The Buttery Sweet Language of Love
[…] Milk and its derivatives have been prized and praised in Indian literature from the time of the Rigveda. Late medieval vernacular bhakti literature expands this tradition considerably, taking as the seed for further reflection especially the Bhagavata Purana’s account of Krishna’s yogurt and butter “theft” that we have just seen. Such further reflections may be taken as further “churning” of the milk-as-bhakti motif, whereby the notion of churning to extract something especially desirable, as a creative act, also suggests resonance with a celebrated Puranic churning story— the Churning of the Cosmic Ocean. Yet Krishna’s butter theft may also be regarded as an undoing of cosmic churning, wherein “the sea of milk products that the butter thief unleashes is the sea of love” (Hawley and John Stratton, 1983, Krishna, the Butter Thief, Princeton University Press, p. 305). Whereas the Puranic story is an affirmation of dharma’s cosmic order (in which there is a foiled attempt by a demon to steal the ambrosia of immortality from the gods), Krishna’s successful butter theft is a playful shattering of dharma’s seemingly rigid boundaries, allowing to prevail what the bhakti traditions hold to be essential for dharma to be properly realized, namely divine love.
—From the book Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics by Kennth R. Valpey (HH Krishna Kshetra Swami), published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. The legal open access download version is available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-28408-4
Vraja Bhakti Poetry
There is a poem attributed to Surdas, an important figure in the late medieval north Indian landscape of krishna-bhakti.The poet invites his readers/listeners to picture in detail the scene of child Krishna’s butter thieving. Gopal is described as being “in the butter,” the shimmering color of which contrasts with his own “dusk-toned body.” Then ensues a cascade of images mirroring and echoing a sense of divine grace occurring in liquid form, the freshly churned butter “trickling down his face to his chest / as if the far ambrosial moon rained beams on loves below.” Then, shifting the metaphor, Surdas suggests a sense of excitement and danger: Gopal has “risen to peer from his lair,” perhaps like a lion cub, to look about and confirm that no one is looking, “and then / he cheerfully feeds his friends.” Surdas’ audience knows (from the Bhagavata Purana account) that these “friends” are monkeys, whose impish company points to Krishna’s inclination to freely extend his kindness to all beings. The poem’s colophon turns our attention to the intense affection of Krishna’s beloveds (the “loves below”), the gopi maidens, who have delightedly witnessed Krishna’s mischief:
... Seeing Sur’s Lord in his boyish fun,
the maidens start, love-struck and weakened,
Until their hearts are lost to speech
in thought after thought after thought.
(Hawley, John Stratton, and Mark Juergensmeyer (trans.), 1988, Songs of the Saints of India, Oxford University Press.)
The poem that is so rich in imagery of savorable fluidity, invites us to partake in a vision of a light-hearted and mildly forbidden sort of divine love. Gopal—Krishna—in his thieving stealth cannot hide his beauty, compared to the moon, which in much Indic literature is associated with ambrosia. That Krishna’s moonlike face “rained beams on loves below,” implies that Krishna’s young cowherdess beloveds (as well as the older mothers, from whose houses Krishna steals butter) are the receivers of his “drop after drop” curd-like flowing love. These maidens are “love-struck” by witnessing Krishna’s artless beauty as he freely shares the butter with his monkey friends. The flow of yogurt and butter, as a downpour of mercy, echoes the Rigvedic hope for Indra to bestow blessing in the form of rain. And this flow precipitates a cascading flow of thought (“thought after thought after thought”) that arrests speech, possibly alluding to the Rigveda’s preoccupation with right and poetic speech by which the divinities may be pleased and bestow their bounty. Here, in the overwhelming power of Krishna’s beauty and love, speechless thought prevails, since speech, with all its clumsy limitations and proneness to misunderstanding, fails to do justice to the longing heart.
Ironically, of course, this song of Surdas is constituted of speech. Yet it also alludes to the other essential function of the mouth, namely tasting and eating. The traditions of krishna-bhakti have a highly developed culture of vegetarian cuisine; and complementary to devotees’ alimentary concerns of preparing the most tasty and tasteful food offerings for Krishna is a sophisticated theology of aesthetic taste. Integral to the vocabulary of devotional aesthetic taste, milk and milk products are often referred to as implicit vehicles for the communication of bhakti in the mode of sweetness (madhurya-bhava), both because of the literal sweetness of dairy and because they are associated with Krishna’s pastoral way of life, in contrast to the mode of lordship (aishvarya-bhava) that predominates in the worship of Vishnu.
—From the book Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics by Kennth R. Valpey (HH Krishna Kshetra Swami), published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. The legal open access download version is available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-28408-4