Ram Rasik Sampraday

Religious lineage among the Ramanandis,
a community of renunciant ascetics. All
Ramanandis are devotees (bhakta) of
the god Rama, but members of the
Ram Rasik Sampraday stress the worship of Rama and his wife Sita as the
divine couple. They focus their worship on the time of domestic bliss
when the newly married couple lived in
Ayodhya, before Rama’s unjust banishment from that city. Rasik (“aesthete”)
devotion involves complex forms of
visualization, in which devotees imagine themselves to be servants and companions of Rama and Sita, and spend
their days in service to the divine couple. Rasik devotees also draw up exacting “schedules” of the deities’ daily
routines—in some cases, down to the
quarter-hour—so that through this
imaginative exaltation they can savor
the bliss of being God’s companions.
(This form of dedication is clearly influenced by devotional patterns to the god
Krishna, particularly the divine reverence found in the Gaudiya Vaishnava
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Ram Rasik Sampraday
religious community.) Because Rasik
worship is complex and highly developed, it has remained an elite phenomenon largely confined to a small
group of ascetics. For further information see Peter van der Veer, Gods on
Earth, 1988; and Philip Lutgendorf,
The Life of a Text, 1991.