtha and twelve tīrthas lying to its north.⁸⁴ According to the Māhātmya, the fruits (phala) that are attained by bathing in all the tīrthas are attained by bathing in Viśrānti-tīrtha and obtaining darśana of the mūrti at that site, which is known as Viśrānti because Kṛṣṇa is held to have taken rest (viśrāma) there.⁸⁵ According to the prevailing pilgrimage itinerary that is still followed by contemporary pilgrims today, the traditional starting-point for circumambulation of the city of Mathurā and of the whole of Vraja is Viśrānti-tīrtha, and the Varāha Purāṇa’s account accords with this itinerary by recommending that the pilgrim inaugurate the circumambulation of the city of Mathurā by bathing in Viśrānti-tīrtha and obtaining darśana of the mūrti there, after which he or she should visit the mūrti of Keśava.⁸⁶

The mūrti of Govinda on the northern petal of the lotus-maṇḍala is the central node in the pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana. Vṛndāvana itself is represented in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa as part of a larger pilgrimage network comprising the twelve forests that surround the city of Mathurā: Madhuvana, Tālavana, Kundavana (Kumudavana), Kāmyakavana (Kāmyavana), Bahulavana (Bahulāvana), Bhadravana, Khādiravana (Khadiravana), Mahāvana, Lohajaṅghavana (Lohavana), Bilvavana, Bhāṇḍīravana, and Vṛndāvana.⁸⁷ As Haberman notes, “Whatever it indicates about actual pilgrimage activity in the area of Braj prior to…the sixteenth century, this list of twelve forests indicates the heart of an ideal itinerary which provided a framework for later developments.”⁸⁸ In contrast to its cursory treatment of the other eleven forests, the Māhātmya devotes an entire chapter (154) to Vṛndāvana, which is celebrated as the culmination of the twelve-forest schema and a network of pilgrimage sites in its own right. Vṛndāvana is represented as the luxuriant forest where Kṛṣṇa romped and played with the gopas, gopīs, and cows in crystalline ponds and vine-laden groves and engaged in heroic exploits in which he vanquished various demons.⁸⁹ According to the Māhātmya, pilgrims who visit Mathurā-maṇḍala should journey to Vṛndāvana north of the city of Mathurā and obtain darśana of the mūrti of Govinda.⁹⁰ Among other tīrthas in Vṛndāvana that the pilgrim is enjoined to visit, the Māhātmya mentions in particular Keśi-tīrtha, the site where Kṛṣṇa slew the horse-demon Keśī; Kāliya-hrada, the pool where he subdued the serpent Kāliya; and Dvādaśāditya, the site where Kṛṣṇa, his body chilled from his bout with Kāliya in the water, warmed himself with the heat radiated by the twelve Ādityas, sun deities.⁹¹

The mūrti of Harideva on the western petal of the lotus-maṇḍala is the central node in Govardhana, which, like Vṛndāvana, is represented as a discrete pilgrimage network within Mathurā-maṇḍala to which the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa devotes an entire chapter (162). The pilgrim is enjoined to travel to the area of Govardhana to the west of the city of Mathurā and to bathe in an unnamed kuṇḍa there—called Brahma-kuṇḍa in the Mathurā Māhātmya of Rūpa Gosvāmin—that has bathing tīrthas on its four sides guarded by the deities Indra (east), Yama (south), Varuṇa (west), and Kubera (north).⁹² The pilgrim is then instructed to embark on a circumambulation (pradakṣinā or parikrama) of Mount Govardhana, which is celebrated as the mountain that Kṛṣṇa lifted up as an umbrella to shelter the cowherds, cowmaidens, and cows from the torrents of Indra’s rain. According to the Māhātmya, the pilgrim should first bathe in the pond known as Mānasa-Gaṅgā and obtain darśana of the mūrti of Harideva,⁹³ after which he or she should proceed to circumambulate Mount Govardhana and visit the various tīrthas along the pilgrimage path. The circumambulation includes a visit to Ariṣṭa-kuṇḍa and Rādhā-kuṇḍa, which the Māhātmya extols as the sites where Kṛṣṇa slew the bull-demon Ariṣṭa and created a pond in which he bathed to absolve himself of the sin of slaying a bull, after which, at the behest of Rādhā, he named an adjacent pond in her honor.⁹⁴

In addition to the principal pilgrimage networks in Mathurā-maṇḍala—the city of Mathurā, twelve forests, Vṛndāvana, and Govardhana—the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa mentions a number of tīrthas that are located on the east side of the Yamunā River and that are identified in later Māhātmyas as sites in the forest of Mahāvana associated with līlā episodes in Kṛṣṇa’s early childhood. The Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa mentions, for example, the Yamalārjuna-tīrtha, the site where, after Yaśodā bound the mischievous butter thief with a rope to a heavy mortar to restrain him, he dragged the mortar between a pair of arjuna trees (yamalārjuna) and uprooted them. In this same area it also locates the site where the baby Kṛṣṇa overturned a cart (śakaṭa), smashing many pots.⁹⁵

Pilgrimage Fruits

In the course of its discussion of the various networks of pilgrimage sites in the different regions of Mathurā-maṇḍala, the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa emphasizes the specific fruits (phala) to be attained by visiting each tīrtha along the pilgrimage path—whether tīrthas associated with particular episodes in Kṛṣṇa’s līlā, tīrthas centered around particular mūrtis of Kṛṣṇa or other deities, bathing tīrthas located on the bank of the Yamunā River, or kuṇḍas located throughout the pilgrimage terrain that also serve as sites for bathing. Two of the most important fruits that are repeatedly emphasized in the Māhātmya are purification of all sins (pāpas or pātakas) and liberation (mukti or mokṣa) from the endless cycle of birth and death. The purifying power of the land derives from the purifying power of Kṛṣṇa, who during his sojourn on earth in Mathurā-maṇḍala is held to have purified the entire ground by the touch of his feet, step by step, as mentioned earlier. In addition to emphasizing the purifying and liberating power of Mathurā-maṇḍala, the Māhātmya also maintains that through visiting particular tīrthas the pilgrim can attain the lokas of particular deities, with attainment of the loka of Viṣṇu extolled as one of the supreme fruits of circumambulating the pilgrimage circuit.

At a critical juncture in the conversation between Pṛthivī and Varāha that frames the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Pṛthivī remarks that circumambulation (pradakṣiṇā) of the earth and pilgrimage to all its tīrthas yields greater fruits (phala) than the performance of sacrificial rituals (yajñas), the practice of austerities (tapas), or the giving of gifts (dāna). She then suggests that it is very difficult to traverse the entire earth and visit all of its tīrthas and asks Varāha if there is any means by which this feat might be accomplished. Varāha responds by noting that there are 660 billion (66,000 crores) tīrthas on earth and that it would be impossible for ordinary human beings to visit them all. However, he asserts, the benefits of visiting all the tīrthas on earth can be attained by visiting a single pilgrimage circuit: Mathurā-maṇḍala.⁹⁶

The fruits (phala) attained by visiting all the tīrthas in the seven continents (sapta-dvīpa) that constitute the earth—even greater than those are [the fruits] attained by visiting Mathurā. One who, having arrived in Mathurā, circumambulates it has indeed circumambulated the entire earth consisting of seven continents, O Vasuṃdharā [Pṛthivī].… The fruits (phala) attained by circumambulation of Mathurā are declared to be even greater than the fruits (phala) and merit (puṇya) that are held to derive from all the gods, all tīrthas, all gifts, and all sacrificial rituals.⁹⁷

Vraja as a Meditation Maṇḍala

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa, as we have seen, celebrates Vraja as a mythic space that provides the setting for Kṛṣṇa’s līlā on earth, while the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa extols Vraja as a place of pilgrimage. The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa presents a third perspective in which Vraja, or Vṛndāvana, is celebrated not only as a geographic place in North India that is the site of Kṛṣṇa’s earthly līlā and a center of pilgrimage but also as a transcendent space beyond the material realm of prakṛti that is the domain of Kṛṣṇa’s eternal līlā and an object of meditation.

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya is an independent unit consisting of fifteen chapters (69–83) that forms part of the Pātāla Khaṇḍa in the Southern recension of the Padma Purāṇa and is generally considered one of the latest sections interpolated into this composite work. The Southern recension has been adopted by all printed editions of the Padma Purāṇa and appears to derive from the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition in South India. The Bengali recension of the Padma Purāṇa, which is available only in manuscripts and is generally considered the older of the two recensions, does not include the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya chapters in its version of the Pātāla Khaṇḍa.⁹⁸

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa is presented in the form of a conversation between Śiva and his consort Pārvatī that extols the glories of Vṛndāvana as both a geographic place and a transcendent domain. The Māhātmya celebrates Kṛṣṇa as the Lord of Vṛndāvana (Vṛndāvaneśvara), the Lord of Vraja (Vrajendra), and the Lord of Gokula (Gokuleśvara) and generally uses the terms Vṛndāvana, Vraja, and Gokula interchangeably to designate the encompassing pastoral region that surrounds the city of Mathurā and includes twelve forests.⁹⁹ Vṛndāvana is distinguished from the cities of Mathurā and Dvārakā as the bucolic forested area where Kṛṣṇa abides in his essential form (svarūpa) as Govinda, the keeper of cows, and engages in līlā with the gopīs, gopas, and cows who are the residents of Vraja (vrajaukases or vraja-vāsins).

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya represents the pastoral area of Vṛndāvana along with the city of Mathurā as a thousand-petaled lotus, which it calls Mathurā-maṇḍala or Gokula.¹⁰⁰ It portrays Kṛṣṇa seated on a gem-laden throne on an octagonal yoga-pīṭha in the pericarp (karṇikā or varāṭaka) of the lotus.¹⁰¹ The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya presents two distinct iterations of the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala, which I would argue serve separate but interrelated functions. In the first iteration, which is described in the opening section of chapter 69, the lotus-maṇḍala functions as a geographic maṇḍala that presents a hierarchized vision of the twelve forests and the līlā-sthalas, sites of Kṛṣṇa’s playful exploits, that together constitute the sacred geography of his earthly abode.¹⁰² In the second iteration, which is described in the closing section of chapter 69 and in chapter 70, the lotus-maṇḍala functions as a cosmographic maṇḍala that presents a hierarchized vision of the realms and retinues that together constitute Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode.¹⁰³ Both of these iterations of the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala—as a geographic maṇḍala and as a cosmographic maṇḍala—are intended to be used as meditation maṇḍalas to aid the process of visualization and thereby facilitate experiential realization of Kṛṣṇa in his transcendent abode.

Before turning to an analysis of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s representations of the lotus-maṇḍala, I would like to briefly consider several issues pertaining to the text’s sources and relationship to the early Gauḍīya authorities. A number of scholars have noted that although Rūpa Gosvāmin and Jīva Gosvāmin frequently cite verses from the Padma Purāṇa, they only quote a few verses that correspond to verses found in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, all of which are located in one chapter (73). They do not cite critical sections of the Māhātmya, such as chapters 69 and 70 pertaining to the yoga-pīṭha in the center of the thousand-petaled lotus, which one would expect them to quote because the teachings in those sections closely agree with the Gosvāmins’ teachings. This has led Entwistle to conjecture that the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya may have been composed by the Gosvāmins, and more specifically “it is quite possible that the elaborate yogapīṭha description was written by one of the Vrindaban Goswamis some time in the middle of the sixteenth century and was then incorporated in the Padmapurāṇa.”¹⁰⁴ I would take issue with Entwistle’s conjecture on two fronts. First, the Gosvāmins, when quoting from the Padma Purāṇa, were most likely referring to the Bengali recension of the text, as Entwistle himself acknowledges,¹⁰⁵ and, as mentioned earlier, this recension does not include the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya chapters in its version of the Pātāla Khaṇḍa. Moreover, in the case of those few verses cited by the Gosvāmins that correspond to verses found in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, they identify these verses as coming not from the Pātāla Khaṇḍa but from an otherwise unknown Nirvāṇa Khaṇḍa (in the case of Rūpa) or Nirmāṇa Khaṇḍa (in the case of Jīva).¹⁰⁶ This suggests to me that the Gosvāmins were referring to a Bengali version of the Padma Purāṇa that is no longer available and that differs not only from the printed editions of the Southern recension but also from the extant Bengali manuscripts. Second, and more important, based on my own analysis of the descriptions of the yoga-pīṭha in chapters 69 and 70 of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, I would argue that these descriptions were not composed by the Gauḍīya Gosvāmins, but rather they derive from the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, a work that belongs to the corpus of South Indian Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās and was most likely produced by the Teṉkalai school of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition in the fourteenth century CE.¹⁰⁷

The second chapter of the third pāda (section) of the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā contains the earliest known representation of Vṛndāvana as a lotus-maṇḍala with a yoga-pīṭha in the center.¹⁰⁸ In its cosmography the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā allots a central role to Vṛndāvana as part of the transcendent domain of Goloka, although in the final analysis the text betrays its Pāñcarātra orientation by subordinating Goloka, the abode of Kṛṣṇa, to Viṣṇuloka, the abode of Nārāyaṇa. Vṛndāvana is represented as a transcendent realm that can be visualized in meditation as a thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala arranged in concentric rings radiating out from the innermost ring of eight petals, with Kṛṣṇa enthroned on an octagonal yoga-pīṭha in the pericarp of the lotus surrounded by his female devotees and the other members of his divine entourage. Entwistle remarks regarding the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s portrayal of Vṛndāvana:

The whole area of Mathura is described as a lotus with a thousand petals, arranged in seven concentric rings, the innermost having eight petals and each successive ring twice as many as the one it circles.… In the centre of the lotus, under a pavilion (maṇḍapa), is the octagonal yogapīṭha on which Krishna stands, surrounded by female devotees and with other members of his entourage round about. Such a visualization serves as a means of transporting the mind to the celestial Vrindavana in Goloka, for it is believed that those devotees who can imitate the divine sports and visualize themselves in the surroundings of Vrindavana will also attain eternal life in the company of Krishna.

The Bṛhadbrahmasaṃhitā has all the basic elements found in later elaborations of the yogapīṭha theme by the devotees of Braj: the lush and gem-encrusted paradise with its golden ground and wish-granting trees, the timeless environment where everything remains fresh and young, where nothing is subject to the degeneration and other constraints that affect the material world.¹⁰⁹

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s portrayal of the cosmographic lotus-maṇḍala in chapters 69 and 70 conforms closely with the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s description of the thousand-petaled lotus with its seven concentric rings, as I will discuss later. Moreover, a substantial number of verses cited in this section of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya also appear verbatim, or with slight variations, in the corresponding section of the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā.¹¹⁰ In order to account for the similarities and differences between the two texts, I would contend that the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya has borrowed from the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s description of the lotus-maṇḍala and has recast certain portions in order to re-orient the cosmography from a Pāñcarātra vision culminating in Viṣṇuloka to a Kṛṣṇa bhakta’s vision culminating in Vṛndāvana. The most plausible explanation for the parallels between the teachings of the early Gauḍīya authorities and those of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya is thus not that the Gosvāmins composed the yoga-pīṭha material and then inserted it into the Padma Purāṇa but rather that both the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya and the Gosvāmins drew from common source material derived from the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā. Indeed, as I will discuss in a later section, when Jīva Gosvāmin deploys the trope of the thousand-petaled lotus he explicitly cites the fifth chapter of the Brahma Saṃhitā, a work that is ascribed the authoritative status of a theological śāstra in the Gauḍīya tradition and on which Jīva himself wrote a commentary, the Digdarśanīṭīkā. This text appears to be a summary of the contents of the extant Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, and, as we shall see, it presents a variant of the lotus-maṇḍala imagery found in the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā that is critical to Jīva’s discussion of the transcendent structure of Goloka-Vṛndāvana.

Vṛndāvana as a Geographic Lotus-Maṇḍala

While the representation of Vṛndāvana as a cosmographic lotus-maṇḍala in chapters 69 and 70 of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa appears to have been directly influenced by the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s portrayal of the thousand-petaled lotus, the opening section of chapter 69 diverges from the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā in its representation of Vṛndāvana as a geographic lotus-maṇḍala. In contrast to the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, which focuses primarily on describing the transcendent Vṛndāvana as an object of meditation and does not appear to be acquainted with the specific tīrthas that mark the landscape of the earthly Vṛndāvana in North India, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya not only maps the cosmography of the transcendent Vṛndāvana but also maps the topography of its terrestrial counterpart. In this context the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s representation of Vṛndāvana as a geographic lotus-maṇḍala can be fruitfully compared to the portrayal of the geographic region of Mathurā as a lotus-maṇḍala in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa.

The Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, as discussed earlier, superimposes the image of a four-petaled lotus on the region surrounding the city of Mathurā and thereby invests the geographic place with the status of a maṇḍala—Mathurā-maṇḍala—that functions simultaneously as a pilgrimage maṇḍala, or circuit, and as a cosmic maṇḍala. Through this incipient maṇḍalization of the geographic area, the five manifestations of Kṛṣṇa who are assigned locations in the pericarp of the lotus-maṇḍala and on the four surrounding petals function simultaneously as mūrtis presiding over the major pilgrimage networks on the earthly plane and as guardian deities presiding over the cardinal directions on the transmundane plane. In contrast to the Varāha Purāṇa’s image of a four-petaled lotus, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa presents a much more complex maṇḍalization of the area in which it portrays Mathurā-maṇḍala as a thousand-petaled lotus that is both immanent and transcendent, existing as a geographic region on earth comprising the twelve forests that surround the city of Mathurā and as a transmundane domain encompassed by the discus (cakra) of Viṣṇu beyond the material realm of prakṛti.

The earth is celebrated as blessed among the three worlds because that [place] named Mathurā is absolutely dear to Viṣṇu. His own abode (sthāna), called Mathurā-maṇḍala, is his foremost abode, which is hidden (nigūḍha), multiform, and situated around a city. Mathurā-maṇḍala is in the form of a thousand-petaled lotus and is a wondrous (adbhuta) Vaiṣṇava dhāman because it is encircled by the discus (cakra) of Viṣṇu.¹¹¹

Whereas the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa presents the twelve forests as a major pilgrimage network but does not include them in its representation of the lotus-maṇḍala, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa, in its initial iteration of the thousand-petaled lotus as a geographic maṇḍala, portrays Mathurā-maṇḍala as incorporating the twelve forests. Moreover, in contrast to the Mathurā Māhātmya’s enumeration of the twelve forests, which is spatially ordered with reference to their location on the pilgrimage route, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya presents a hierarchical ordering of the twelve forests in terms of their increasing ontological importance: Bhadravana, Śrīvana (Bilvavana), Lohavana, Bhāṇḍīravana, Mahāvana, Tālavana, Khadīrakavana (Khadiravana), Bakulavana (Bahulāvana), Kumudavana, Kāmyavana, Madhuvana, and Vṛndāvana.¹¹²

In accordance with the standard lists of the twelve forests that are found in sources pertaining to Vraja from the fourteenth century CE onward, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya thus includes Vṛndāvana as the culminating—and hence most important—forest in its enumeration of the twelve forests. However, the dominant view that is expressed throughout the Māhātmya is that Vṛndāvana, the greatest forest (mahāraṇya) among the twelve forests, ultimately incorporates the other eleven forests within it. Vṛndāvana, in its identification with the broader pastoral arena known as Gokula or Vraja, is celebrated as the great abode (mahat-pada) that encompasses the entire thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala, while at the same time, as the abode of Govinda, it is identified with the pericarp (karṇikā or varāṭaka) at the center of the lotus-maṇḍala. In contrast to the image of the four-petaled lotus-maṇḍala in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, in which Mathurā is assigned primacy of place as the seat of Keśava in the pericarp of the lotus and Vṛndāvana is relegated to a subsidiary position as the seat of Govinda in the northern petal, in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s image of the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala the spatial hierarchy is reversed: Mathurā is relegated to a subsidiary position and Vṛndāvana is assigned primacy of place as the seat of Govinda in the pericarp of the lotus and also as the broader pastoral region that encompasses the surrounding petals of the thousand-petaled lotus.

The great abode (mahat pada) known as Gokula [Vṛndāvana] is a thousand-petaled lotus. The pericarp (karṇikā) of that lotus is the great dhāman, the supreme abode (sthāna) of Govinda, which is adorned with a gemladen pavilion (maṇḍapa) in which he is stationed on a golden pīṭha. From the pericarp the petals sequentially unfold in the cardinal directions and the intermediate directions.… Vṛndāvana is the pericarp (varāṭaka) of that thousand-petaled lotus by whose touch the earth is rendered blessed among the three worlds.¹¹³

In its portrayal of the geographic maṇḍala, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya does not describe in detail all of the concentric rings that constitute the thousand-petaled lotus but focuses instead on the two inner rings of petals that unfold from the pericarp: the innermost ring of eight petals that encircles the pericarp and the second ring of sixteen petals that encircles the first ring. On the eight petals of the innermost ring, which are enumerated in order of the eight directions (four cardinal directions and four intermediate directions), are located particular līlā-sthalas and other sites in the immediate vicinity of Vṛndāvana, such as Kāliya-hrada, the pool where Kṛṣṇa subdued the serpent Kāliya; Dvādaśāditya, the site where, after subduing Kāliya, Kṛṣṇa warmed himself with the rays of the twelve Ādityas; and Cīra Ghat, the site where Kṛṣṇa stole the gopīs’ garments as they bathed in the Yamunā River.¹¹⁴ On the sixteen petals of the second ring are located sites in outlying areas, such as Mount Govardhana and Nandīśvara, the village of Nanda, as well as nine of the forests in the twelve-forest network that is included in the broader pastoral region of Vṛndāvana. The description culminates in a celebration of the forest of Mahāvana on the sixteenth petal, which contains the līlā-sthalas associated with Kṛṣṇa’s early childhood adventures, such as the site where the baby Kṛṣṇa sucked the life-breath out of the demoness Pūtanā and the site where the playful butter thief dragged a mortar between a pair of arjuna trees (yamalārjuna) and uprooted them.¹¹⁵

While the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya thus correlates many of the petals of its lotus-maṇḍala with important tīrthas that are also found in the pilgrimage networks delineated by the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s geographic maṇḍala is not a pilgrimage maṇḍala. It is not a pilgrimage map designed to guide pilgrims in their circumambulation of the tīrthas, but rather, I would argue, it is a cognitive map designed to aid bhaktas in their meditative visualization of Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abode. Immediately following its description of the geographic maṇḍala, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya declares that the greatest of sages are always one-pointedly devoted to meditation (dhyāna) on this most recondite (gopita) of places in the three worlds.¹¹⁶

Vṛndāvana as the Abode and Body of Govinda

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa, like the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, provides lavish descriptions of Vṛndāvana as a pastoral paradise that engages the entire sensorium with its lush, vine-laden forests and groves; undulating streams flowing with sweet waters; fragrant, multicolored flowers; iridescent displays of dancing peacocks; and melodious sounds of intoxicated cuckoos and bees. Like the Bhāgavata, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya celebrates not only the multisensory delights of the environment but also the existential qualities of the place, whose residents are portrayed as Vaiṣṇavas of pure nature (śuddha-sattva) who are immersed in the bliss of preman for Kṛṣṇa and free from vices such as egoism, anger, and jealousy.¹¹⁷ However, in contrast to the Bhāgavata, which distinguishes Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abode in Vraja from the transcendent abode to which he returns at the end of his earthly sojourn, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya insists that Kṛṣṇa’s earthly abode and his transcendent abode are simply two aspects of his singular dhāman known as Vṛndāvana. Vṛndāvana is celebrated as that eternal (nitya), nonchanging (avyaya), transcendent (parama or para) domain that exists beyond the material realm of the Brahmā-universes (brahmāṇḍopari-saṃsthita) and at the same time exists on earth in its full glory (svayaṃ bhuvi).¹¹⁸ The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya portrays the terrestrial Vṛndāvana as endowed with the qualities of the transcendent Vṛndāvana and as the most hidden (guhya) and recondite (gopita) place on earth. Although located in the material realm of prakṛti, it does not partake of the guṇas and is eternal (nitya), imperishable (akṣara), nonchanging (avyaya), and free from suffering, old age, and death.

Glorious Vṛndāvana is delightful, the abiding-place of the fullness of blissful rasa (pūrṇānanda-rasāśraya). There are abundant wish-fulfilling gems, and the water is full of the taste of ambrosial nectar (amṛta).… It is free from sorrow and suffering, free from old age and death, and free from anger, jealousy, divisiveness, and egoism. It abounds with the fullness of the blissful ambrosial nectar of rasa (pūrṇānandāmṛta-rasa), an ocean filled with preman and joy (pūrṇa-prema-sukhārṇava). The great dhāman is beyond the guṇas (guṇātīta), its essential nature full of preman (pūrṇa-prema-svarūpaka).… Vṛndāvana on earth is eternal (nitya) due to contact (sparśa) with the dust of his [Kṛṣṇa’s] feet.… The most hidden of the hidden (guhyād guhyatara) places on earth, Vṛndāvana is the delightful, imperishable (akṣara), nonchanging (avyaya) abode (sthāna) of Govinda that consists of transcendent bliss (paramānanda).¹¹⁹

The special nature of Vṛndāvana in both its transcendent and immanent aspects, according to the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, derives from its status as the abode (dhāman or sthāna) of Govinda—as the transcendent domain where Kṛṣṇa abides eternally in his divine body as a cowherd youth (kaiśora-vigraha) and as the geographic place where he walked the earth in Dvāpara Yuga. The above passage asserts that the eternality of the terrestrial Vṛndāvana is “due to contact (sparśa) with the dust of his feet”: Kṛṣṇa’s feet touched the earth and marked it with his bodily traces, and the landscape thereby became infused with his bodily presence. The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya ultimately maintains that Vṛndāvana is nondifferent (abhinna) from the body (deha) of Kṛṣṇa, and therefore the very touch (sparśa) of its dust is liberating:

It [Vṛndāvana] is nondifferent (abhinna) from the body (deha) of Govinda and the abode of the joy of pūrṇa Brahman. Liberation (mukti) is attained there by the touch (sparśa) of the dust.¹²⁰

Invoking the trope of the thousand-petaled lotus, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya declares that Vṛndāvana, as the pericarp (karṇikā) of the lotus, and the Yamunā River, which flows with blissful ambrosial nectar (ānandāmṛta) around the pericarp, are in the final analysis nondifferent (abhinna) from Kṛṣṇa and constitute a single body (vigraha): “The Kālindī [Yamunā], pericarp [Vṛndāvana], and Kṛṣṇa are nondifferent (abhinna). They are one body (vigraha).”¹²¹

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya continually extols Vṛndāvana’s incomparable status as the most recondite of all places (sarva-sthaneṣu gopita), which is the most hidden of the hidden (guhyād guhyatara), the most secret of the secret (rahasyānāṃ rahasya), and the most difficult of the difficult to access (durlabhānāṃ durlabha).¹²² Through such expressions it seeks to signal that although the earthly Vṛndāvana is endowed with transcendent qualities, its transcendent nature is hidden and is not visible (adṛśya) to the material eye (carma-cakṣus); it cannot be perceived by the material senses (agocara).¹²³ This point is emphasized in the following passage from chapter 75 of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, in which Kṛṣṇa reveals Vṛndāvana-rahasya, the secret of Vṛndāvana, to the celestial ṛṣi Nārada:

This delightful Vṛndāvana is my [Kṛṣṇa’s] only dhāman. Those who reside here in my presence (sākṣāt)—whether cows, trees, insects, humans, or gods—at death attain their ultimate end in me. Those cowherd wives who reside here in my abode (ālaya) are connected with me. The gods are devoted to me. This forest [Vṛndāvana], measuring five yojanas, is my divine body (deva-rūpaka). This Kālindī [Yamunā], which flows with transcendent nectar (paramāmṛta), is called the suṣumṇā, the central channel [of my body]. The gods and other beings exist here in subtle forms (sūkṣma-rūpatā). And I, who pervade it completely, will never leave this forest, although my appearance (āvirbhāva) in and disappearance (tirobhāva) from this place occur yuga after yuga. This abode (sthāna) consisting of blazing splendor (tejo-maya) cannot be seen (adṛśya) with the material eye (carma-cakṣus).¹²⁴

This passage represents Vṛndāvana, Kṛṣṇa’s “only dhāman,” as having both earthly and transcendent dimensions. The animals, trees, human beings, and other beings who reside with Kṛṣṇa in his earthly abode in Vṛndāvana are promised a place with him in his transcendent abode when they leave their mortal bodies. The forest itself, which is a delimited geographic area of five yojanas (approximately forty miles), is ascribed a transmundane status as the divine body (deva-rūpaka) of Kṛṣṇa, which he abides in eternally and never leaves. The Yamunā River whose waters flow through the terrestrial forest is also allotted a transmundane status as the central channel that flows with transcendent nectar (paramāmṛta) through the divine body. While the earthly Vṛndāvana can be perceived by the material senses, its transcendent aspect is described as made of tejas, blazing splendor, and thus “cannot be seen (adṛśya) with the material eye (carma-cakṣus).” The implication of this passage, which the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya elaborates on elsewhere, is that ordinary human beings do not have the capacity to access the hidden dimensions of Vṛndāvana, for the material senses cannot penetrate beyond the surface manifestations to its transcendent reality. While the terrestrial features of the Vṛndāvana forest and the Yamunā River can be perceived by the material senses, their transcendent dimension, in which they are nondifferent (abhinna) from the divine body of Kṛṣṇa, can only be “seen” (root dṛś) with the nonmaterial eye of knowledge by those who attain through meditation direct experiential realization of Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode.

As we shall see, both Rūpa Gosvāmin and Jīva Gosvāmin cite variants of this passage that are critical to the Gauḍīya ontology of Vṛndāvana, although they identify the source as the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra, not the Padma Purāṇa.¹²⁵ This fact supports my conclusion that the Gosvāmins had in their possession a version of the Padma Purāṇa that did not contain the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya chapters (with the exception of some of the material found in chapter 73). If the Gosvāmins did have access to these chapters, they certainly would have quoted the Padma Purāṇa’s version of this passage rather than the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra’s version, because, as I discussed in Chapter 3, the Gauḍīyas ascribe transcendent authority to the Purāṇas as part of an expanded Vedic canon, whereas they do not allot comparable śāstric authority to Pāñcarātra texts such as the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra.

Vṛndāvana as a Cosmographic Lotus-Maṇḍala

Having provided in the opening section of chapter 69 a cognitive map of the terrestrial landscape of Vṛndāvana in the form of a geographic lotus-maṇḍala and having established that the geographic place is endowed with transcendent qualities, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya turns to an extended exposition of Vṛndāvana as a cosmographic lotus-maṇḍala in the closing section of chapter 69 and in chapter 70.

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s account of the cosmographic lotus-maṇḍala begins with a description of the luminous octagonal yoga-pīṭha that is located in a palace in the center of Vṛndāvana, in the pericarp (karṇikā) of the thousand-petaled lotus. The yoga-pīṭha is extolled as the “supreme abode (sthāna) of Govinda” where he sits on a gem-laden throne in the midst of an eight-petaled lotus whose petals coincide with the eight corners of the octagonal yoga-pīṭha.

In the center of Vṛndāvana… in the center of a beautiful palace (bhavana) there is a luminous yoga-pīṭha. Fashioned with eight corners, it is captivating in its manifold splendor. On it is a magnificent throne laden with rubies and other gems. An eight-petaled lotus, the seat of joy, is in the pericarp (karṇikā). That is the supreme abode (sthāna) of Govinda. How can its glory be described?¹²⁶

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya recommends meditating (root dhyā) on Kṛṣṇa, the Lord of Vṛndāvana, who is served on the yoga-pīṭha by a group of cowmaidens. It then provides the basis for the process of visualization by describing in lavish detail every part of the wondrous divine body (adbhuta-vigraha) of the cowherd Kṛṣṇa, from his dark, glossy curls adorned with peacock feathers to the lustrous jewel-like nails of his lotus-feet, which are extolled as the source of pūrṇa Brahman.¹²⁷

The account continues with a description of the seven concentric rings that constitute the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala and that radiate outward from the pericarp of the lotus where Kṛṣṇa is seated on his throne along with his consort Rādhā. Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā are encircled by the eight most beloved gopīs, who surround the throne in the innermost ring of eight petals. These eight gopīs, who are seated on the eight petals in the eight corners of the octagonal yoga-pīṭha, are identified with the eight prakṛtis, the eight aspects of primordial matter, for they are considered partial manifestations (aṃśas) of Rādhā, who is celebrated as mūla-prakṛti, the primordial source of all matter.¹²⁸

[One should meditate on] Govinda seated together with Rādhā on a golden throne.… In the yoga-pīṭha in the area surrounding the golden throne are the foremost among Kṛṣṇa’s beloved cowmaidens, every part of their bodies (aṅgas) filled with passion.… They are the eight auspicious prakṛtis and are foremost among Kṛṣṇa’s beloved cowmaidens.¹²⁹

The innermost ring of eight gopīs is surrounded by a second group of eight gopīs, who together with the original eight are identified with the sixteen prakṛtis and correspond to the second ring of sixteen petals.¹³⁰ These two circles of gopīs are in turn encircled by a third ring comprising myriads of Kṛṣṇa’s female devotees, including cowherd maidens (gopa-kanyās), maidens who embody the Vedic mantras (śruti-kanyās), and divine damsels (deva-kanyās).¹³¹

According to the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s cosmographic hierarchy, the three inner rings of the lotus-maṇḍala, in which a retinue of gopīs and other female devotees surround Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā on their throne, are located inside the palace, while the fourth ring is “outside the palace” (mandirasya bāhye).¹³² In the fourth ring are stationed four gopas who are Kṛṣṇa’s close friends among the cowherd boys and who are represented as the guardians of the four doors of the palace corresponding to the four directions.¹³³ They are surrounded in turn by a fifth ring comprising myriads of gopas and their cows.¹³⁴

The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s sectarian interests are most evident in its representations of the two outermost rings of the lotus-maṇḍala, which it relegates to the periphery of the cosmographic hierarchy by correlating them with domains that are outside of—and hence lower than—the domain of Vṛndāvana proper where Kṛṣṇa presides in his essential form (svarūpa) as the cowherd Govinda. In the sixth ring are stationed the four vyūhas—Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha—who are represented as the guardians of the four directions and are portrayed elsewhere in the Māhātmya as manifestations of Kṛṣṇa associated with Mathurā and Dvārakā.¹³⁵ Finally, in the seventh ring is stationed Viṣṇu, who as a “one-tenth portion” (daśāṃśa) of Kṛṣṇa¹³⁶ is assigned to a subordinate position in the periphery of the lotus-maṇḍala where he manifests as four Viṣṇus—white, red, golden, and black—who assume the role of the outermost doorkeepers guarding the four directions.¹³⁷

As mentioned earlier, I would contend that the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s account of the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala is directly modeled after the corresponding account found in the second chapter of the third pāda of the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, although it re-visions certain portions to give primacy in its cosmographic hierarchy to Kṛṣṇa’s abode over that of Viṣṇu, who is generally referred to as Nārāyaṇa in the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā account. In order to support my contention, I would like to briefly review the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s account and highlight the parallels and differences between the two texts’ representations. The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, like the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, represents Mathurā-maṇḍala as a thousand-petaled lotus with seven concentric rings (āvaraṇas), with Kṛṣṇa enthroned on an octagonal yoga-pīṭha in the pericarp (karṇikā or varāṭaka) of the lotus. Using nearly identical language and imagery to that found in a Vṛndāvana Māhātmya passage quoted earlier, the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā describes Vṛndāvana as the most hidden of the hidden (guhyād guhyatama) places, which exists simultaneously in the transcendent domain of Goloka and on earth and maintains its eternal (nitya), imperishable (akṣara) status even on the terrestrial plane.

Glorious Vṛndāvana is delightful, the abiding-place of the fullness of blissful rasa (pūrṇānanda-rasāśraya). The ground yields wish-fulfilling gems, and the water is full of the taste of ambrosial nectar (amṛta).… It is free from sorrow and suffering, free from old age and death, and free from anger, jealousy, divisiveness, and egoism. The great dhāman is beyond the guṇas (guṇātīta), its essential nature consisting of prema-bhakti (prema-bhakti-svarūpaka).… It is hidden (gūḍha), the most hidden of the hidden (guhyād guhyatama) places, by virtue of its being both inside and outside, situated in Goloka and also on earth.… It is the imperishable (akṣara), eternal (nitya), supreme (uttama) abode (sthāna) whose essential nature is bliss (ānanda-svarūpa).¹³⁸

After reflecting on the transcendent and immanent nature of Vṛndāvana, the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā embarks on its portrayal of the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala, beginning with the following description of the yoga-pīṭha in the pericarp of the lotus, which once again bears striking resemblance to the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s description of the yoga-pīṭha quoted earlier:

In the center of the forest of Vṛndāvana is my supreme pīṭha.… A ruby-laden pavilion (maṇḍapa) adorned with a canopy and banner is located there. In its center is a yoga-pīṭha. Fashioned with eight corners, it is resplendent with manifold gems.… On it is a beautiful throne laden with rubies. A great eight-petaled [lotus] is shining forth there in the pericarp (karṇikā) with its filaments. That is the beloved abode (sthāna) of Govinda. How can its glory be described?¹³⁹

The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā recommends meditating (root smṛ) on Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in the pericarp, after which it proceeds with an account of the seven concentric rings that constitute the thousand-petaled lotus-maṇḍala, with the first six rings corresponding to the first six rings of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s lotus-maṇḍala. The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā begins with a description of the innermost ring of eight petals that surrounds Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā on the throne and provides an enumeration of the eight gopīs seated on the eight petals that is nearly identical, with minor variants, to the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s enumeration.¹⁴⁰ It then provides an enumeration of the second group of eight gopīs who are stationed in the second ring of sixteen petals and who together with the eight gopīs in the innermost ring are celebrated as the sixteen prakṛtis.¹⁴¹ The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā continues with a description of the myriads of female devotees in the third ring of the lotus-maṇḍala, including the gopīs who revel with Kṛṣṇa in the rāsa-līlā, and provides an account of the various categories of maidens that overlaps with, but differs in detail from, that found in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya.¹⁴²

The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, like the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, signals a shift in the cosmographic hierarchy by distinguishing between those who are inside Kṛṣṇa’s palace—his retinue of female devotees in the inner three rings of the lotus-maṇḍala—and those who are “outside the palace” (mandirasya bāhye).¹⁴³ It allots the fourth ring to the four gopas who are the guardians of the four doors of the palace, using language that is strikingly similar to that used in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya.¹⁴⁴ Like the Māhātmya, it also allots the fifth ring to the myriads of gopas and their herds of cows.¹⁴⁵ At this point the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā formally marks the end of its account of the five rings that constitute the Vṛndāvana portion of the lotus-maṇḍala by including a brief discussion that has no parallel in the corresponding section of the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya. It reflects on the efficacy of the lotus-maṇḍala as a meditation device and maintains that those who draw a maṇḍala of Vṛndāvana, like the one it has just described, and worship it while meditating (root dhyā) on Kṛṣṇa engaged in līlā with the gopīs and gopas will attain Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode (parama pada) in Goloka when they cast off their material bodies (tanus).¹⁴⁶

The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s account continues with a description of the sixth ring of the lotus-maṇḍala, which, like the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, it allots to the abodes of the four vyūhas: Vāsudeva, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha. It explicitly states that the abode (sthāna) of Vāsudeva is “below” (adhas) Kṛṣṇa’s abode in Goloka and positions the abode of each of the subsequent vyūhas below that of the previous one.¹⁴⁷

While the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya’s account of the first six rings of the lotus-maṇḍala thus closely conforms to—and I would argue is directly modeled after—the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s account, it is in their respective descriptions of the seventh and final ring that the two texts part ways. The Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā provides an elaborate description of the seventh ring, which it allots to the abode of Nārāyaṇa, the supreme Godhead, in its increasingly sublime fourfold manifestations (caturdhā vyūha) as Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇuloka, Śvetadvīpa, and the Ocean of Milk (kṣīra-sāgara or dugdhābdhi).¹⁴⁸ Whereas in its account of the first six rings of the lotus-maṇḍala, the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā represents the movement from the center towards the periphery of the maṇḍala as a movement from higher to lower realms, in the case of the seventh ring it reverses the hierarchy and represents Nārāyaṇa’s fourfold abode in the final ring as the supreme (para) dhāman that is the culmination of the entire cosmographic schema. In the perspective of this Pāñcarātra text, Kṛṣṇa is a manifestation (vibhava) of Nārāyaṇa, and therefore even though his abode in Goloka is higher than the domain of the vyūhas, it is surpassed in greatness by the supreme dhāman of Nārāyaṇa, which is limitless in extent (ananta-pāra).¹⁴⁹ The Vṛndāvana Māhātmya, in adapting the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā’s account to its own sectarian perspective in which Nārāyaṇa is a “one-tenth portion” of Kṛṣṇa, jettisons the final section that describes Nārāyaṇa’s fourfold abode and substitutes its own hermeneutical reframing in which it asserts the seventh ring’s peripheral status as the outermost ring that is also the lowest rung in the cosmographic hierarchy: the place where Nārāyaṇa manifests in his subordinate role as four Viṣṇus who are the outermost doorkeepers of the maṇḍala.

The lotus-maṇḍala with its seven concentric rings functions in the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya not only as a cosmographic maṇḍala that maps and hierarchizes the realms and retinues that constitute Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode; it also functions as a meditation maṇḍala that is designed to support the process of visualization and thereby catalyze experiential realization of the transcendent dhāman of Kṛṣṇa. As I will discuss in Chapter 6, the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya ascribes primacy of place to meditation (dhyāna) as the preeminent means to realize Kṛṣṇa, and in chapter 72 it describes a particular method of meditation, which it refers to as the “meditation of the ṛṣis” (ṛṣi-dhyāna), that involves visualizing a simplified version of the cosmographic maṇḍala.¹⁵⁰

Geographic Place as Transcendent Space: Vraja-Dhāman in the Gauḍīya Tradition

The early Gauḍīya authorities appropriated and re-visioned Purāṇic representations of Vraja and contributed in two significant ways to the discursive and cultural reconstructions of Vraja in the sixteenth century. First, Caitanya and his followers—in particular, the six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana and Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa—assumed critical roles in the cultural reclamation of Vraja, mapping the narratives of Kṛṣṇa’s life in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa onto specific geographic locales and transforming Vraja from a mythic space into a pilgrimage place interwoven with tīrthas identifying the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s playful exploits. Rūpa Gosvāmin contributed to this process not only through his role in recovering and restoring the lost līlā-sthalas of Vraja but also through writing his own Mathurā Māhātmya in which he reconfigures the form and content of a Purāṇic Māhātmya to promulgate Gauḍīya constructions of pilgrimage that reflect the mid-sixteenth-century transformations of the Vraja region in which he himself participated.

The second major contribution of the early Gauḍīya authorities was in providing an analytical framework to support their discursive reimagining of Vraja as a bimodal domain that functions simultaneously as a geographic place and as a transcendent space. The earliest known representations of Vraja, or Vṛndāvana, as having both earthly and transcendent dimensions are found in the Bṛhadbrahma Saṃhitā, which, as discussed in the previous section, appears to have directly influenced the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa and to have indirectly influenced the early Gauḍīya authorities through the mediation of the Brahma Saṃhitā. The Gauḍīyas’ distinctive contribution is in developing an analytical framework to elucidate the ontological status of the transcendent Vraja-dhāman and its relationship to its earthly counterpart. The critical foundation of this analytical framework is provided by the categories of prakaṭa līlā, manifest līlā, and aprakaṭa līlā, unmanifest līlā, which Rūpa Gosvāmin introduces in his Laghubhāgavatāmṛta and Jīva Gosvāmin elaborates on in his Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha. This distinction between prakaṭa līlā and aprakaṭa līlā allows Rūpa and Jīva to (re)read the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s account of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā on two levels corresponding to the earthly and transcosmic planes. On the earthly plane, the Bhāgavata’s account is read as a narrative of the manifest līlā that occurs in the material space-time continuum when Kṛṣṇa descends to earth in Dvāpara Yuga. In the manifest līlā Kṛṣṇa travels through time between three geographic places on earth—the city of Mathurā; the pastoral region designated as Vraja, Gokula, or Vṛndāvana; and the city of Dvārakā—and unfolds his play in a progressive sequence of events. On the transcosmic plane, the Bhāgavata’s account is read as a narrative of the unmanifest līlā that goes on eternally in the transcendent dhāman of the supreme Bhagavān beyond the material space-time continuum and beyond Brahman. As discussed in Chapter 1, this transcendent dhāman—which is not named by Rūpa but is called “Kṛṣṇaloka” by Jīva, Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, and later Gauḍīya authorities—is the center of Gauḍīya cosmography and is subdivided into three dhāmans.¹⁵¹ The innermost dhāman is the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, variously called Goloka, Gokula, Vṛndāvana, or Goloka-Vṛndāvana, which has an earthly counterpart in the geographic region of North India that is variously designated as Vraja, Gokula, or Vṛndāvana. The two outer dhāmans of Kṛṣṇaloka are the transcendent domains of Mathurā and Dvārakā, which have earthly counterparts in the cities of Mathurā and Dvārakā.

Expanding on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s representations of Kṛṣṇa’s bodily investment in the land of Vraja, the Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment, as we shall see, re-visions and extends the notion of embodiment to include Vraja-dhāman in both of its dimensions—not only as a geographic place, but also as a transcendent space. On the transcosmic plane, the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, Goloka-Vṛndāvana, is represented as an extension of Kṛṣṇa’s absolute body (vigraha) and is identified with the form of Bhagavān (bhagavad-rūpa). On the earthly plane, the terrestrial Vraja-dhaman is represented as the body (deha or vigraha) and essential form (svarūpa) of Kṛṣṇa and functions as what I term a dhāma-avatāra through which Kṛṣṇa descends to earth and becomes embodied as a geographic place.

In the following analysis I will begin with a brief examination of the contributions of Caitanya and the early Gauḍīya authorities to the reclamation and restoration of Vraja. I will then provide an analysis of the contributions of the Mathurā Māhātmya of Rūpa Gosvāmin to Gauḍīya constructions of Vraja as a pilgrimage place that is invested with transcendent features. After briefly surveying representations of the sacred geography of Vraja as the body of Kṛṣṇa, I will devote the major portion of my analysis to the arguments developed by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha, which build on the framework developed by Rūpa in the Laghubhāgavatāmṛta. Jīva uses philosophical arguments as well as prooftexts from various śāstras to establish (1) the ontological status of the three transcendent dhāmans that constitute Kṛṣṇaloka; (2) the relationship between the transcendent dhāmans and their earthly counterparts; and (3) the special status of Vraja-dhāman as the supreme dhāman of Kṛṣṇa that functions not only as his abode but also as an extension of his body on both the transcosmic and earthly planes.

The Gauḍīya Reclamation of Vraja

Caitanya’s Pilgrimage to Vraja

The most authoritative account of Caitanya’s visit to Vraja in 1514 is given in Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Caitanya Caritāmṛta, which recounts how Caitanya circumambulated Vraja-maṇḍala, traveling through the twelve forests and visiting the līlā-sthalas, the sites where particular episodes of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā are held to have occurred during his sojourn on earth.¹⁵² The Caitanya Caritāmṛta was completed by Kṛṣṇadāsa, who was a resident of Vraja, around 1615,¹⁵³ and his account is thus a retrospective account that appears to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the discursive representations of Mathurā-maṇḍala in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa and the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin and, on the other hand, by the pilgrimage circuit established by Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa in the latter half of the sixteenth century, which I will discuss later. In any case, Kṛṣṇadāsa’s account, which represents Caitanya’s visit to Vraja as a paradigmatic pilgrimage, provided a framework for the Vana-Yātrā that has been followed by Gauḍīya pilgrims from the end of the sixteenth century to the present day.¹⁵⁴

According to Kṛṣṇadāsa’s hagiographic narrative, as Caitanya approached Mathurā and saw the city, he fell to the ground and prostrated, filled with preman. Having arrived in Mathurā, he bathed in the Yamunā River at Viśrānti-tīrtha and then visited Kṛṣṇa’s birthplace (janma-sthāna) where he offered obeisance to the mūrti of Keśava. After bathing in the twenty-four bathing ghats along the Yamunā and visiting the tīrthas in Mathurā associated with the most important mūrtis of Kṛṣṇa, Caitanya toured the twelve forests of Vraja with the aid of his local brahmin guide, beginning with the forests closest to Mathurā: Madhuvana, Tālavana, Kumudavana, and Bahulāvana. Kṛṣṇadāsa’s account emphasizes Caitanya’s bodily engagement with the land of Vraja and the flora and fauna of the forests. His body thrilling with the ecstasy of preman, he bathed in the kuṇḍas along the path of his pilgrimage. He caressed the cows and deer, who responded by licking his body with great affection. He embraced the trees and creepers, and they in turn shed ecstatic tears of honey and offered their fruits and flowers at his feet. As Caitanya chanted, “Kṛṣṇa bol! Kṛṣṇa bol!” all creatures, moving and nonmoving, began to reverberate with the Kṛṣṇa-sound, echoing his deep voice. He danced with the peacocks and rolled on the ground, overflowing with preman as he reveled in the sacred landscape of Vraja.¹⁵⁵

At the sight of Mathurā, his prema increased a thousand times, and when he was wandering in the forest, his prema increased a lakh [hundred thousand times]. In other countries, prema would arise at the name “Vṛndāvana,” and now he was actually roaming in that Vṛndāvana. Day and night his mind seethed in prema, and only out of habit did he succeed in bathing and eating and so on. In this way was his prema, as he wandered through the twelve forests.¹⁵⁶

Kṛṣṇadāsa recounts how Caitanya then proceeded to Govardhana. At Āriṭagrāma, or Ariṣṭagrāma, the site where Kṛṣṇa slew the bull-demon Ariṣṭa, he inquired about the whereabouts of Rādhā-kuṇḍa, but no one could tell him. However, Caitanya, the “all-knowing Bhagavān,” knew the location of the lost tīrtha and went to bathe in a small pool that he identified as Rādhā-kuṇḍa, the pond where Kṛṣṇa played every day with his beloved Rādhā. Overwhelmed by preman, he danced on the bank, recalling the līlā of Kṛṣṇa’s love-play with Rādhā at the kuṇḍa, and he used the mud of the kuṇḍa to make a tilaka, auspicious mark, on his forehead. As he proceeded on the path of his pilgrimage, Caitanya saw Mount Govardhana, and, mad (unmatta) with devotion, he prostrated on the ground, took a stone (śilā) from the mountain, and hugged it as the body (vigraha or kalevara) of Kṛṣṇa.¹⁵⁷ He visited the Harideva temple in the village of Govardhana and danced in ecstasy before the mūrti of Kṛṣṇa in his manifestation as Harideva Nārāyaṇa, who presides over the western petal of the lotus-maṇḍala of Vraja. After bathing in Brahma-kuṇḍa, he spent the night at Harideva temple. The next morning he bathed in Mānasa-Gaṅgā and proceeded to circumambulate Mount Govardhana. Although Caitanya was eager to obtain darśana of the mūrti of Gopāla whose temple was on the top of Mount Govardhana, he would not set foot on the sacred mountain because he considered it to be the body of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇadāsa recounts how Gopāla, out of love for Caitanya, caused his custodians to remove his mūrti from the temple on the mountain and take it to the village of Gāṅṭhuli. While bathing at Govinda-kuṇḍa, Caitanya heard that the mūrti of Gopāla had been taken to Gāṅṭhuli, and he went there to receive darśana. Overcome with preman, he danced before the mūrti and sang praises of Gopāla’s playful exploit in which he effortlessly lifted up Mount Govardhana with his hand to protect the inhabitants of Vraja from Indra’s deluge.¹⁵⁸

According to Kṛṣṇadāsa’s narrative, Caitanya proceeded to the forest of Kāmyavana, where he visited the sites of particular līlā episodes. He then went to Nandīśvara, the village of Nanda, and, after bathing in the kuṇḍas, he climbed the village hill and entered a cave where he obtained darśana of the mūrtis of the child Kṛṣṇa and his foster parents Nanda and Yaśodā. Caitanya then visited the forests of Khadiravana and Bhāṇḍīravana, after which he crossed the Yamunā and visited the forests of Bhadravana, Śrīvana (Bilvavana), and Lohavana on the east side of the river. He proceeded to the forest of Mahāvana, where he visited the sites associated with Kṛṣṇa’s early childhood, including the Yamalārjuna site where Kṛṣṇa, the mischievous butter thief, dragged a mortar between a pair of arjuna trees and uprooted them. Caitanya subsequently returned to Mathurā, but after seeing the crowds of people who had assembled there, he went to stay alone at Akrūra-tīrtha, a ghat on the Yamunā River located between Mathurā and Vṛndāvana.¹⁵⁹

Kṛṣṇadāsa recounts how Caitanya, using Akrūra-tīrtha as his base, made several trips to Vṛndāvana during which he visited the sites associated with other līlā episodes. For example, he bathed at Kāliya-hrada, the pool where Kṛṣṇa subdued the serpent Kāliya, after which he visited Dvādaśāditya, the mound where Kṛṣṇa was warmed by the rays of the twelve Ādityas after subduing Kāliya. He subsequently visited Keśi-tīrtha, the site where Kṛṣṇa slew the horse-demon Keśī. He then saw the site where Kṛṣṇa performed the rāsa-līlā with the gopīs, and, overcome with preman, his internal state of rapture was expressed externally as anubhāvas, bodily gestures and movements such as rolling on the ground, laughing, dancing, and singing, and sāttvika-bhāvas, involuntary physical manifestations such as loss of external consciousness and weeping.

[S]eeing the place of the rāsa, he fainted with prema. Again regaining consciousness, he rolled around on the ground, and laughed and danced and wept and fell, and sang in a loud voice. In such play he passed that day there.…¹⁶³

According to Kṛṣṇadāsa’s account, Caitanya also bathed at Cīra Ghat in Vṛndāvana, the site where Kṛṣṇa stole the gopīs’ garments, and he rested at the foot of an ancient tamarind tree that had been there since the time of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā. Kṛṣṇadāsa concludes his account by emphasizing that Caitanya’s attendants became concerned about his welfare, due to his increasing absorption in the madness of devotion as well as the crushing crowds pressing for his attention, and they eventually succeeded in convincing him to leave his beloved Vṛndāvana and return to Purī.¹⁶¹

While Kṛṣṇadāsa’s hagiographic account of Caitanya’s pilgrimage to Vraja thus presents him as the paradigmatic bhakta whose behavior is to be emulated by Kṛṣṇa bhaktas who undertake a pilgrimage to Vraja, at the same time Kṛṣṇadāsa reminds us at various points in the narrative that Caitanya is no ordinary bhakta but is an “avatāra of Kṛṣṇa” and the “all-knowing Bhagavān” himself.¹⁶² As discussed in Chapter 4, in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta Kṛṣṇadāsa celebrates Caitanya as the Kali Yuga avatāra who is Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā together in a single body, and as such he is both the object (viṣaya) of devotion in his essential nature as Kṛṣṇa, the supreme Godhead, and the vessel (āśraya) of devotion in his identity as Rādhā, the paradigmatic bhakta. At the close of his narrative of Caitanya’s visit to Vraja, Kṛṣṇadāsa recounts a conversation between Caitanya and a discerning man in which he attempts to conceal his identity by insisting that he is simply an ordinary jīva,¹⁶³ but the man pierces through the veil of illusion and recognizes his true identity as Vrajendranandana, the son of Nanda the lord of Vraja.

The man said [to Caitanya]: “You are not like a jīva. Your person and your nature are those of Kṛṣṇa. I see you in the form of Vrajendranandana, though hidden beneath a golden complexion. By tying musk in a cloth it cannot be hidden; so your Īśvara-nature cannot be concealed. Your nature is not of this world, and is imperceptible to [ordinary] intelligence; and seeing you, the world is mad with Kṛṣṇa-prema.”¹⁶⁴

By reminding us of Caitanya’s special status, Kṛṣṇadāsa invests his narrative with another layer of signification in which Caitanya’s engagement with the land of Vraja and with the mūrtis in its temples can be (re)read as the self-interacting dynamics of Bhagavān’s divine play: as he circumambulates Vraja-maṇḍala, Kṛṣṇa’s yuga-avatāra, embodiment in the form of a human being, revels in his own dhāman, embodiment in the form of a place, and reveres his own arcā-avatāras, embodiments in the form of ritual images, as he rediscovers the sites of his own līlā.

The Six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana

As discussed in the Introduction, Caitanya is represented in Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Caitanya Caritāmṛta and other hagiographies as instructing Rūpa Gosvāmin and Sanātana Gosvāmin to go from Bengal to Vraja, recover the lost līlā-sthalas of Vraja-maṇḍala, and establish temples and shrines to visibly mark the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s playful exploits as tīrthas.¹⁶⁵ The two brothers, in accordance with Caitanya’s instructions, settled permanently in Vraja—Rūpa in 1516 and Sanātana in 1517—and established two of the most important temples in Vṛndāvana: the Govindadeva temple and the Madanamohana temple.

Rūpa is credited in hagiographic accounts with discovering the black stone mūrti of Govindadeva, the presiding deity of Vṛndāvana, which, as mentioned in the Introduction, is revered as a svayam-prakaṭa (self-manifested) mūrti that revealed itself to him in 1533 or 1534 at the site of the original yoga-pīṭha where Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā enjoyed their nightly trysts. Rūpa then established the Govindadeva temple to house the mūrti. A new Govindadeva temple in red sandstone was subsequently built on the site in 1590 by Rājā Mān Siṅgh of Amber (r. 1589–1614 CE), who was the highest ranking Hindu officer in the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605 CE). The largest of the Hindu edifices built during the reign of Akbar as part of his court’s royal patronage of Vraja, the Govindadeva temple is described by Frederick S. Growse, in his 1883 district memoir of Mathurā, as the “most impressive religious edifice that Hindu art has ever produced, at least in Upper India.”¹⁶⁶ In the latter half of the seventeenth century iconoclastic attacks were made on the temples of Mathurā and Vṛndāvana at the behest of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707 CE), and the original mūrti of Govindadeva was removed from the temple in Vṛndāvana and taken to a series of safer locales, eventually becoming established in a new temple built by Mahārājā Jai Siṅgh II (r. 1700–1743 CE) at the center of his palace in his newly constructed royal city of Jaipur.¹⁶⁷

Sanātana Gosvāmin is credited in hagiographic accounts with recovering the mūrti of Kṛṣṇa as Madanamohana, enchanter of the god of love, from the wife of a Chaube brahmin and installing the deity for worship on the Dvādaśāditya mound above the Yamunā. Sanātana subsequently oversaw the establishment of the Madanamohana temple at the site, another impressive edifice in red sandstone that was constructed with funds provided by a wealthy merchant. During the iconoclastic raids of the late seventeenth century, the original mūrti of Madanamohana, like that of Govindadeva, was removed from Vṛndāvana and was eventually established in a new temple built by Mahārājā Gopāla Siṅgh opposite his palace in Karauli, a small town southeast of Jaipur.¹⁶⁸

Rūpa and Sanātana were joined in Vraja by four other disciples of Caitanya, who together are renowned as the “six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana” and are credited with recovering many of the lost līlā-sthalas of Vraja, particularly in the areas of Vṛndāvana and Rādhā-kuṇḍa. According to hagiographic accounts, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin, the son of a Śrīvaiṣṇava brahmin priest at the Śrīraṅgam temple in South India, became a disciple of Caitanya and was eventually instructed by him to move to Vṛndāvana and assist Rūpa and Sanātana in reestablishing the tīrthas of Vraja. In 1542, soon after Gopāla Bhaṭṭa moved to Vṛndāvana, a svayam-prakaṭa mūrti of Kṛṣṇa as Rādhāramaṇa, the beloved of Rādhā, is held to have spontaneously appeared out of a śālagrāma stone worshiped by him, and he subsequently performed the formal abhiṣeka ceremony establishing the worship of the deity. As mentioned in the Introduction, Rādhāramaṇa is unique among the mūrtis established by the six Gosvāmins in that it is the only mūrti that remained in Vraja and was not removed from the area in response to the iconoclastic attacks of the late seventeenth century.¹⁶⁹

Raghunāthadāsa Gosvāmin, the son of a wealthy Bengali landowner, moved from Purī to Vraja to assist Rūpa and Sanātana in the reclamation of Vraja following Caitanya’s death in 1533. According to hagiographic accounts, he settled at Rādhā-kuṇḍa and was instrumental in establishing it as a major center of pilgrimage for the Bengali followers of Caitanya. In his role as the first mahanta (custodian) of Rādhā-kuṇḍa, he is credited with excavating the two conjoining ponds—Rādhā-kuṇḍa, Rādhā’s pond, in 1546 and Śyāma-kuṇḍa, Kṛṣṇa’s pond, in 1553—at the site of the small pool that Caitanya himself, during his visit to Vraja, had identified as the place where Kṛṣṇa played every day with his beloved Rādhā.¹⁷⁰

Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin, the son of Tapana Miśra, a brahmin disciple with whom Caitanya stayed in Vārāṇasī, is represented in hagiographic accounts as studying the Bhāgavata Purāṇa for four years in Vārāṇasī at the behest of Caitanya, after which he was instructed to join Rūpa and Sanātana in Vṛndāvana. As mentioned in Chapter 3, he became renowned for his expertise in Bhāgavata-paṭhana and dedicated his life to reciting and expounding the Bhāgavata in the assembly of Rūpa and Sanātana before the mūrti at the Govindadeva temple established by Rūpa. According to the Caitanya Caritāmṛta, Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa eventually arranged for one of his disciples to build a temple in honor of Govinda—a statement that is traditionally understood as a reference to the Govindadeva temple built by Rājā Mān Siṅgh—and he himself provided a flute and other ornaments for the mūrti. For the rest of his life he remained blissfully absorbed in reciting and recounting stories of Kṛṣṇa from the Bhāgavata.¹⁷¹

Jīva Gosvāmin joined his uncles Rūpa and Sanātana in Vṛndāvana by 1541 and assisted Rūpa in editing the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, which was completed that year. According to hagiographic accounts, in 1542, soon after Jīva’s arrival in Vṛndāvana, Rūpa gave him a mūrti of Kṛṣṇa as Rādhādāmodara that he himself had carved, and in 1558 Jīva bought land for the Rādhādāmodara temple and installed the mūrti in the temple. He eventually succeeded Rūpa and Sanātana as the institutional leader of the Gauḍīya Sampradāya in Vraja. Some years after his uncles had passed away, in an imperial edict (farmān) dated 1568, the Mughal emperor Akbar officially recognized Jīva as the custodian of the Govindadeva temple built by Rūpa and the Madanamohana temple established by Sanātana. In addition, at the time of his passing in 1584, Raghunāthadāsa bequeathed his property to Jīva in his final testament. Jīva succeeded Raghunāthadāsa as the custodian of Rādhā-kuṇḍa, and in his role as the second mahanta he secured title to the land around the complex and inspired Rājā Mān Siṅgh to build brick containments for the two ponds in 1591.¹⁷²

Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa and the Vana-Yātrā

Besides the six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana, the other Gauḍīya authority who assumed a pivotal role in the process of “myth-mapping” and reclamation of the lost sites of Vraja in the sixteenth century is Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, a brahmin from Madurai in South India who arrived in the area in 1545. Revered as the great “Ācārya (teacher) of Vraja,” he is credited with creating the Vana-Yātrā (Hindi Ban-Yātrā), the encompassing pilgrimage circuit that encircles the entire region of Vraja, and with providing in his Vrajabhaktivilāsa (1552) the first detailed itinerary for the circuit, which he determined to have a circumference of eighty-four krośas (approximately 168 miles). More than any other figure, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa is credited with “rediscovering” the līlā-sthalas of Vraja, the sites of Kṛṣṇa’s playful exploits recounted in the narratives of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa—with locating the forests, groves, hills, ponds, and other sites that bore the traces of his footprints but had been lost sight of—and making them visible once again through establishing a network of temples and shrines to identify these sites as tīrthas. Haberman remarks regarding Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s contributions to the cultural reclamation of Vraja:

More than any other figure he was responsible for the intricate mapping process whereby the mythical realm of Braj as expressed in Vaishnava literature and oral tradition was physically imprinted on the topographical region of Braj. For these accomplishments Narayan Bhatt is remembered as the great Acharya of Braj. The Vraja Bhakti Vilasa describes an overwhelming number of sacred sites in the area, including all the major forests and shrines of the contemporary pilgrimage. The text identifies the story associated with each site and provides a description of the appropriate ritual action for participating in it. The Vraja Bhakti Vilasa also maps out a detailed procedure and itinerary for the performance of the pilgrimage through the twelve forests of Braj, which is called for the first time the Ban-Yatra.¹⁷³

As I will discuss in a later section, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s contributions to Gauḍīya constructions of Vraja involved not only mapping the myths of Kṛṣṇa’s līlā onto the topography but also mapping the image of Kṛṣṇa’s body onto the landscape, in which he correlated the twelve forests and other important sites in Vraja-maṇḍala with specific parts of Kṛṣṇa’s body.

Vraja as Pilgrimage Place and Beyond

Among the works ascribed to the Gosvāmins, the most extensive treatment of Vraja as a pilgrimage place is found in the Mathurā Māhātmya attributed to Rūpa Gosvāmin. Before turning to an analysis of the text’s representations of Mathurā-maṇḍala, I would like to briefly consider several issues pertaining to the text’s authorship, sources, and relationship to earlier Māhātmyas such as the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa.

Jīva Gosvāmin and Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja include a Mathurā Māhātmya among their respective lists of Rūpa Gosvāmin’s works.¹⁷⁴ The 1958 printed edition of the Mathurā Māhātmya published by Kṛṣṇadās Bābā, which accords with the manuscript versions of the text apart from minor variants, attributes it to Rūpa Gosvāmin. Although Rūpa Gosvāmin’s name does not appear on all the manuscripts and we cannot therefore establish conclusively that he is the author of the extant version of the Mathurā Māhātmya contained in the manuscripts and Kṛṣṇadās Bābā’s printed edition,¹⁷⁵ I would nevertheless argue that this version derives from the Gauḍīya authorities in Vṛndāvana in the middle of the sixteenth century and most likely coincides with the version of the Mathurā Māhātmya that Jīva and Kṛṣṇadāsa ascribe to Rūpa. As I will show in the following analysis, the extant version of the Mathurā Māhātmya has clearly been shaped to accord with the Gauḍīya project, and all of the key verses from Purāṇic sources that Rūpa invokes in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu when discussing the importance of residing in Mathurā-maṇḍala are also found in this Māhātmya. Moreover, as we shall see, a number of the verses that Jīva invokes in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha as critical prooftexts to support his arguments regarding the ontology of Kṛṣṇa’s dhāmans are also found in this Māhātmya, some of which are not found in any other versions of the Mathurā Māhātmya.¹⁷⁶ The evidence thus strongly suggests that both Rūpa and Jīva made use of this version of the Mathurā Māhātmya and that Rūpa himself is the author of the text.

The Mathurā Māhātmya of Rūpa Gosvāmin is a compendium of 467 verses extolling the greatness of Mathurā-maṇḍala and delineating the most important tīrthas to be visited when circumambulating the region. As in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and the Laghubhāgavatāmṛta, in the Māhātmya Rūpa uses the term Mathurā-maṇḍala to designate the city of Mathurā and the surrounding pastoral area of Vraja, which he also calls Gokula or Vṛndāvana.¹⁷⁷ All but the opening lines of invocation and the concluding verses of Rūpa’s Māhātmya are attributed to Purāṇic sources, with the exception of two passages that are ascribed to the Gautamīya Tantra and the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra, respectively.¹⁷⁸ With respect to the Purāṇic sources cited in the Māhātmya, according to Entwistle’s enumeration, 193 of the verses are attributed to the Ādivarāha Purāṇa, nineteen to the Varāha Purāṇa, 121 to the Padma Purāṇa, sixty-three to the Skanda Purāṇa, and sixteen to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, with the remaining verses ascribed to a variety of other Purāṇas. However, as Entwistle notes, many of the verses attributed to particular Purāṇas are not found in the extant editions of those Purāṇas.¹⁷⁹

The relationship of the Mathurā Māhātmya of Rūpa Gosvāmin to the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa, discussed earlier, is of particular interest. Many of the verses that Rūpa’s Māhātmya ascribes to the Ādivarāha Purāṇa are variants of verses that are also found in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa, which suggests that the two Māhātmyas drew independently from a common collection of verses concerning Mathurā and at least some of the material in this collection was derived from the original, or Ādi-, version of the Varāha Purāṇa that is cited in Lakṣmīdhara’s Mathurā Māhātmya but is no longer available.¹⁸⁰ As discussed earlier, the Mathurā Māhātmya of the extant Varāha Purāṇa is a randomly ordered compilation of verses based on older material that provides a litany of pilgrimage sites in the region of Mathurā as they existed around the beginning of the sixteenth century, prior to the reclamation of Vraja by the Gauḍīyas. Rūpa’s Māhātmya, in contrast, is a more systematically arranged compendium of verses in which the older material has been reshaped to conform with a Gauḍīya vision of Mathurā-maṇḍala that reflects mid-sixteenth-century transformations of the pilgrimage circuit. Entwistle remarks regarding the relationship of Rūpa’s Māhātmya to the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa:

It names a little less than two thirds of the number of places and deities mentioned in the Varāhapurāṇa, but the presentation of them is more systematic, especially with regard to the bathing places along the river at Mathura, and their location is in closer conformity with the modern situation. The work is more in tune with mid-sixteenth [century] developments since emphasis is given to Govinda, the tutelary deity of Vrindaban and the epithet given to an image that Rup Goswami established there; some places that were obsolete or of no importance to Krishna devotees… are omitted.…¹⁸¹

Rūpa, in formulating his Mathurā Māhātmya, departs in two ways from the standard format of a Purāṇic Māhātmya, as represented in particular by the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa. First, whereas the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa presents itself as the sole source of all the verses in its compilation and does not include attributions to other sources, Rūpa’s Māhātmya provides attributions identifying the source of each of its verses and presents itself as a compendium invested with the canonical authority of the multiple Purāṇic sources that it invokes. Second, in contrast to the unstructured format of the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Rūpa provides a structural framework for his Māhātmya by organizing the verses under headings, according to themes or pilgrimage clusters. The interjection of headings is one of the most important of the literary strategies adopted by Rūpa to reshape the traditional Māhātmya genre, for it allows him to reconfigure the inherited traditions from various Purāṇic sources in distinctive ways and to lift up and make visible the programmatic concerns of the Gauḍīyas. In the following analysis I will focus on three strategies that Rūpa deploys in his discursive reshaping of the inherited traditions to accord with Gauḍīya interests: (1) his development of a hierarchical taxonomy of the fruits of pilgrimage to Mathurā-maṇḍala; (2) his hierarchical ordering of the principal pilgrimage networks; and (3) his highlighting of themes that emphasize the special status of Mathurā-maṇḍala as a geographic place that is simultaneously a transcendent space.

Taxonomy of Pilgrimage Fruits

The first third of Rūpa’s Māhātmya consists of general praise of Mathurā-maṇḍala, in which Rūpa invokes verses from various Purāṇic sources that extol the fruits of pilgrimage to the region and the distinguishing characteristics that set Mathurā-maṇḍala apart as the most celebrated of all the tīrthas. With respect to the fruits (phala) of pilgrimage to Mathurā-maṇḍala, Rūpa’s Māhātmya highlights many of the fruits that are also mentioned in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, but through his use of headings Rūpa creates a rudimentary taxonomy in which he classifies the fruits in distinct categories and presents them in an ordered progression that implies a ranked assessment of their relative merit, from lowest to highest. His ranked assessment of the fruits of pilgrimage begins with a celebration of the purifying power of Mathurā-maṇḍala to remove sins (pāpa-hāritva), including the residual karmic impressions that the pilgrim has accumulated from sinful actions in previous births.¹⁸² In a later section of the Māhātmya, he invokes a series of Purāṇic verses that extol the power of Mathurā-maṇḍala to bestow liberation (mokṣa-pradatva) from saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death. Like the purifying power of the name discussed in Chapter 4, the purifying power of the land is connected with its liberating power, for when the mound of sins and their residual karmic impressions that the pilgrim has accumulated in the course of multiple lifetimes are destroyed, he or she is liberated from the root cause of bondage that perpetuates the cycle of birth and death.¹⁸³ Moreover, Rūpa invokes a verse from the Saura Purāṇa that suggests that both the purifying power and the liberating power of Mathurā-maṇḍala derive from Kṛṣṇa himself, who during his sojourn on earth purified the entire land with the dust from his lotus-feet. By merely touching (sparśana) the land that has been consecrated by the footsteps of the supreme Godhead, the pilgrim is purified and attains liberation.

There is a place that is renowned in the three worlds by the name Mathurā, whose roads and ground have been purified by contact with the dust from the feet of Kṛṣṇa. By touching (sparśana) that [ground], a person is liberated (root muc) from all bondage (sarva-bandha).¹⁸⁴

Following the section on the liberating power of Mathurā-maṇḍala, Rūpa’s Māhātmya includes three sections in which the ideals of Vaiṣṇava bhakti supersede liberation as the ultimate goal to be attained through pilgrimage to the region of Mathurā. The first of these sections extols the efficaciousness of Mathurā-maṇḍala in granting those who die there not only liberation from rebirth but entry into Viṣṇuloka (Viṣṇuloka-pradatva).¹⁸⁵ The next section celebrates the power of Mathurā-maṇḍala to bestow the most cherished goals of human existence (sarvābhīṣṭa-pradatva).¹⁸⁶ In this context the Māhātmya invokes an unidentified verse from the Padma Purāṇa, which Rūpa also cites in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, that maintains that those who seek refuge in Mathurā-maṇḍala can attain the three mundane goals (trivarga)—kāma, artha, and dharma—along with the transmundane goal of mokṣa, liberation, which together form the four puruṣārthas, ends of human existence.¹⁸⁷ In addition, the pilgrim can attain that which is ascribed the highest status in the hierarchy of pilgrimage fruits delineated by Rūpa’s Māhātmya: bhakti, devotion.

What wise person would not take refuge in Mathurā, which bestows the three mundane goals [kāma, artha, and dharma] on those who seek such goals, bestows mokṣa on those who seek mokṣa, and bestows bhakti on those who seek bhakti?¹⁸⁸

This section of Rūpa’s Māhātmya continues by invoking an extended passage from the Padma Purāṇa that claims that the wondrous glories of Mathurā-maṇḍala derive from two aspects of Kṛṣṇa’s inherent śakti with which he has infused the land: tāraka, which bestows mukti, liberation; and pāraka, which bestows prema-bhakti, the highest form of bhakti that is experienced internally as an unbroken state of transcendent bliss (akhaṇḍa-paramānanda) and expressed externally in ecstatic dancing, singing, and weeping.¹⁸⁹ The final section of Rūpa’s Māhātmya that is concerned with the fruits of pilgrimage elaborates on the power of Mathurā-maṇḍala to bestow bhakti (bhakti-pradatva).¹⁹⁰ The Māhātmya invokes an unidentified verse from the Padma Purāṇa, which Rūpa also cites in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, that suggests that the preeminent status of Mathurā-maṇḍala as the greatest of all tīrthas derives from its special capacity to bestow the supreme goal of human existence that is sought after even by those who have attained liberation: bhakti to Hari.

The greatest fruit (phala) attained at other tīrthas is mukti, but bhakti to Hari, which is sought after even by those who are liberated, can be attained only in Mathurā.¹⁹¹

In addition to extolling the fruits of pilgrimage to Mathurā-maṇḍala, Rūpa’s Māhātmya devotes a section to glorifying those who become residents of Mathurā (Mathurā-vāsins). The Māhātmya invokes a series of Purāṇic verses that ascribe a semidivine status to those who reside in Mathurā, suggesting that through continually abiding in the abode of Kṛṣṇa they imbibe the divine śakti with which the land is saturated: they attain four-armed (catur-bhuja) forms comparable to that of Kṛṣṇa in his manifestation as Viṣṇu and reside on earth as gods (devas) embodied in human forms (nara-vigraha). Even though ordinary human beings who are immersed in ignorance cannot perceive the special status of the residents of Mathurā, an advanced sādhaka whose eye of knowledge (jñāna-cakṣus) is open can “see” (root dṛś) their divine forms.¹⁹²

Hierarchy of Pilgrimage Networks

Rūpa’s reconfiguration of the traditional Māhātmya material is evident not only in his hierarchical taxonomy of the fruits of pilgrimage to Mathurā-maṇḍala but also in his hierarchical ordering of the principal networks that constitute the pilgrimage circuit. He begins his discussion of the pilgrimage circuit by surveying the boundaries (sīmā) that circumscribe Mathurā-maṇḍala, which is twenty yojanas (approximately 160 miles) in circumference.¹⁹³ He then invokes the tradition in which Mathurā-maṇḍala is represented in the shape of a lotus, citing a passage from the Skanda Purāṇa that is nearly identical to the parallel passage, quoted earlier, from the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa:

Mathurā-maṇḍala… has thousands of tīrthas where the activities of Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma occurred.… This lotus bestows mukti on all, O most fortunate one. Keśava, the destroyer of afflictions (kleśas), is stationed in its pericarp (karṇikā), O Devī. Those people who die while in the pericarp are eligible for mukti, O Vasuṃdharā [Pṛthivī], and those who die on the petals [of the lotus] also attain mukti. Having seen the deity Hari, the Lord of lords, who resides in Govardhana on the western [petal], one’s mind is purified. Having seen the most auspicious deity Govinda on the northern [petal], one does not fall again into saṃsāra until the time of the final deluge. Having seen the tīrtha of the deity known as Viśrānti who is stationed on the eastern petal, a person attains mukti, of this there is no doubt. On the southern [petal] there is an image (pratimā) of me [Varāha], which is divine in form, great in stature, and beautiful, resembling the appearance of Keśava. Having seen that image, O Devī, a person is revered in Brahma-loka.¹⁹⁴

Like the parallel passage in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, this passage in Rūpa’s Māhātmya presents an incipient maṇḍalization of the area of Vraja, investing the geographic place that functions as a pilgrimage maṇḍala, or circuit, with the status of a transmundane space that also functions as a cosmic maṇḍala presided over by five manifestations of Kṛṣṇa. Keśava is stationed in the center of the lotus-maṇḍala, while four other manifestations of Kṛṣṇa serve as guardian deities of the four cardinal directions on the transmundane plane and as mūrtis presiding over the pilgrimage circuit on the earthly plane: Harideva on the eastern petal, Govinda on the northern petal, Viśrānti on the eastern petal, and Varāha on the southern petal. As in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Rūpa’s Māhātmya represents four of the five mūrtis on the lotus as key nodes in the principal pilgrimage networks that constitute Mathurā-maṇḍala: Keśava and Viśrānti are ascribed primacy of place in the pilgrimage network of the city of Mathurā, Govinda presides over the pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana, and Harideva presides over the pilgrimage network of Govardhana.

Having provided a schematic framework for the overall pilgrimage circuit of Mathurā-maṇḍala through invoking the image of the lotus, Rūpa’s Māhātmya treats the principal pilgrimage networks in an ordered progression in which he interjects headings at critical points to call attention to clusters of tīrthas as well as individual tīrthas. The order in which the pilgrimage networks are treated suggests not only an idealized pilgrimage itinerary but also a hierarchical assessment, from lowest to highest, of the relative importance of each network to the Gauḍīya project: from the Mathurā pilgrimage network to the network of twelve forests to the Vṛndāvana pilgrimage network to the Govardhana pilgrimage network, culminating in Rādhā-kuṇḍa at Govardhana. The hierarchy implied in the Māhātmya’s sequential treatment of the pilgrimage networks is made explicit by Rūpa in the following verse from another of his works, the Upadeśāmṛta:

Madhupurī [Mathurā] is greater than Vaikuṇṭha because Kṛṣṇa took birth there. The forest of Vṛndāvana is even greater because the celebration of the rāsa[-līlā] occurred there. Mount Govardhana is even greater because Kṛṣṇa delighted in holding it aloft with his hand. But Rādhā-kuṇḍa is the greatest because it overflows with the ambrosial nectar (amṛta) of the preman of the Lord of Gokula. What discriminating person would not perform devotional service (sevā) to this kuṇḍa shining forth at the base of Mount Govardhana?¹⁹⁵

Rūpa devotes an extended section of his Māhātmya to the benefits of circumambulating (pradakṣinā or parikrama) the city of Mathurā, which is located in the forest of Madhuvana, and visiting the most important tīrthas along the pilgrimage route.¹⁹⁶ The pilgrimage itinerary begins at Kṛṣṇa’s birthplace (janma-sthāna) with circumambulation of the mūrti of Keśava that stands at the center of the pericarp of the lotus-maṇḍala.¹⁹⁷ The pilgrimage then progresses east to Viśrānti-tīrtha on the bank of the Yamunā River, which is singled out, along with the mūrti of Keśava, as one of the most important tīrthas in the city of Mathurā.¹⁹⁸ As in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Viśrānti-tīrtha is celebrated in Rūpa’s Māhātmya as the central node in the network of twenty-four bathing tīrthas that are arrayed in the shape of a half moon on the bank of the Yamunā.¹⁹⁹

The second major pilgrimage network addressed by Rūpa’s Māhātmya is the network of twelve forests, which are enumerated in an order that corresponds to that of the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa: Madhuvana, Tālavana, Kumudavana, Kāmyavana, Bahulāvana, Bhadravana, Khadiravana, Mahāvana, Lohajaṅghavana (Lohavana), Bilvavana, Bhāṇḍīravana, and Vṛndāvana.²⁰⁰ Three of the twelve forests are ascribed particular significance in Rūpa’s Māhātmya: Madhuvana, Mahāvana, and Vṛndāvana. Madhuvana, the first of the twelve forests, is extolled as the forest that surrounds the city of Mathurā.²⁰¹ Mahāvana is celebrated as the forest where Kṛṣṇa’s early childhood adventures occurred, containing sites such as the Yamalārjuna-tīrtha, where the mischievous butter thief uprooted a pair of arjuna trees, and the site where he overturned a cart (śakaṭa).²⁰² Vṛndāvana, the culminating forest in the twelve-forest schema, is extolled as a pilgrimage network in its own right.²⁰³

The forest of Vṛndāvana is re-visioned in Rūpa’s Māhātmya as an encompassing pilgrimage network that includes within it not only the pilgrimage sites that are generally associated with Vṛndāvana in Māhātmya literature but also the network of pilgrimage sites associated with Mount Govardhana. The Māhātmya invokes a series of Purāṇic verses that extol this vast, densely wooded area as a lush pastoral playground—as distinct from the domesticated city of Mathurā—interwoven with countless tīrthas that mark the sites where Kṛṣṇa played with the gopas, gopīs, and cows in the groves and meadows of the forest, on the banks of the Yamunā River, and on the slopes of Mount Govardhana.²⁰⁴

This sacred (puṇya) Vṛndāvana, which is protected by the goddess Vṛndā, is inhabited by Hari and attended by Rudra [Śiva], Brahmā, and so on. Vṛndāvana is a very deep, extensive, and dense forest, filled with an abundance of plants and animals and replete with numerous hermitages (āśramas) of sages. Just as Lakṣmī is very dear to the Lord and just as people who express great bhakti are very dear to him, in the same way this earthly Vṛndāvana is very dear to Govinda. Mādhava [Kṛṣṇa] plays (root krīḍ) in Vṛndāvana along with Balarāma, accompanied by cows and calves and surrounded by cowherd boys. O how delightful is Vṛndāvana, where Mount Govardhana is located and where many tīrthas mark the sites of Lord Viṣṇu’s activities.²⁰⁵

The section in Rūpa’s Māhātmya devoted to specific pilgrimage sites in Vṛndāvana draws on inherited traditions while at the same time interjecting Gauḍīya interests in a number of ways. For example, in contrast to the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, which ascribes importance to the mūrti of Govinda as the central node in the pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana but does not discuss the tīrtha where the ritual image is located, Rūpa devotes a separate subsection in his Māhātmya to the Govinda-tīrtha that he himself is credited with establishing.²⁰⁶ Rūpa’s Māhātmya invokes Purāṇic verses that extol the “great temple (mahā-sadman) of Govinda in Vṛndāvana”—an apparent reference to the Govindadeva temple that Rūpa established to house the mūrti of Govinda that he discovered. The temple is celebrated as the “Vaikuṇṭha of Govinda on earth” where Kṛṣṇa dwells surrounded by his retinue of servants. More specifically, Kṛṣṇa is held to be embodied there “in the form of an image (arcātmaka) called Govinda-Svāmin.”²⁰⁷ Rūpa’s Māhātmya allots a separate subsection to Brahma-kuṇḍa in Vṛndāvana, a kuṇḍa that is briefly mentioned in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa but is not named.²⁰⁸ As I will discuss later, Brahma-kuṇḍa is ascribed special significance in Rūpa’s Māhātmya as the site of a “wonder” (āścarya) in the form of a radiant aśoka tree invested with transcendent features that can be perceived only by realized bhaktas with purified vision.²⁰⁹ Rūpa’s Māhātmya allots separate subsections to three tīrthas that are briefly treated in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa: Keśi-tīrtha, the site where Kṛṣṇa slew the horse-demon Keśī;²¹⁰ Kāliya-hrada, the pool where Kṛṣṇa subdued the serpent Kāliya by dancing on his heads;²¹¹ and Dvādaśāditya-tīrtha, the site where Kṛṣṇa warmed himself with the rays of the twelve Ādityas.²¹² Rūpa’s Māhātmya introduces a distinctively Gauḍīya emphasis into its treatment of Kāliya-hrada, which, as I will discuss later, is represented as a “sacred (puṇya), hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) pool” and as the site of a “great wonder” (mahad āścarya) in the form of a luminous kadamba tree invested with transcendent features that, like the aśoka tree in Brahma-kuṇḍa, can be perceived only by realized bhaktas.²¹³

Mount Govardhana, as mentioned earlier, is represented in Rūpa’s Māhātmya as located within the forest of Vṛndāvana, and therefore the sites associated with Mount Govardhana are subsumed within the encompassing pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana as a subsidiary network of tīrthas.²¹⁴ Like the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa, Rūpa’s Māhātmya extols Govardhana as the mountain that Kṛṣṇa lifted up to protect the cowherds, cowmaidens, and cows from the incessant downpour of Indra’s rain. Rūpa’s Māhātmya invokes a series of verses from the Ādivarāha Purāṇa, which are variants of verses found in the Varāha Purāṇa’s Māhātmya, that recommend a pilgrimage itinerary that includes bathing in Mānasa-Gaṅgā, obtaining darśana of the mūrti of Harideva, and circumambulation (pradakṣinā or parikrama) of Mount Govardhana.²¹⁵ After general praise of the glories of Mount Govardhana, Rūpa’s Māhātmya allots separate subsections to two kuṇḍas that are also mentioned in the Mathurā Māhātmya of the Varāha Purāṇa but are not named: Brahma-kuṇḍa²¹⁶ and Govinda-kuṇḍa.²¹⁷ While Rūpa’s Māhātmya thus provides an account of the Govardhana pilgrimage that accords in certain ways with the Varāha Purāṇa’s Māhātmya, at the same time it recasts the inherited material with distinctively Gauḍīya valences. This is particularly evident in the language and imagery that are used in Rūpa’s Māhātmya to invest Mount Govardhana with transcendent features. As I will discuss later, like Kāliya-hrada, Mount Govardhana is represented as a “hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) place” and as the site of a “great wonder” (mahad āścarya) that can be seen only by exalted bhaktas.²¹⁸

Rūpa’s Gauḍīya interests are also evident in the way in which he shapes the ordered progression of pilgrimage sites in his Māhātmya to culminate in a celebration of the most important site in the Gauḍīya pilgrimage itinerary: Rādhā-kuṇḍa. Rūpa’s Māhātmya cites a number of Purāṇic verses that extol the glories of Rādhā-kuṇḍa, which is most dear to Kṛṣṇa among the tīrthas in Govardhana, just as Rādhā is most dear to him among the gopīs.²¹⁹ He invokes a verse from the Skanda Purāṇa that suggests that bhaktas who are devoted to Kṛṣṇa are granted a special visionary experience at Rādhā-kuṇḍa on Dīpāvali, the festival of lights, during the month of Kārttika: they “see” (root dṛś) the entire universe unfold before their eyes at this pond where Kṛṣṇa reveled in love-play with his beloved Rādhā.²²⁰ In the passage from the Upadeśāmṛta quoted earlier, Rūpa suggests that Rādhā-kuṇḍa is the greatest of all tīrthas in Mathurā-maṇḍala—greater than even the forest of Vṛndāvana and Mount Govardhana—because this pond “overflows with the ambrosial nectar (amṛta) of the preman of the Lord of Gokula.”²²¹

Transcendent Features of Mathurā-Maṇḍala

In addition to his hierarchical taxonomy of the fruits of pilgrimage and his hierarchical ordering of the principal pilgrimage networks that constitute Mathurā-maṇḍala, Rūpa’s recasting of the traditional Māhātmya material to conform with the Gauḍīya project is also evident in the way in which he highlights certain themes that emphasize the unique status of Mathurā-maṇḍala as a geographic place that is invested with the qualities of a transcendent space. Throughout the Māhātmya Rūpa invokes verses that extol Mathurā-maṇḍala as an eternal (nitya, śāśvata, or sanātana) domain that is located on earth and yet at the same time is recondite (sugopita), hidden (guhya), and transcendent (para), beyond the phenomenal realm of prakṛti (prapañcātīta).²²² The Māhātmya includes a number of different sections, introduced by headings, that highlight the transcendent features of this geographic place. As I will discuss later in this chapter, these themes are also briefly articulated by Rūpa in the Laghubhāgavatāmṛta and are extensively elaborated by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha as part of his arguments regarding the ontology of Kṛṣṇa’s dhāmans.

Rūpa’s Māhātmya includes a section that emphasizes Mathurā-maṇḍala’s special status as the place where Kṛṣṇa is eternally present (nitya-hari-saṃnidhānatva).²²³ “Mathurā is renowned as the place where Lord Hari himself (svayam) is present eternally (sarvadā) before one’s eyes (sākṣāt).”²²⁴ Rūpa’s Māhātmya invokes this verse from the Vāyu Purāṇa along with eight other verses from Purāṇic sources in order to provide canonical authority to ground his claim that Kṛṣṇa’s instantiation in the land is not limited to the traces left by his footsteps during his sojourn on earth in Dvāpara Yuga, but rather he continues to abide there eternally (nitya, sarvadā, or sadā). Six of these Purāṇic verses are also invoked by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha as scriptural prooftexts to support his argument that Mathurā-maṇḍala is the eternal abode (nityāspada or nitya-dhāman) of Kṛṣṇa.²²⁵

Rūpa’s Māhātmya includes another section that emphasizes Mathurā-maṇḍala’s status as a transcendent domain that is not part of the phenomenal realm of prakṛti (prapañcātīta).²²⁶ He invokes a series of Purāṇic verses to establish that, although Mathurā-maṇḍala may exist on the earth as a geographic place, at the same time its nature is different from the material creation (sṛṣṭi).²²⁷ The lotus-shaped maṇḍala is celebrated not only as a pilgrimage circuit to be circumambulated on earth but as a transcendent space that exists eternally beyond the material realm: “This Mathurā-maṇḍala in the shape of a lotus is established forever (sadā) above the domain of Viṣṇu and exists eternally (śāśvata) there.”²²⁸ Mathurā-maṇḍala is not only extolled as the place where Kṛṣṇa resides eternally, but the very substance of the place itself is held to be eternal (nitya, śāśvata, or sanātana), its eternality extending even to its cowherd inhabitants and to its geographic features such as forests and rivers: “Know my Mathurā to be eternal (nitya) as well as the forest of Vṛndāvana, the Yamunā, the cowherd maidens, and the cowherd boys.”²²⁹ Three of the five Purāṇic verses cited as prooftexts in this section of Rūpa’s Māhātmya are also invoked by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha to support his arguments regarding the nonphenomenal (prapañcātīta) and eternal (nitya) nature of Mathurā-maṇḍala.²³⁰

To further establish the transmundane status of Mathurā-maṇḍala, Rūpa’s Māhātmya includes a concluding section in its general praise of the area in which the place itself is extolled as the ultimate goal (svataḥ parama-phalatva).²³¹ The Māhātmya invokes a series of Purāṇic verses, which are also cited by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha, to establish that Mathurā-maṇḍala is the ultimate goal in the sense that it is the highest of all worlds. As a nonphenomenal, transcendent domain, it is celebrated as beyond the hierarchy of fourteen worlds that constitute the material realm of prakṛti, including not only the three worlds—earth, midregions, and heavens—but also the four higher worlds (ūrdhva-lokas) above the three worlds and the seven lower worlds (pātāla-talas) beneath the earth.²³² Moreover, it is extolled as even beyond Vaikuṇṭha and thus as the highest (uttama) realm within the transcendent.²³³ Although Rūpa’s Māhātmya does not comment on the significance of this claim, in the cosmography delineated by Rūpa in the Laghubhāgavatāmṛta and elaborated by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha, the abode (dhāman) of Kṛṣṇa as svayaṃ Bhagavān is represented as beyond the transcendent realm of Vaikuṇṭha, or Paravyoman, where his avatāras and other partial manifestations reside.

With respect to the means through which the transcendent domain of Mathurā-maṇḍala can be accessed, Rūpa’s Māhātmya includes a section that ascribes a central role to meditation (dhyāna) as the means of attaining Bhagavān’s transcendent abode (bhagavad-dhyānādi-labhyatva). This section invokes a single prooftext from the Ādivarāha Purāṇa, which emphasizes that through regular practice of meditation advanced sādhakas can attain a direct visionary experience in which they “see” (root dṛś) Kṛṣṇa’s supreme abode:

When human beings have been completely purified by tapas and so on and by regularly engaging in the efficacious practice of meditation (dhyāna), only then can they see (root dṛś) my highest (uttama) abode. Otherwise it cannot be seen in hundreds of kalpas.²³⁴

Rūpa’s Māhātmya, in extolling the glories of Vṛndāvana, invokes a number of verses that suggest that those advanced sādhakas whose vision has been purified through meditation have the capacity to directly cognize Kṛṣṇa’s transcendent abode interpenetrating its terrestrial counterpart. In this context the Māhātmya cites the following passage from the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra that along with a second passage from the Gautamīya Tantra are the only passages from non-Purāṇic texts cited in the Māhātmya.²³⁵ The passage, which is a variant of a passage from the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa quoted earlier, presents Kṛṣṇa’s response to the celestial ṛṣi Nārada’s request to hear about Vṛndāvana.

This delightful Vṛndāvana is my only dhāman. Those who reside here in my abode (adhiṣṭha)—whether cows, birds, trees, insects, humans, or gods—at death attain my abode (ālaya). Those cowmaidens who reside here in my abode (ālaya) are eternally (nityam) connected with me and are devoted to serving me. This forest [Vṛndāvana], measuring five yojanas, is my body (deha-rūpaka). This Kālindī [Yamunā], which flows with transcendent nectar (paramāmṛta), is called the suṣumṇā, the central channel [of my body]. The gods and other beings exist here in subtle forms (sūkṣma-rūpatā). And I, who embody all the gods (sarva-deva-maya), never leave this forest, although my appearance (āvirbhāva) in and disappearance (tirobhāva) from this place occur yuga after yuga. This delightful abode consisting of blazing splendor (tejo-maya) cannot be seen (adṛśya) with the material eye (carma-cakṣus).²³⁶

The inclusion of this passage in Rūpa’s Māhātmya is critical to the Gauḍīya project that Rūpa wishes to advance, for more than any of the other verses invoked in the Māhātmya it points to the bimodal nature of Vṛndāvana as Kṛṣṇa’s “only dhāman” that functions simultaneously as a geographic place and as a transcendent space. As I will discuss in a later section, Jīva cites this passage in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha to support his arguments regarding the nonphenomenal nature (prapañcātītatva) of the earthly Vṛndāvana, which he maintains is nondifferent (abheda) from the transcendent Vṛndāvana.²³⁷ The Māhātmya format that Rūpa adopts, in which he invokes verses in clusters under headings, does not allow him to comment on this passage from the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra and to expound in his own words on the relationship between the earthly and transcendent dimensions of Kṛṣṇa’s abode. He undertakes this task in the Laghubhāgavatāmṛta, as we shall see, in which he represents the terrestrial Vṛndāvana as the site of the manifest līlā where Kṛṣṇa played with the gopīs and gopas during his sojourn on earth in Dvāpara Yuga. This geographic place is represented as the immanent counterpart of the transcendent Vṛndāvana, Goloka, which is inaccessible to the material senses and is the domain of the unmanifest līlā where Kṛṣṇa revels perpetually with the gopīs and gopas, who are deemed his “eternal associates” (parikaras or pārṣadas) because, as the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra suggests, they are “eternally connected” with the supreme Godhead.

Rūpa’s Māhātmya, in the section that glorifies particular tīrthas in the pilgrimage network of Vṛndāvana, suggests that although ordinary human beings who are immersed in ignorance cannot perceive the transcendent aspect of Vṛndāvana, it can be perceived by realized bhaktas with purified vision who have attained perfection. In this context the Māhātmya invokes two unidentified passages from the Varāha Purāṇa that are also cited by Jīva in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha and are not found in any other versions of the Mathurā Māhātmya. The first passage describes a “wonder” (āścarya) on the northern shore of Brahma-kuṇḍa in Vṛndāvana that only pure bhāgavatas have the capacity to perceive (root jñā + abhi): a radiant aśoka tree that suddenly bursts into bloom at the exact same time on the exact same day each spring.

O Vasuṃdharā [Pṛthivī], listen and I will tell you about a wonder (āścarya) in that place where people who are devoted to serving me attain perfection (siddhi). On the northern side of that place there is an aśoka tree made of white light that bursts into bloom at noon on the twelfth day of the bright fortnight of the month of Vaiśākha, bringing joy to my bhaktas. No one other than a pure bhāgavata can perceive (root jñā + abhi) this.²³⁸

The second passage represents Kāliya-hrada as a “sacred (puṇya), hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) pool” where Kṛṣṇa plays eternally and that is adorned by a “great wonder” (mahad āścarya) on its eastern shore that only the wise can “see” (root dṛś): a luminous kadamba tree that blooms perpetually throughout the twelve months of the year and sends forth light in ten directions.

The hrada of Kāliya is a sacred (puṇya), hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) pool in the pure waters of the Yamunā where I engage eternally (nityam) in play.… The wise see (root dṛś) a great wonder (mahad āścarya) there: a huge kadamba tree on the eastern side of Kāliya-hrada. This tree, which is beautiful, luminous, and cooling, has one hundred branches, blooms with fragrant flowers twelve months a year, and shines forth in ten directions.²³⁹

As I will discuss in a later section, both of these passages form a critical part of Jīva’s arguments in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha regarding the transmundane (alaukika), eternal (nitya) nature of Vṛndāvana, which is simultaneously transcendent and immanent, containing luminous divine (divya) aśoka and kadamba trees that can be directly cognized on the shores of Brahma-kuṇḍa and Kāliya-hrada even today by those who have attained the status of mahā-bhāgavatas.

Rūpa’s Māhātmya, in the section glorifying Mount Govardhana, invokes another unidentified passage from the Varāha Purāṇa that makes use of language and imagery that recalls the passage regarding Kāliya-hrada quoted above. Mount Govardhana is represented as a “hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) place” and as the site of a “great wonder” (mahad āścarya) that only those with sublime consciousness can see (root dṛś): huge beams of light that shine forth from the top of the mountain twice a month and illumine the ten directions.

This hidden (guhya), transcendent (para) place of mine called Govardhana is only a short distance west of Mathurā, about eight krośas. Those with sublime consciousness see (root dṛś) a great wonder (mahad āścarya) there. A phenomenon occurs in that place that is cherished by all bhāgavatas. Twenty-four times a year, on the twelfth day of each fortnight, they see (root dṛś) huge lights on the top of the mountain illumining the ten directions. If a person who is devoted to serving me sees those lights, he or she attains a supreme state of perfection (siddhi), of this there is no doubt.²⁴⁰

Vraja as the Body of Kṛṣṇa

In the Gauḍīya discourse of embodiment the sacred geography of Vraja is revered as participating in the reality of Kṛṣṇa not only as his abiding abode but as his actual body. The land’s status as a mesocosmic embodiment of Kṛṣṇa is ascribed to different areas, from Mount Govardhana to the forest of Vṛndāvana to the entire region of Vraja comprising the twelve forests.

Mount Govardhana as the Body of Kṛṣṇa

The earliest formulations of Gauḍīya perspectives on Kṛṣṇa’s embodiment in Vraja are attributed to Caitanya, who, as discussed earlier, is held to have considered Mount Govardhana to be the body of Kṛṣṇa and would therefore not set foot on the mountain. Caitanya’s understanding apparently stems from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s account of Kṛṣṇa assuming the form (rūpa) of Mount Govardhana.²⁴¹ Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s account in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta also emphasizes how Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmin, in accordance with their teacher Caitanya’s example, also refused to set foot on Mount Govardhana—a tradition that is still honored today by many Gauḍīya pilgrims.²⁴²

Caitanya’s reverence for Mount Govardhana as the embodiment of Kṛṣṇa is represented in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta as extending beyond the mountain as a whole to each of its stones, or śilās, which he extolled as the body (vigraha or kalevara) of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇadāsa recounts how Caitanya gave to Raghunāthadāsa Gosvāmin a Govardhana śilā that he himself had cherished for three years and told him to worship it regularly through pūjā as the vigraha of Kṛṣṇa. “This śilā is the vigraha of Kṛṣṇa. Take it and serve it eagerly. Do sāttvika-pūjā to this śilā, and quickly you will gain the wealth of the prema of Kṛṣṇa.”²⁴³ Caitanya is thus credited with establishing the worship of Govardhana śilās as aniconic mūrtis that are svarūpas, natural forms, of Kṛṣṇa and that function as what Owen Lynch terms a “metonymic divinity” in that the sacrality of the part—the śilā—derives from its special status as the concentrated essence of the whole—Mount Govardhana, which itself is revered as a part that embodies the wholeness of the supreme Godhead.²⁴⁴

Forest of Vṛndāvana as the Body of Kṛṣṇa

Kṛṣṇa’s embodiment in the sacred geography of Vraja is also represented as encompassing the forest of Vṛndāvana. As previously discussed, the Mathurā Māhātmya of Rūpa Gosvāmin cites a passage from the Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra, which is a variant of a passage from the Vṛndāvana Māhātmya of the Padma Purāṇa quoted earlier, that represents the forest of Vṛndāvana as the body of Kṛṣṇa: “This forest, measuring five yojanas, is my body (deha-rūpaka). This Kālindī [Yamunā], which flows with transcendent nectar (paramāmṛta), is called the suṣumṇā, the central channel [of my body].”²⁴⁵ The imagery of embodiment functions on two levels in this passage. On the one hand, the passage points to Kṛṣṇa’s concrete instantiation in a terrestrial forest that is delimited to an area of five yojanas (approximately forty miles) and through which the waters of the Yamunā River flow. On the other hand, the passage suggests that Kṛṣṇa’s localized embodiment in the earthly Vṛndāvana serves as a means of accessing his absolute body in the transcendent Vṛndāvana where the transcendent Yamunā flows with transcendent nectar (paramāmṛta).

As I will discuss in a later section, this passage is also cited by Jīva Gosvāmin in the Kṛṣṇa Sandarbha to support his argument that the earthly Vṛndāvana is ultimately nondifferent (abheda) from the transcendent Vṛndāvana.²⁴⁶ As we shall see, in developing his arguments regarding the ontology of Vraja, Jīva deploys the trope of embodiment to encompass both aspects of Vṛndāvana: the transcendent Goloka-Vṛndāvana, which is represented as an extension of Kṛṣṇa’s vigraha, absolute body, and as the very form of Bhagavān (bhagavad-rūpa); and its immanent counterpart in the earthly Vṛndāvana, which is represented as a glorious manifestation (vibhūti) of Kṛṣṇa’s svarūpa, essential form, in the guise of a geographic place.²⁴⁷