Introduction

1 Introduction to the Text

The present book is a text-critical edition and annotated translation of the Bhagavad- or Haribhaktivilāsa (“Splendour of devotion to Hari”, henceforth HBV). This text, written ca.1540, is one of the first Sanskrit works of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava saṃpradāya begun by Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533; for classical overviews on this devotional Hindu tradition, see e.g., De 1942 or Eidlitz 1968), detailing in twenty long chapters and around 12000 verses the normative sadācāra or correct conduct as well as the ritual life of a Vaiṣṇava, ranging from how to properly brush the teeth upon getting up in the morning to how to build a temple for Viṣṇu. The

HBV does so in the form of a nibandha, or in the terms of Teun Goudriaan (Goudriaan & Gupta 1981: 141–142), a “compilation”, that is, a work of usually known authorship, which present material on ritual, usually in the form of quotations from older authorities.

In contrast to texts such as Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, the HBV or ritual texts like it in general have been little studied either by scholars or practising Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas (Wong 2015). That does not mean that the

HBV has never been studied before. For instance, in his influential work on the early Sanskrit works of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, Sushil Kumar De (1942: 340–402) discussed the text and summarises its contents, and Rasik Vihari Joshi’s (1959) study on Kṛṣṇaite ritual was mainly based on the HBV. More recent studies include Krishnadas Sinha’s (2009) doctoral thesis on the influence of the HBV on the Bishnupriya Manipuri community, Elisabeth Raddock’s (2011) work on its relationship with the Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra and Barbara Holdrege’s (2015: 287–289) discussion of the way in which the

HBV deals with reconfiguring the elements of the practitioner’s body before worship.

I have myself dealt with various aspects of this text before (Broo 2004, 2005, 2009, 2016, 2017b). There is also a full English translation of the text available (Dāsa & Dāsa 2005–2006), though it is somewhat less than exact and lacks Sanātana Gosvāmin’s commentary.¹ Nevertheless, while I am indebted to all of this previous scholarship and will engage with it at length below, it differs from mine, as none of it deals with the text-critical and intertextual issues that lies at the heart of the present book. This new approach also offers me an opportunity to revisit questions raised by my esteemed predecessors.

In this introduction, I deal with the puzzling question on the authorship of the text before moving on to a summary of the chapters covered in this volume (that is, chapters one to five), examining the style and method of both the main text and its commentary and considering its historical context, theology and intertextualities. I then describe the sources for the critical edition of the text, look at its place in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava history, and finally discuss the conventions I have adopted in the critical edition and annotated translation that follows.

2 Who Wrote the Haribhaktivilāsa?

Every single manuscript of the

HBV that I have examined clearly says (1.2) that the text was compiled by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the disciple of Prabodhānanda, for the pleasure of Rūpa, Sanātana and Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmins. The colophon at the end of every chapter likewise identifies the author as Gopāla Bhaṭṭa. Nevertheless, Jīva Gosvāmin includes the HBV among the works of his uncle Sanātana Gosvāmin at the end of his Laghuvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī commentary on the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa written in 1582–1583.² Around 1610, Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja ascribes the

HBV to Sanātana twice in his Caitanyacaritāmṛta (2.1.35, 3.4.221; for this important early 17th-century hagiography, see Stewart 2010) and even has Caitanya teach a summary of its teachings to Sanātana (2.24.329–345). Kṛṣṇadāsa wrote the Caitanyacaritāmṛta after the passing of both Gopāla Bhaṭṭa and Sanātana Gosvāmin, but as he knew both of them personally—and is mentioned by name in the HBV (1.4)—his evidence cannot be taken lightly.

Gopāla Bhaṭṭa and Sanātana Gosvāmins both belonged to the famous “Six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana”, a group of ascetic and learned men to a large part responsible for establishing Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism in the Vraja area in the 16th century and for systematising the doctrines of this movement (for accessible introductions, see Kapoor 1995 or Rosen 1991).

Of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s (ca.1500–1575) life, little is known to us, and as pointed out by S.K.De (1938a), the details are conflicting. In Murāri Gupta’s Sanskrit Caitanyacaritāmṛta (ca.1535, 3.15.14–16),³ he is said to be the son of Trimalla Bhaṭṭa, a priest at the Śrīraṅgam temple, at whose house Caitanya spent a rainy season ca.1511 during his pilgrimage in South India and whose whole family was converted by him into the worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. Kavi Karṇapūra mentions the same Trimalla Bhaṭṭa in Śrīraṅgam in his Kṛṣṇacaitanyacaritāmṛta (ca.1542, 13.4), though without mentioning Gopāla Bhaṭṭa. Again leaving out Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja mentions the hospitality of both Trimalla and Veṅkaṭa Bhaṭṭas of Śrīraṅgam at two different occasions (2.1.108–110 and 2.9.82–166). Narahari Cakravartin tries to harmonise these two versions in his Bhaktiratnākara (early 18th century, 1.128), by stating that Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s father was Veṅkaṭa Bhaṭṭa and that Trimalla Bhaṭṭa was his uncle. At any rate, after the death of his parents around 1521 (Goswami 2018: 338), Gopāla Bhaṭṭa joined Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmins in Vṛndāvana.⁴

According to the oral tradition of the Rādhāramaṇa temple (Case 2000: 73–75), Caitanya sent Gopāla Bhaṭṭa to Nepal to retrieve sacred Śālagrāma stones. In 1542, one of these Śālagrāmas miraculously transformed into the form of Rādhāramaṇa worshipped in the Vṛndāvana temple bearing the same name still today. Caitanya further honoured Gopāla Bhaṭṭa by sending him his own seat, necklace and loincloth, something that at least within his lineage is seen as a sign of Caitanya’s setting him up as his sole disciple and successor (Case 1995: 45). While that may be a pious exaggeration, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa seems to have been the only one of the Six Gosvāmins to formally initiate disciples.

Today Gopāla Bhaṭṭa is best known as the founder of the Rādhāramaṇa temple, but there are at least five texts connected with his name extant, three of which are connected with aesthetic theory and poetics.

Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s commentary Rasikarañjanī on Bhānudatta Miśra’s Rasamañjarī (early 16th century⁵) has not been published but is available in a good number of manuscripts (Dash 2011: 129). According to S.K.De (1938b: xxxii) it was probably written before his joining the movement of Śrī Caitanya, as it does not refer to Caitanya or any of the texts of the movement.⁶ Gopāla Bhaṭṭa also wrote the commentary Rasataraṅginī on Rudra Bhaṭṭa’s Śṛṅgāratilaka, which extensively cites the texts of Rūpa Gosvāmin (Pollock 2021).

Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s commentary Kṛṣṇavallabhā on the Bengali recension of Līlāśuka Bilvamaṅgala’s Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta (early 15th century?) has been printed (in De 1938b); while it does not mention Caitanya, it does agree with Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology (i.e., in considering Kṛṣṇa the source of all avatāras) and cite Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and Ujjvalanīlamaṇi (De 1938b: xii). Suprisingly, as S.K.De notes (1938b: xxxix–xl), Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s later commentary to the same Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta never mentions this commentary, even though Kṛṣṇadāsa considered Gopāla Bhaṭṭa one of his instructors (śikṣāguru).

Gopāla Bhaṭṭa also wrote a text in prose and verse on the correct times for both daily and occasional rituals, Kālakaumudī (De 1938a: 64–65), of which only a handful of manuscripts seem to be extant (Raghavan 1968: 14). According to P.V.Kane (1997: 1010), this work was cited by the smṛti-writer Raghunandana (ca.1520–1570), but as S.K.De points out (1938b: li), that same Kālakaumudī was cited already by Rāyamukuṭa in the 15th century, so they must refer to some other work by the same name.⁷ The Kālakaumudī thus does not help in narrowing down the dates of the author.

What these four texts have in common is that they all at the beginning or end claim to be written by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the son of Drāviḍa Harivaṃśa Bhaṭṭa. The southern provenance of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa corresponds to the narration detailed above, but the name of the father fits neither the Trimalla of Murāri Gupta or the Veṅkaṭa of Narahari Cakravartin. Is Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the son of Trimalla or Veṅkaṭa Bhaṭṭa, founder of the Rādhāramaṇa temple and one of the six Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana, even identical with Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the son of Harivaṃśa Bhaṭṭa, author of works primarily on Sanskrit aesthetics? Some facts speak for such an identity. At least in his commentaries on the Śṛṅgāratilaka and the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta, the latter shows himself to be a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava, and how many other Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas by that name were from the south? But the strongest evidence is that Manohara Dāsa (a great grand disciple of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin), and following him, Narahari Cakravartin (Bhaktiratnākara 1.228), write that Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin wrote a commentary on the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta, even citing its colophon (Anurāgavallī pp.11–12).

Still, there are also some things that speak against this identification. Manohara Dāsa writes 150 years after the event and is not always reliable (Sen 2019: 115), and neither Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja nor any other Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas before the 17th century link the two. Despite the Rādhāramaṇa temple having been founded in 1542, Rādhāramaṇa is not mentioned in any of the texts by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the son of Harivaṃśa. Finally, the chronology seems off. Rūpa Gosvāmin quotes a verse by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa in his early (ca.1530) anthology Padyāvalī (38), while all of the explicitly Vaiṣṇava texts of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the son of Harivaṃśa, refer back to texts later than that, such as the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and its sequel, the Ujjvalanīlamaṇi. Pollock (2021) finds the identification between the two Gopāla Bhaṭṭas to be settled. I am less certain.

Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s name is also linked to another ritual text, the Satkriyāsāradīpikā, detailing fourteen saṃskāras or rites of passage for Vaiṣṇavas. While manuscripts of the text exist,⁸ the printed text, first published by Kedaranātha Datta Bhaktivinoda, appears to have been interpolated with new material, as it contains not only directions for offering libations to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa himself but also to the Yogapīṭha of Māyāpura (p.164), proclaimed by Bhaktivinoda in the late 19th century as the birthplace of Caitanya (see e.g., Bhatia 2017: 161–199). Sushil Kumar De (1942: 402) felt it “extremely doubtful” that this text was written by the 16th-century Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, as it is not mentioned in even the later hagiographies. Further study on this text would be needed to determine its authorship.

Finally, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa is held to have written a text of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava philosophy and theology later expanded by Jīva Gosvāmin into his magnum opus the Bhāgavata- or Ṣaṭsandarbha (De 1942: 193). According to Shrivatsa Goswami (2018: 339–341), what Jīva Gosvāmin did was just a little editing, so that the Bhāgavatasandarbha really ought to be credited to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa. In the absence of any manuscripts of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s original text, however, not much can be said of its relationship to Jīva Gosvāmin’s work.⁹

We have a little more information on Sanātana Gosvāmin (1488–1565).¹⁰ He is credited with at least three books. The first, Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (De 1942: 177–181, originally called just Bhāgavatāmṛta), written or at least begun during the lifetime of Caitanya himself (that is, before 1533), is a major work in two parts, the first describing sage Nārada’s search for the supreme devotee of Kṛṣṇa and the second and longer one the journey of Gopakumāra, a simple cowherd boy, throughout the universe and beyond into the various realms of the transcendent world, finally arriving in Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral world of Goloka. Written in a Purāṇic style, the work is accompanied by an elaborate auto-commentary, the Digdarśinī. There are several English translations of the full text available, the most readable being that of Gopīparāṇadhana Dāsa (2002).

Sanātana’s second book is the much less known Kṛṣṇalīlāstava, retelling the story of Kṛṣṇa from the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa up to the killing of Kaṃsa in the form of invocatory prayers. It is undated, but the last prayers of the text indicate that it was written when the author resided in the Vraja area.¹¹ Of this book as well there is an excellent translation by Gopīparāṇadhana Dāsa (2012). The third and final text is the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī (again, originally called simply Vaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī) commentary to all of the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.¹² While it is based on the influential 14th-century commentary of Śrīdhara Svāmin (Sheridan 1994, Gupta 2020), it goes much beyond it, discussing for instance parallel passages in the Harivaṃśa and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. While the text mentions the commentary of Vallabha (1479–1531), the founder of the Puṣṭimārga Vaiṣṇava saṃpradāya, as that of “an eminent Vaiṣṇava” (at 10.8.19) and once by name (at 10.21.17), it actually incorporates many of Vallabha’s glosses throughout (Dāsa 2018: 466). The Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī is at any rate of great importance for the development of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava understanding of the main part of this text of so central importance to the saṃpradāya.

Sanātana Gosvāmin’s family too was of South Indian origin. In his autocommentary to the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (1.1.3), he writes that his younger brother Rūpa Gosvāmin, “the best of Vaiṣṇavas”, was the son of Kumāra of the lineage of Jagadguru, the preceptor of Brāhmaṇas famous in the Karṇāṭa land.¹³ In the appendix to his Laghuvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī, an edited and slightly abridged version of the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī, Sanātana’s nephew Jīva Gosvāmin (1511–1608) supplies more details, informing us that it was Kumāra’s grandfather Padmanābha who first moved to Bengal, settling in Naihati. After a quarrel with his relations, Padmanābha’s son Mukunda moved to east Bengal. Mukunda’s son Kumāra had several children, of which Sanātana appears to have been the eldest. He studied Sanskrit with Vidyāvācaspati, a younger brother of Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma, and, together with his brother Rūpa, evinced a great interest in Kṛṣṇa-bhakti even before meeting Caitanya in Rāmakeli in 1515 (De 1942: 100–101).

Nevertheless, despite this excellent brāhmaṇical pedigree, Kṛṣṇadāsa has Sanātana call himself “lowborn” (nīcajāti) several times in the Caitanyacaritāmṛta (e.g., 2.24.320, 3.4.6, 3.4.28) and behaving as if he had lost his brāhmaṇical standing by for instance not entering the Jagannātha temple in Purī. Usually this has been understood to stem from the fact that Sanātana had worked in the Muslim government of Bengal led by Ḥusain Shāh (r. 1493–1519) as chief minister or departmental head (sākar mallik) while Rūpa had been the Shāh’s private secretary (dabīr khās, O’Connell 2019: 176). However, as Joseph O’Connell has clearly demonstrated (2019: 173–178), many followers of Caitanya were directly involved with the rule of Ḥusain Shāh without any apparent loss of social or religious status. Some scholars have opined that Sanātana’s feeling of being fallen stem rather from his having converted to Islam in his youth (e.g., Sen 1917: 37), but there is no evidence of this and the brāhmaṇical studies mentioned above rather disprove it. Moreover, why would that make him call himself “lowborn”? Rather, following the distinction that Sanātana himself makes in his commentary to

HBV1.38 between ancestral and personal purity, I suggest that the purity of his family had been compromised by the conversion of someone in a previous generation, and that something in Sanātana’s own life compounded his feeling of lowliness, perhaps in connection with having had to disguise himself as a Muslim mendicant (daraveśa) when escaping the service of the Shāh (Caitanyacaritāmṛta 2.20.13, 49).

At any rate, Sanātana arrived in Vṛndāvana around 1519 (Entwistle 1987: 147) and with the exception of a stay in Puri, he remained there as a celibate renunciant for the rest of his life. He established the worship of an image of Kṛṣṇa called Madanagopāla or Madanamohana on the top of the Dvādaśāditya Tila hill of Vṛndāvana overlooking the Yamunā river (for a description of the site, see Entwistle 1987: 402), but judging from the many places associated with him throughout the Vraja area (Entwistle 1987: 147), he seems to have changed his residence several times.

Given that the

HBV is associated with both Gopāla Bhaṭṭa and Sanātana Gosvāmins, later tradition has tried to find a solution to the question of the book’s authorship. In his Anurāgavallī (p.8) from 1696, Manohara Dāsa first cites the above-mentioned introductory verse of the

HBV and then the commentary (there called dikpradarśinī) “by Sanātana Gosvāmin.” He then gives a brief explanation of the meaning of the commentary as he had heard it from a wise and sober great one (mahānta). According to him, Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote the book but then gave it to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, who completed it throughout. “This shows,” Manohāra Dāsa continues, “the waves of their love—a great secret is that there was no difference between them.”¹⁴

According to Nityānanda Dāsa’s Premavilāsa (p.214), however, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa wrote the book on the order of Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmins. When it was complete, he offered it to Sanātana Gosvāmin who accepted it as his own.¹⁵ Finally, Narahari Cakravartin writes in his Bhaktiratnākara (1.197–198) that the idea of the book originated with Gopāla Bhaṭṭa but that it was Sanātana who actually carried out the task, writing in the name of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa.¹⁶

Several Gauḍīya Vaiṣņava scholars have tried to understand these contradictory statements. In the introduction to his edition, Purīdāsa (1946) writes that on the order of Caitanya, Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote a text on Vaiṣṇava behaviour that he called the Haribhaktivilāsa, a text that Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin later expanded into the Bhagavadbhaktivilāsa famous as the

HBV today, and which indeed does call itself Bhagavadbhaktivilāsa in the chapter colophons.¹⁷ The Haribhaktivilāsa and the Bhagavadbhaktivilāsa would thus be two different texts. Haridāsa Śāstrī echoes this opinion in his edition (1986), adding that he hopes soon to bring out an edition of the shorter text written by Sanātana Gosvāmin. O.B.L.Kapoor (1995: 85–86) repeats the same argument in his book on the Vṛndāvana Gosvāmins.

This solution is appealing, as it would explain the two names associated with the text. But is there any hard evidence for such an “Ur-

HBV”? Haridāsa Śāstrī never did bring out the text of Sanātana Gosvāmin’s that he mentioned, but there are several manuscripts of a

HBV different from the printed one available. I have seen twenty-eight.

Apart from individual, perhaps unique abbreviations of the

HBV,¹⁸ there appear to be—with some small variations particularly at the beginning and end—two shorter versions of the

HBV. The first,¹⁹ called simply

HBV, “The Essence of the

HBV” (haribhaktivilāsasya sārasaṅgrahaḥ) or “An Abbreviated

HBV” (haribhaktivilāsasaṃkṣepaḥ), runs from 16 to 48 folios and contains extracts from the

HBV on different topics, beginning with offering obeisance (praṇāma) and continuing to verses describing the greatness of cleansing the temple, seeing the Lord, singing the names of the Lord, meditating on the Lord, worshipping the Lord, initiation, bathing the Lord, the Lord’s devotees and so on.

As the order of topics is completely different from that given in the Caitanyacaritāmṛta (2.24.329–345, see above), and as it usually begins with the verse “This is written as extracted from the book called Haribhaktivilāsa by Śrīmad Gopāla Bhaṭṭa of Vṛndāvana”²⁰ with no mention of Sanātana whatsoever, it is evident that this text is what it usually calls itself, a compendium of verses from the

HBV.

The second and more common shorter version,²¹ however, presents something closer to what we are looking for here. This version runs from 37 to 116 folios. The text here is not divided into chapters, but the contents follow the order given in the Caitanyacaritāmṛta, though much more concisely than in the ordinary

HBV. The 234 verses of the first chapter are here only 67; the 250 of the second chapter, 54; the 360 of the third chapter, 109; the 374 of the fourth chapter, 50; and the 480 of the fifth chapter, 81. Could this then be the original text of Sanātana’s, later expanded by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa?

Again, the answer is no. Here as well, most manuscripts mention Gopāla Bhaṭṭa; none Sanātana. While the verse cited from the

HBV in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (1.2.201) is found both in this text (e.g., Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Alwar 3963, folio64a) and in the ordinary text (11.677), this text leaves out parts of quotations taken second-hand from earlier texts (e.g., 4.149cd–150; an untraceable citation from Bhṛgu Smṛti actually taken from Viṣṇubhakticandrodaya). That an abbreviator would cut out unnecessary verses is not hard to understand, but that a person wishing to expand a text would take the trouble to locate unnamed sources to add more verses from them is very unlikely. Further, this text includes several verses cited from the Gautamīya Tantra, included only in some mss of the larger text (e.g., Gautamīya Tantra 8.28–29 given before

HBV4.162). Again, as many colophons clearly state (calling it a saṅgraha, summary), this text is abridged from the larger version rather than being the origin of an expanded, larger version. Finally, while these abridged versions of the

HBV seem to be fairly old (the oldest manuscript I have seen, Pāṭhbāṛī 2002/242, is dated 1727 

CE), there is no mention of any alternative versions of the text in the manuscript list of the Rādhā Dāmodara temple from 1597 (Śarmā 2016).

Scholars have provided other possible explanations. Dinesh Chandra Sen (1917: 37–38) thought that Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote the text in Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s name, fearing that his conversion to Islam in his youth before coming in contact with Caitanya would prejudice readers against the book. Melville Kennedy (1925: 137) followed the same line of argument. But had Sanātana Gosvāmin really been a Muslim? It is undisputed that both Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmins had worked at the court of Ḥusain Shāh in their youth and that Sanātana Gosvāmin felt himself fallen and untouchable even after becoming an associate of Caitanya’s,²² but S.K.De (1986: 97, 141–143) convincingly argued against his ever having converted to Islam, something that surely would have hindered him from studying the Hindu scriptures under Vidyāvācaspati, brother of the celebrated Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma Bhaṭṭācārya, as he himself claims in the beginning of his Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī commentary to the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.²³

Instead, S.K.De held (1986: 143) that Gopāla Bhaṭṭa was the real author, and that the association of the text with Sanātana Gosvāmī was due to some kind of undetermined collaboration between the two, or perhaps to impart authoritativeness to a text not appreciated by all Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas. Since S.K.De, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s authorship of the text has been accepted by most scholars, including for instance Margaret Case (2000: 75), Siniruddha Dash (2005: 240), Shrivatsa Goswami (2018), David Haberman (2003: 89) and Barbara Holdrege (2015: 700). I have as well subscribed to the opinion that Gopāla Bhaṭṭa was the main author (e.g., Dāsa 2001; Broo 2003 and 2020 [2003]), but I have come to revise my opinion based on the following arguments.

Firstly, there are important parallels between the introductory verses of the

HBV and those of the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣaṇī. In

HBV1.4, the author praises the Vaiṣṇavas of Vṛndāvana, led by Kāśīśvara, Lokanātha and Kṛṣṇadāsa,²⁴ and the same three are mentioned in verse nine of the introduction to the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī.²⁵ Similarly, at

HBV1.2, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, Rūpa, Sanātana and Raghunātha Dāsa are mentioned, and with the exception of Sanātana, the same persons are mentioned in verses12 and 13 of the introduction to the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī.²⁶ Interestingly, in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu written in 1541, Rūpa Gosvāmin glorifies Sanātana, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa and Raghunātha Dāsa at the end of every quadrant (1.4.21, 2.5.134, 3.5.37, 4.9.44). These four therefore seem to have been very close.

Secondly, the simple, often self-deprecating anuṣṭubh verses introducing every chapter of the

HBV and usually addressed to Caitanya²⁷ are very similar to verses found in the texts uncontestably written by Sanātana, that is, the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (e.g., 1.12),²⁸ Kṛṣṇalīlastava (e.g., 406, 415)²⁹ and Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī (e.g., at 10.14.40, 10.40.3 or 10.50.1).³⁰

Thirdly, and most importantly, the connections between the main text of the

HBV and its commentary reveal the author of the main text. The commentary or gloss to the

HBV, generally called Digdarśinī (“The one that reveals the drift”) contains no name or date, but it is universally held to be written by Sanātana Gosvāmin.³¹ It has the same name as Sanātana’s autocommentary to his earlier text, the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta, and while generally shorter, the style of writing (for instance the use of iti dik to present the final argument, the overuse of evam agre ’pi and the engagement with the Harivaṃśa and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa) resembles that of this text and the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī commentary to the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The commentary also at times refers to Sanātana’s Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (e.g., at 11.453).

At first sight, the commentary does not appear to be written by the same author as the main text. As noted already by S.K.De (1986: 140), it includes long cited passages that easily could have been incorporated into the main text that already consists mostly of citations. While the main text is addressed to a general Vaiṣṇava audience (see below, 24–25), the commentary appears in its turn to be intended for specifically Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas. As the commentary mentions the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin from 1541 (as Bhaktirasārṇava, at 11.631 and 632)—a book that for its part mentions the

HBV (1.2.201)—the commentary cannot have been finalised at the same time as the main text. This lapse of time between main text and commentary also seems to be implied by a statement in the commentary to the fourth verse of the first chapter, “it is also indicated that this book was written when these people were living in those places.”³² Further, the Rādhā Dāmodara temple manuscript list mentioned above mentions two manuscripts of the

HBV and separately one of its commentary (taṭṭīkā, Śarmā 2016: 60). And finally, the commentator once (1.3) provides an alternative reading for an original verse in the main text.

Taken together, these arguments for a difference between the author of the main text and that of the commentary seem strong, but they do not hold up to a closer scrutiny. The commentary does indeed seem to have been finalised after the main text, and as we shall see below (25), it is addressed to a different audience. Nevertheless, I argue that the commentator is the same as the author of the main text.

First, in his later work, the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī, Sanātana Gosvāmin refers to more extensive discussions on particular topics in the commentary to the Bhagavadbhaktivilāsa (10.470 and twice 10.58),³³ but he refers in the same way to the main text of the

HBV (10.59–82, 3.262–280).³⁴

Second, and to me conclusively, the author of the commentary has had access to the same sources as the author of the main text, as he is often able to mention alternative readings (e.g., commentary to

HBV1.41, 2.148, 3.173, 4.54, 5.381). This is particularly striking in the cases where the main text provides citations taken second hand from unnamed primary sources. For example, at 2.184–233, the

HBV gives a lengthy citation from the Varāha Purāṇa (98.7–55) that textual variants show to be taken first-hand from the Jayamādhavamānasollāsa (folios111a–115b; for more on this text, see below 35). After the verse that is 2.145 in the

HBV, the Jayamādhavamānasollāsa adds a short gloss that in the

HBV is incorporated into the commentary.³⁵ That a separate commentator would firstly have known that this Varāha Purāṇa citation was in fact taken from the Jayamādhavamānasollāsa and that he secondly would have taken the trouble to find it there and insert that text’s short glosses into his commentary defies all probability. Rather, the same person wrote the main text and the commentary, and since it is clear that the commentary was written by Sanātana Gosvāmin, that means that he is the author of the main text of the

HBV as well.

But is it not possible that Sanātana Gosvāmin had access to notes by Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin that he expanded into the Digdarśinī commentary that we have today? After all, the New Catalogus Catalogorum (Dash 2005: 240) lists three manuscripts with a commentary by “Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the author himself.” That is possible, of course, but there is no evidence for any such Ur-commentary. I have examined these three manuscripts, but the catalogue attributions of their commentary are mistaken, as they are in all cases identical with Sanātana’s Digdarśinī commentary. Despite examining more than a hundred manuscripts, I have not been able to find any other commentary on the

HBV than the

DDṬ.

Further, despite the confusion regarding the authorship of the

HBV, several later Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava author treat the main text and the commentary as a seamless whole. Both the Karmavivṛti of Kṛṣṇadeva Sārvabhauma (Horstmann 2009: 218–290) and the Vaidikavaiṣṇavasadācāra of Harekṛṣṇa Śarmā (Horstmann 2009: 298–325), texts dealing with how Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas are to understand the relationship between bhakti and karma in the sense of socio-religious rituals, written at the behest of Mahārāja Savāī Jaisingh

II (1700–1743), the ruler of Amber/ Jaipur, extensively cite the

HBV and its commentary (in the Karmavivṛti always called dikpradarśinī). No authorship is given for either text, but they are generally cited together and are awarded the same amount of authority. Kṛṣṇadeva Sārvabhauma once refers to the “verses of the

HBV” (haribhaktivilāsasya kārikā, Horstmann 2009: 251), implying two parts to the complete

HBV: its verses and its commentary.

But what about the commentary offering a variant reading at

HBV1.3? Sanātana does the same in his auto-commentary to the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (e.g., 2.4.190). Perhaps he is being playful, or perhaps by the time that these commentaries were finalised, variant readings had come up. We know that by 1597, the Rādhā Dāmodara temple library housed two copies of the

HBV, and as I will show below (51–52), there appears to have been some differences in readings between the two.

But if Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote the text, as I think the above arguments conclusively show, why did he do so in the name of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa? We may never know the full answer, but it is noteworthy that Sanātana does not give his own name in any of his books. The Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta is written in the playful guise of an appendix to the Jaiminīya Mahābhārata, and while neither the Kṛṣṇalīlāstava nor the Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī is written in the name of anyone else, they also do not give the name of the author. Perhaps Gopāla Bhaṭṭa did somehow help in writing the text, for instance by providing examples of Śrī Vaiṣṇava practice,³⁶ or perhaps D.C.Sen was partly right—even though Sanātana probably never formally did convert to Islam, he nevertheless may have been burdened by his past and felt that the name of the faultless Brāhmaṇa Gopāla Bhaṭṭa would better suit a book on the rules and regulations of Vaiṣṇavas.

In gifting the authorship of his book to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, Sanātana Gosvāmin at any rate follows a custom not uncommon in this period, as pointed out by Vijayendra Snātaka (1968: 103). In a similar way, Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s preceptor Prabodhānanda appears to have awarded the authorship of the Rādhārasasudhānidhi to Hita Harivaṃśa, “in order to enhance the prestige of his junior contemporary”, as Jan Brzezinski has convincingly shown (1992b: 479).

Whatever the reason, just as Sanātana’s authorship of the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta was an open secret, so was that of the

HBV. This open secret seems to have been less well-known by later Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, however, where authors with a close connection to the Vṛndāvana community, such as Kṛṣṇadeva Sārvabhauma in Jaipur, were aware of it, while Bengali authors such as Manohara Dāsa struggled to understand who had written the text.

3 Summary of Contents

The present volume contains the first five chapters (vilāsas) of the

HBV. After a general introduction (1.1–4) and summary of contents (lekhyapratijñā, 1.5–27), the first chapter deals with the guru and the mantra to be received from the guru. After explaining the need for approaching a guru (1.28–31), the author provides several lists of ideal characteristics of guru and disciple (1.32–71). This is followed by a short section on how guru and disciple are to observe each other before initiation (1.72–76), various rules for how to serve the guru and how the disciple should ask the guru for initiation (1.77–100).

The section on the guru is followed by a section on how Viṣṇu is superior to the other gods (1.101–117), and how therefore mantras directed to Viṣṇu are the best of mantras (1.118–121). Apart from general Viṣṇu mantras (1.122–141), mantras to Nṛsiṃha (1.142–143) and Rāma (1.144–151) are also described and glorified, but the main emphasis is given to the 18-syllable mantra of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa (1.152–191).

After establishing that everyone is eligible for initiation into this mantra (1.192–197), the author describes methods for determining how suitable a particular mantra is to a particular practitioner (1.198–224), noting that the power of the Gopāla mantra transcends such considerations. Nevertheless, the author concludes the first chapter with a brief introduction to some methods of purifying other mantras (1.225–234).

The second chapter deals with initiation, first establishing its mandatoriness (2.3–8), its greatness (māhātmya, see 20; 2.9–12) and then deliberating on the proper time for initiation (2.13–30). This is followed by a very detailed description of the various parts of preparing for and performing an elaborate ceremonial initiation (kriyāvatī dīkṣā, 2.31–183), including lists of the regulations the disciple is to follow henceforth (2.132–176). Next follows a somewhat simpler Purāṇic style of initiation (2.184–233), then various ever more simplified methods (2.234–246). The chapter ends with a short description of the greatness of bestowing a Viṣṇu mantra (2.247–250).

The third chapter begins the description of the ideal daily life of the initiated Vaiṣṇava devotee. After introducing the importance and greatness of virtuous conduct (sadācāra, 3.4–19), the author takes up the daily duties beginning with arising before sunrise, sipping water (ācamana) and changing clothes (3.20–21). He goes on to describe glorifying and remembering Kṛṣṇa and the greatness of such remembrance (3.22–87), bowing down and praying to the Lord (3.88–98), meditation on the Lord and its greatness (3.98–129), how to wake the Lord and remove offered flowers, leaves and fruits from the altar (3.130–145), how to cleanse the Lord’s mouth (3.146–149) and the offering of the auspicious waving of lights (maṅgalanīrājana, 3.150–152).

This is followed by the rules for the morning bath to be taken after sunrise, prefixed by those for attending the call of nature and subsequent purification (3.156–184), sipping water (ācamana, 3.185–208), brushing the teeth (3.209–234) and arranging the hair (3.235–236). The instructions on bathing itself (3.237–280) focus on bathing outside at a sacred site (tīrtha); that bathing is to be supplemented by sprinkling one’s head with water that has washed the feet of the guru, father, Brāhmaṇas, water from a conch and especially from the Śālagrāma stone (3.281–304). One is then to offer libations (tarpaṇa) to the gods (3.305–306), sit down and do the sandhyā rituals, first in the Vedic way (3.307–315) and then in the Tantric way (3.316–336), here meaning worshipping Kṛṣṇa in the sun and in water. This is then followed by more libations (3.337–354) and finally a deliberation on the proper attitude for all such rituals (3.355–360).

The fourth chapter deals with preparation for worship. After returning home after the rituals detailed in the previous chapter, the devotee is to clean the Lord’s temple, plaster the floor with cow dung and clay and decorate the temple with svastikas, flags and so on (4.4–53) as well as clean the vessels for worship (4.55–96). The devotee is then to pick flowers, Tulasī leaves and other necessities for the worship (4.97–99). If needed, he can then take another bath at home, using warm water, oil or other cleansing agents unless it is a day on which such items are forbidden (4.100–145).

The author then provides rules for what kind of clothes to wear (4.146–161), the seat to use (4.162–165), and then how to draw the vertical mark of the Vaiṣṇavas (ūrdhvapuṇḍra) on one’s body (4.166–224), preferably with gopīcandana clay or mud from the root of a Tulasī plant (4.225–243). The practitioner should then decorate his body with the marks of Viṣṇu (conch, disc, club and so forth, 4.244–303), necklaces, garlands and other decorations (4.303–335). The author follows with a short description of sandhyā at home (4.336–338), of worship of the guru (4.339–369) and of how to enter the temple of the Lord (4.370–373).

The fifth chapter begins with the worship at the gate of the temple (5.6–11), entering properly (5.12–14), worshipping the attendant divinities (5.15–16) and then ritually binding the directions (digbandhana, 5.17), sitting down on a proper seat (āsana, 5.18–27) and then arranging the items necessary for the worship in their proper places (5.28–53). The practitioner should then recite Vedic mantras for invoking peace (5.54–56), remove obstacles (5.57–59), bow to his gurus and the attendant divinities and visualise a protective wall of fire around himself (5.60–62).

This is followed by a description of how to purify the elements of the body (5.63–73), restrain the breath (prāṇāyāma, 5.74–87). The author then deals in some detail with various ways of superimposing mantras onto the body (nyāsa, 5.88–165). After briefly mentioning various hand gestures to be shown (mudrā, 5.166–167), the author provides both longer and shorter visualisation of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa (5.168–218). This is followed by a description of the internal sacrifice, comprising both worship of the Lord in the mind and worship of the Lord within the practitioner’s body (5.219–248).

The description of the external worship then begins with a consideration of the various external abodes of the Lord, including a description of various forms of Viṣṇu (5.249–295). The Śālagrāma stones are particularly emphasised and their variety is described in great detail, as well as the greatness of their worship (5.296–456). The practitioner is finally enjoined to worship the Śālagrāma stone together with a stone from Dvārakā, the varieties of which are also described (5.457–480).

4 Style and Method of the Text and Commentary

The section on the guru (1.28–100) may illustrate the method of the author. He begins with two verses of his own (1.28–29), backing them up with four verses on the guru cited from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (1.30–33). It is noteworthy that unlike the main sources that the author uses, the original text is not written in prose but in simple anuṣṭubh verses, preceded by an iti to indicate that a section with cited text has come to an end. The author even sometimes versifies prose passages from his earlier sources (see below, 1.7).³⁷

Nevertheless, as pointed out by Goudriaan and Gupta (1981: 143–144), this style of writing means that is not always easy to see the difference between original and cited verses, and as an iti can easily be dropped by a careless copyist, previous editors of the

HBV have indeed at times made mistakes in differentiating between cited and original verses (e.g., considering verse3.101 as a continuation of the Nārada Pañcarātra citation at 3.100). To make matters even more complicated, verses from previous sources are sometimes presented as if original (e.g., 2.182, 3.266, 5.63).

The Bhāgavata verses are at any rate followed by a verse from the Kramadīpikā and then a whole host of verses culled from the Agastya Saṃhitā, Hayaśīrṣa Saṃhitā, Kūrma Purāṇa, Nārada Pañcarātra and the Upaniṣads, but also all of the scriptural verses cited in the corresponding sections of the Nṛsiṃhaparicaryā and Viṣṇubhakticandrodaya (see below), making this section in the

HBV much more theologically rich than those in the previous texts.

On the one hand, there is little originality found in this section. Out of 72 verses, only five are written by the author himself, four of which serve simply to introduce new topics (1.28, 29, 72 and 100). The fifth one (1.55), on the other hand, is an important verse, as it defines who is a Vaiṣṇava (“one who has taken Viṣṇu-initiation and who is devoted to the worship of Viṣṇu”), but even that one may have been taken from an (untraced) earlier source. Apart from these five verses, the only original contributions of the

HBV here are the headings and the selection and arrangement of verses. But one should not underestimate what these tools can be used for.

Citing the Nārada Pañcarātra, the author of the

HBV holds that gurus of different varṇas can have disciples of the same or lower Varṇas. Still, he adds the following lines (

HBV1.51–55):

And also: “But when there is a famous guru of the highest Varṇa in > one’s own land or somewhere else, those who desire virtue should not > initiate. One who does so anywhere in his presence is ruined; that > person is ruined here and in the next world. Therefore one should act > as the śāstras enjoin. Kṣatriyas, Vaiśyas and Śūdras should not > initiate in inverted order (pratiloma, i.e. they should not initiate > anyone from a higher Varṇa).” > And in the Padma Purāṇa: “A Brāhmaṇa who is the best of the great > Bhāgavatas is indeed the guru of humankind. Verily he³⁸ is > worshipable like Hari by all the worlds. But a non-Vaiṣṇava who is > born in a great family, initiated into all sacrifices, and a student > of a thousand branches of knowledge cannot be a guru.” > Wise men call someone a Vaiṣṇava who has taken Viṣṇu-initiation and > who is devoted to the worship of Viṣṇu. Others are > non-Vaiṣṇavas.³⁹

In other words, being a Vaiṣṇava is more important than being a Brāhmaṇa, but gurus should preferably be Brāhmaṇas. This seems to be reflected by the social reality of 16th-century Vṛndāvana, where five of the six Gosvāmins were Brāhmaṇas, but where Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmins, perhaps considering their caste background compromised, sent prospective disciples to Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin of unimpeachable Brāhmaṇa credentials (Premavilāsa 58–59, 105).

Nevertheless, by stressing Vaiṣṇavism, the text leaves some room for non-Brāhmaṇa gurus. In fact, just before the verse stressing that the guru must be a Vaiṣṇava (1.54), some Bengali manuscripts of the text (e.g., Sanskrit College 9089 & 9142; Tübingen Ma

I84) add another verse attributed to the Padma Purāṇa:

Brāhmaṇas, Kṣatriyas and Vaiśyas are the gurus of those born as > Śūdras, but Śūdras that are devoted to the Lord are the gurus of these > three.⁴⁰

The manuscript history of the

HBV shows this verse to be a later interpolation (as it is only found in the Bengali recension of the text), but one that clearly corresponds to a changing social reality, with non-Brāhmaṇa gurus of the next generation of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, such as Narottama Dāsa, widely initiating across Varṇa lines (Sen 1917: 428–429; Rosen 1991b: 103–107).

In general, the presentation of each topic of the

HBV follows the same order. The author begins by establishing the mandatoriness (nityatā) of that particular ritual or observance, then describes the rules or procedure (vidhi) to be observed and finally provides a description of its “greatness” (māhātmya), that is, what its rewards will be, often in a very exaggerated style. Sometimes the same is accomplished in a negative way, that is, through describing the punishments for non-observance.⁴¹ As in the case of the section on the guru above, almost every verse will be cited from previous authorities.

In general, chapters three to five in this volume follow the practitioner from getting out of bed in the morning to preparing for the morning worship (pūjā), but the rules given are not always in the right chronological order. Brushing the teeth, for example, is usually done after purification upon attending the call of nature, but if the practitioner is to wake the image of the Lord, he is enjoined to do so already before that (

DDṬ to

HBV3.20). Similarly ācamana or sipping water for purification is described at length in one place (3.185–208), but forms a part of almost every ritual of the text. The composite form of the text makes it very difficult to avoid repetitions, so that for example rules for the seat are given twice (4.162–165 and 5.18–27).

Sanātana Gosvāmin’s auto-commentary to the text is called Digdarśinīṭīkā (

DDṬ), “The gloss that shows the direction”, and is for the most part, as the name suggests, a gloss (ṭīkā) rather than a regular commentary (bhāṣya). It does not cover every verse but focuses on difficult parts, either in terms of vocabulary and grammar or content. In common with many other mediaeval and early modern Bengali texts, the commentator makes use of Kātantra (see e.g., Shen 2014) rather than Pāṇinīan grammar when explaining linguistically difficult places. The

DDṬ follows the ordinary conventions of Sanskrit commentaries (for an introduction, see Tubb & Boose 2007), such as differentiating between literal explanations (ity arthaḥ) and implied meanings (iti bhāvaḥ), but the peculiarity that gives it its name is that the author in the case of longer discussions often ends with supplying the general direction or drift of the argument (iti dik).⁴² It also clarifies the conventions of the main text, such as how it collects verses from earlier ritual texts (at 1.1), how it uses the words ca (at 1.33) and iti (at 1.53) and how it sometimes leaves out irrelevant parts of verses (at 1.33).

The

DDṬ is sometimes rather tedious, such as when glossing “and so on” (ādi) with only one more item and another “and so on”⁴³ or when writing that similar cases later on are to be understood in the same way but then still feeling the need to explain them again when they turn up next.⁴⁴ Many times the commentor is forced to account for irregular grammar in verses cited, often occasioned by poor manuscript readings.⁴⁵ The commentary is also not free from mistakes, particularly when it comes to explaining Vedic grammar.⁴⁶

Nevertheless, there are many places where the

DDṬ is extremely interesting to the reader. It sometimes provides further information on topics covered only briefly,⁴⁷ discusses variant readings available to the author,⁴⁸ mentions local or social customs⁴⁹ and at times takes the text into a less generally Vaiṣṇava and more specifically Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava direction.⁵⁰ In one place it even engages in something of a text-critical discussion on the age of various scriptures referenced, calling the Kāśīkhaṇḍa a “modern poetical creation”.⁵¹

At times, the

DDṬ is indispensable for understanding the main text. These include several technical parts, such as how to determine the suitability of a particular mantra for a particular person (1.198–208), how to construct the firepit and the implements for the initiatory fire sacrifice (dīkṣahoma, 2.34–48) or how to purify the elements of the body (bhūtaśuddhi, 5.65–73).

Not everything in the

DDṬ is original. For example, many of the technical explanations of matters relating to initiation in the second chapter are culled from the commentary of one Puruṣottama Vana to the Kramadīpikā, a commentary that I have not been able to locate. Textual reuse is also very noticeable whenever the

DDṬ deals with verses from the Bhāgavata (and less often, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa), where the commentary of Śrīdhara underlies the glosses. In one place (3.23), Sanātana Gosvāmin begins with reproducing the commentary of Śrīdhara verbatim (with the exception of one phrase that he perhaps did not feel comfortable with), but then adds his own, independent commentary, apologising for surpassing his revered predecessor. In most cases, however, such a clear distinction is not retained.

The following commentary, to Bhāgavata Purāṇa 11.27.12–13 at

HBV5.257–258, explaining different types of images or bases of the Lord, may be taken as an example. Words in italics are words from the verses in question that are being explained. I have here placed text added by Sanātana Gosvāmin in bold and words that he has deleted from Śrīdhara’s commentary within square brackets.

Metallic means made of metals such as gold. Plaster means made of > clay, sandalwood paste and so on. Mentally conceived means > worshipped in the heart. Even though being mentally conceived suits > all of these forms, still, since this applies to a particular > appearance of the blessed Lord in the mind, it is separately > mentioned. > Since he supports life and consciousness, the Lord only is called > the living being; his temple refers to the base for > worship. As he is eminently (prakarṣeṇa) present (tiṣṭhati) > there, it [the temple of the living being, the Lord] is called > the support (pratiṣṭhā). Alternatively, the image becomes a temple > for the Lord by support, that is, through Kalā Nyāsa and so > on.⁵²

What Sanātana Gosvāmin does, in other words, is use the gloss of Śrīdhara as the basis for his own text, seamlessly adding two things. Firstly, he explains why the Bhāgavata Purāṇa counts images conceived only in the mind as a separate category even though every image is worshipped mentally as well through meditation and so on, and secondly, he feels the need to explain why the Bhāgavata here calls the Lord “the living being” (jīva). He removes Śrīdhara’s simple gloss of living being as meaning the Lord and adds one of his own, probably feeling uncomfortable with a term that seems to equate the supreme Lord (paramātman) with the individual living being (jīvātman), something that flies in the face of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava doctrine.

5 Historical Context of the Haribhaktivilāsa

The

HBV is not dated, but as it is mentioned in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (1.2.102) from 1541 and as it uses a text that Sanātana Gosvāmin copied in 1534 (see below, 32–33), we can confidently place it between these two years.⁵³ I will return to the question as to where the text was written below (40).

As mentioned above, Sanātana Gosvāmin settled in Vṛndāvana around 1519. Later hagiographies present the area as a wilderness, where Rūpa and Sanātana slept under a different tree every night (Caitanyacaritāmṛta 2.19.127). Muslim sources seem to agree. Irfan Habib (1996: 135, 156) translates a parvānā or order from 1704 by Muktār Khān, governor of Agra province, that mentions how Rūpa Gosvāmin had settled in the village of Vṛndāvana when the Mathurā area “was full of jungle and uninhabited”.

But exactly how uninhabited and wild was this area? The conquests of Muhammad Ghori (1149–1206) had ended Hindu power in the Doab and gradually led to the destruction of all Buddhist, Jain and Hindu temples in the area. Buddhism never recovered, and for several centuries, Jains and Hindus were not able to construct any temples that were not soon afterwards demolished (Entwistle 1987: 123). Nevertheless, by Sanātana Gosvāmin’s arrival in 1519, the reign of the savagely iconoclastic Sikandar Lodi (r. 1489–1517) of the Delhi sultanate was over, and while fears of rampaging Muslim bands were still very much alive, the situation for Hindus was becoming safer.

As A.W.Entwistle has showed (1987: 110–133), while the Mathurā area was connected with the cult of Vāsudeva at least since the 4th century

BC, there are few signs of the worship of the playful and amorous, two-armed cowherd (Gopāla) Kṛṣṇa in the Vraja area previous to the late 15th century. There is no historical evidence for Nimbārka (13th century?⁵⁴), the founder of an important Vaiṣṇava saṃpradāya, having ever visited Vraja, but according to A.W.Entwistle (1987: 137), it “seems likely” that there was a succession of teachers in his lineage in the Mathurā area already before the 16th century, though their theology had not yet evolved into what it is today. One of these teachers was Keśava Kāśmīrin Bhaṭṭa (15th century?), whose Kramadīpikā focuses on the worship of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa (an important source for the

HBV that I will describe below), originated in Andhra Pradesh, but may have spent his last years at Dhruv Tila in Mathurā (Entwistle 1987: 137).

The introduction of this new type of Vaiṣṇavism into this area is also linked to the Bengali ascetic Mādhavendra Purī (ca.1420–1490), credited by the followers of both Caitanya and Vallabha as an influential forerunner of their movements. Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja calls him “the first sprout of the wish-fulfilling tree of bhakti”.⁵⁵ In the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, he is said to have been a member of the Mādhva Vaiṣṇava saṃpradāya and the guru of Caitanya’s guru Īśvara Purī. Mādhavendra Purī is connected with the Mādhvas in the Vallabha tradition as well, but there he is also credited with having taught the young Vallabha. Both traditions also credit him with finding a Gopāla image at Govardhana and developing the cult of this image (Entwistle 1987: 137–140).

Vallabha (1479–1531), the founder of the Puṣṭimārga Vaiṣṇava saṃpradāya (see e.g., Smith 2021), never lived in Vraja, but he often visited Govardhana and the temple of Gopāla, also known as Śrīnāthajī there. This temple, finalised in 1519, was associated with him, though many of the temple priests were Bengalis until their expulsion sometime after 1530. Caitanya had sent his followers Lokanātha and Bhūgarbha to Vṛndāvana already around 1509 and himself briefly visited Vṛndāvana in 1514 (Entwistle 1987: 142–144). After the arrival of Rūpa and Sanātana, more followers of Caitanya gradually settled in Vṛndāvana. That the area was not completely uninhabited is proved by the earliest official records of the activities of these people being land deeds. Rūpa and Sanātana’s nephew Jīva Gosvāmin purchased land at Rādhākuṇḍa from villagers already in 1546 and went on gradually to procure more land at least until 1601 (Habib 1996: 144).

It is within this rise of Kṛṣṇa-centred devotion in the Vraja area that the

HBV needs to be contextualized. It clearly positions itself as a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava text, mentioning right at the beginning Caitanya and his followers Prabodhānanda, Raghunātha Dāsa, Rūpa, Sanātana, Kāśīśvara, Kṛṣṇadāsa and Lokanātha. After that, every chapter begins with homage to Śrī Caitanya and sometimes such adulatory verses are given within the chapters as well (e.g., 1.192, 3.86, 5.447). Still, the text is explicitly addressed to a broader audience, that is, all the Vaiṣṇavas of the Mathurā area (1.1, 1.4), often stating that one should perform a ritual according to the details of one’s own tradition (saṃpradāya).⁵⁶ The commentary also mentions (at 5.292) the worship of ancient images of forms of Viṣṇu found in the Vraja area of his day. Such a catholic tendency should come as no surprise, as the first half of the 16th century was a time when the boundaries between the various Vaiṣṇava groups in the area were still quite porous. Rūpa Gosvāmin does the same when he, in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (1.2.269, 309), equates his terms vaidhī and rāgānugā sādhanabhakti with the terms maryādā- and puṣṭimārga of the Vallabha-saṃpradāya, and in his drama Lalitamādhava (10.37), he prays for the benefit of all those who have taken up residence in the land of Mathurā.

Nevertheless, while the explicit focus of the text is all Vaiṣṇavas in the Mathurā area, the author gives an important caveat right at the end (20.366, 382–383):

These rituals have been given primarily for rich and virtuous > householders, not for great souls who have given up all possessions. > […] In this way, exclusive devotees (ekāntin) mostly do > glorification (kīrtana) and remembrance (smaraṇa) of the Lord with > the highest love; other activities do not please them. If they desire > to serve the feet of their dear and blessed images (śrīmūrti) in a > particular mood, they should do so with their own mantras and own > taste (rasa), for they conduct themselves according to the > prescribed rules.⁵⁷

It is noteworthy that the text thus does not primarily focus on the kinds of Vaiṣṇavas with which it originates, but rather on the laypeople surrounding and supporting them. This is seen, for example in how the practice of saṃkīrtana, congregational singing of Kṛṣṇa’s names, gets a rather small place in the text (Broo 2009: 60–64).

It is important to understand that the

HBV is intended as an authoritative ritual compendium, not as a description of historical reality or as a ritual handbook. Even the famous Bengali Smārta ritualist Raghunandana, more or less contemporaneous with the

HBV, wrote that people no longer followed elaborate systems of worship (Kane 1977: 1118). Incorporating parts of earlier similar compendia, the author of the

HBV ends up with an enormous variety of ritual procedures and detail, such as branding the marks of Viṣṇu on the body (taptamudrā), complex methods of purifying the elements of the body (bhūtaśuddhi), superimposing mantras on the body (nyāsa) and time-consuming and difficult procedures for initiation (dīkṣā). Some of these rituals seem to never have been in vogue in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism; others are done differently today.

The ritual density of the ideal Vaiṣṇava day and the complexity of many of these rituals have led some modern Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas to consider the

HBV to have been written to appease the Smārtas of its days, suspicious of Caitanya’s new movement (e.g., Bhaktivedānta Swami Prabhupāda in his commentaries to Caitanyacaritāmṛta 2.1.35 and 2.23.105). While the author several times singles out the Smārtas as his main opponents (e.g., in the commentaries to 3.43, 4.190 and 5.455), even calling them “envious” (5.455) or “wicked” (15.80), attempting to present Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, a new and still very small movement, in a brāhmaṇically orthopractical way may indeed be one of the reasons for the book. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that Sanātana Gosvāmin in several places adds Smṛti material not found in the earlier compilations on which he primarily bases the

HBV.⁵⁸

Nevertheless, the detailed ways in which particularly the commentary often engages with these rituals (e.g., at 5.133–145) shows that they were not uninteresting to Sanātana Gosvāmin or simply strategically motivated. Rather, their inclusion seems to be motivated by the author’s desire to create an all-encompassing and authoritative ritual compendium. This is perhaps best illustrated by the detailed and very technical description of how to determine the suitability of a particular mantra for a particular practitioner (1.200–208)—a practice that the author then states to be unnecessary for Kṛṣṇa mantras, as these mantras are suitable for everyone (1.209–1.223).

Such a desire for comprehensiveness corresponds well to the work of Sanātana Gosvāmin’s younger brother Rūpa Gosvāmin, who in his contemporaneous Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu deals with many types of bhakti that are only of very marginal interest to Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas in general, such as loving Kṛṣṇa in the quiet or servant’s mood (śānta- and dāsyabhāva), or his treatment of the seven subservient (gauṇa) bhakti-rasas, in order to acknowledge the earlier notion of eight or nine rasas, only to reduce them to vyabhicāribhāvas in the end.

Either Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmin’s perspective on bhakti was broader than that of their followers, or, more likely, they felt that a proper appreciation of their particular understanding of Kṛṣṇa-bhakti needed a broad enough background of ritual, theology and aesthetics. The latter viewpoint is supported by the way in which the commentary to the

HBV often brings the text into a less generic and more specifically Gauḍīya understanding of Vaiṣṇavism, focusing not on devotion to any form of Viṣṇu but specifically on Kṛṣṇa in Vṛndāvana (e.g., when dealing with worship of attendant divinities at 5.82 or with pīṭhanyāsa at 5.142–143).

Nevertheless, while presenting devotion to Kṛṣṇa in a very orthopraxical way, the

HBV does not always slavishly follow the earlier texts. For example, while the

HBV takes over numerous verses detailing the māhātmya or greatness of various rituals verbatim, it groups them in new and theologically important ways, generally beginning with worldly benefits and proceeding to liberation—and beyond.⁵⁹

At times, the author uses the medium of the brāhmaṇical nibandha for presenting some of the new ideas of Śrī Caitanya. Chapter sixteen of the

HBV, wholly dedicated to the month of Kārttika, is much more elaborate than the similar passages in any of the previous texts, even compared to the chapter on Kārttika in the Viṣṇubhakticandrodaya (15). For example, while the Nṛsiṁhaparicaryā (7.39) instructs the devotee to worship the image of Dāmodara Kṛṣṇa under a Dhātrī tree on the full moon of Kārttika, the

HBV adds that he should be worshipped alongside Rādhā, who is never mentioned in the Nṛsiṃhaparicaryā. It is also in this connection that the

HBV presents the very emotional Dāmodarāṣṭaka hymn (16.199–206) with a lengthy commentary, radically departing from the more sober tone of the earlier texts. Here the commentator brings in many ideas of bhakti-rasa, aesthetic rapture in devotion (for an introduction, see Haberman 2001) systematised in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s slightly later Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu.

In the chapters included in this volume, the most evident innovation is the author’s arguing that everyone, including women and outcastes, has the eligibility (adhikāra) for initiation into Kṛṣṇa-mantras (1.193–197) and for the worship of Kṛṣṇa even in the Śālagrāma stone (5.450–455). While the ritual primacy of the male Brāhmaṇa is not questioned (and, as we saw above, generally upheld for the position of the preceptor), the author does subvert it by arguing that Vaiṣṇava initiation makes anyone equal to, and indeed even superior to, a Brāhmaṇa (2.12 and

DDṬ 5.455). These are radical thoughts, as seen by the fact that some of them were challenged by later Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authors and even when accepted were systematically implemented in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism only centuries later.⁶⁰ Still today there are Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas who hold that only persons born as Brāhmaṇas can function as gurus (e.g., Mahārāja 2015: 139).

6 The Theology of the Haribhaktivilāsa

As should be evident by now, the

HBV is a text dealing with ritual. Nevertheless, between the lines of both the main text and the commentary many theological issues are raised. Most are familiar to any student of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. For example, while the followers of Caitanya are called Gauḍīya, Bengali or Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas, in actual fact, they hardly ever worship Viṣṇu, from which the word “Vaiṣṇava” is derived. Viṣṇu is not considered the origin of Kṛṣṇa and the other avatāras, but rather a guṇa-avatāra form of Kṛṣṇa, that is, a descent associated with one of three qualities of the created world (Viṣṇu being associated with sattva, Brahmā with rajas and Śiva with tamas). It is Kṛṣṇa himself who is the avatārin or source of all the avatāras (see e.g., De 1961: 238–251). The

HBV too refers to the doctrine that Kṛṣṇa, and in particular Gopāla Kṛṣṇa of Vraja, is the avatārin (e.g., 1.152), and the commentary adds that Viṣṇu is a guṇa-avatāra (at 1.114). Nevertheless, Gopāla Kṛṣṇa is not the sole form of the divine addressed in the text. In the first chapter, the initiatory mantras that are given focus primarily on Kṛṣṇa, but mantras are also given for Viṣṇu, Rāma, and Nṛsiṃha (1.118–191).

Similarly, when describing how to fashion an image for worship (mūrti), the text describes (18.118–312) the form of Kṛṣṇa, but also Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha, Narasiṃha, Trivikrama, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Baladeva, Buddha, Kalki, Mahāviṣṇu, Lokapāla Viṣṇu, Yogasvāmin Viṣṇu, Vāsudeva, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, Aniruddha, Sāmba, Nara and Nārāyaṇa, Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇa, Puruṣottama, Viśvarūpa, Lakṣmī, Garuḍa, and even Kāmadeva. A similar list of forms of Kṛṣṇa and Viṣṇu is given with respect to varieties of the Śālagrāma stone as well (5.313–429).

However, among all of these forms of Kṛṣṇa or Viṣṇu, there is a seeming omission: there is no description of an image of Caitanya himself, so prominently worshipped in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism today. This was noticed already by De (1942: 116), who thought that, “Caitanya-worship does not appear to have been a creed with [the Vṛndāvana Gosvāmins]” and that the Vṛndāvana Gosvāmins even opposed the deification of Caitanya. As Rembert Lutjeharms has pointed out (2018: 103), De was not the first to hold such an opinion; scholars such as Biman Bihari Majumdar, Ramakanta Chakravarti and Hitesranjan Sanyal held that there was a rift in the early Gauḍīya community with regard to how to view Caitanya. The Vṛndāvana Gosvāmins allegedly worshipped Caitanya as a “means to an end”, while the Bengali devotees worshipped Caitanya as an “end in itself”.

Lutjeharms (forthcoming) has shown such a dichotomy to be overly simplistic and not easy to fit into historical reality.⁶¹ Nevertheless, while Caitanya certainly is deified in the

HBV—starting with the very first verse, in which the commentator brings out several meanings of the word caitanyadeva, finally arriving at the historical Caitanya as his own opinion (svamate)—the

HBV is certainly centred on Kṛṣṇa rather than Caitanya. This is to be expected, as the explicit goal of the text, as we have seen, was to serve a diverse group of Vaiṣṇavas in the Mathurā region, not only the Bengali devotees. This is also borne out by the manuscript history of the text: in the late 16th-century Rādhā Dāmodara library mentioned above, both manuscripts of the

HBV were in devanāgarī script, while the one manuscript of its much more Gauḍīya-centric commentary was in Bengali script (Śarmā 2016: 60).

Among all forms of Kṛṣṇa or Viṣṇu, it is the Gopāla Kṛṣṇa of the eighteen-syllable mantra proclaimed in the Kramadīpikā that is in the focus. He is to be worshipped in the form of a Śālagrāma stone or as an image (mūrti) in a temple. The text provides elaborate information about how to fashion such an image (eighteenth chapter), install it (nineteenth chapter) and construct a temple for it (twentieth chapter). Nevertheless, while the dual images of Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇa are briefly mentioned (18.207–212), there is nothing about the joint worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in this context. In fact, Rādhā is mentioned very rarely in the text, and their joint worship is mentioned only briefly in connection with the month of Kārttika, suggesting that it is to be performed only at that time (16.195–197).

Such worship of Kṛṣṇa on his own may seem strange within modern Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism where the joint worship of the divine couple (yugala) of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa is ubiquitous. Nevertheless, this has not always been the case. All the early images worshipped in the Vraja area in the middle of the 16th century were images of Kṛṣṇa alone, with the Rādhā images added towards the end of the 16th century or the beginning of the 17th (Nath 1996: 161, Singh 1996: 261). In fact, the Kṛṣṇa image called Madanagopāla or Madanamohana worshipped by Sanātana Gosvāmin is accompanied by Rādhā and Lalitā on a side altar, but nevertheless still worshipped alone on the central altar of his palatial temple in Karoli, Rajasthan, where he resides since 1728 (Entwistle 1987: 185). Still today, the important images of Rādhāramaṇa, Rādhāvallabha and Bāṅke Bihārī are worshipped alone in Vṛndāvana (Case 2000: 84).

The eclectic Vaiṣṇavism of the

HBV is in other words in full accordance with the stated purpose of the text. The

HBV is, after all, one of the first Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava texts written in this area, at a time when the tradition was still not very clearly demarcated from other Vaiṣṇava groups. The commentator (5.292) adds that the worship of these forms of Viṣṇu is also detailed to serve the worship of ancient images of these divinities found in the Vraja area of his day. Further, this eclecticism mirrors that of the sources of the

HBV (dealt with in detail in the next section). For instance, the initiatory mantras described mirror the influence of the Viṣṇubhakticandrodaya, Rāmārcanacandrikā and Nṛsiṃhaparicaryā respectively. By reusing material from these older Vaiṣṇava ritual texts, the author positions himself within their authoritative traditions.

It is noteworthy that the

HBV does not show any awareness of the distinction between vaidhi- and rāgānugā-bhakti or devotion motivated by the fear of overstepping rules and devotion following in the wake of the passion of Kṛṣṇa’s eternal associates introduced by Rūpa Gosvāmin in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu and so important for the later tradition. Instead, the text at times differentiates between ordinary Vaiṣṇavas, who love all of the Lord’s different forms, and exclusive devotees (ekāntinaḥ).⁶² The term ekānta as a qualification of a Vaiṣṇava is famously found already in the Nārāyaṇīya of the Mahābhārata (see, e.g., Adlury 2018), but while the term there denotes someone who worships Nārāyaṇa to the exclusion of all other gods, in the

HBV, the term is more exclusive still. Here, it refers to those who focus all of their devotion on Gopāla Kṛṣṇa, the youthful cowherd boy of Vṛndāvana. As Sanātana Gosvāmin contrasts the exclusive devotee with householders the end of the

HBV (as cited above, 25) may also imply that the exclusive devotees generally would be renunciants. That statement also shows quite clearly that the exclusive devotee is the ideal of the author, but in the

HBV, he or she is the exception.

7 Intertextualities

S.K.De (1942: 396–402) provides a list of almost two hundred texts cited in the

HBV. Where did the author have access to such an extensive library in the wilderness of early 16th century Vraja? Shrivatsa Goswami (2018: 344, identifying the author with Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmin) suggests that he must have carried the bulk in his head when coming to Vṛndāvana. Not discounting that people in India and elsewhere have throughout history performed amazing feats of memory (see e.g., Carruthers 1990), my study of the text suggests that Sanātana Gosvāmin rather than using two hundred texts, had access to around twenty-five, from five of which he culled most of his citations second-hand.

How do I know that Sanātana Gosvāmin cites these verses second-hand and not directly from the sources he mentions? Firstly, because many of the citations are not actually found in (at least printed versions of) the texts they purport to be taken from;⁶³ secondly, because the readings of the passages given correspond to those of these secondary sources rather than to those of the primary sources themselves;⁶⁴ thirdly, because the order and extent of the citations follow those in the secondary sources;⁶⁵ and fourthly, because Sanātana Gosvāmin does mention most of these secondary sources in the text or the commentary.⁶⁶ Further, as described below, two of the manuscripts of these secondary texts used by Sanātana Gosvāmin have survived.

The most important source text for the

HBV is the Viṣṇubhakticandrodaya (

VBC) of Nṛsiṃha Araṇya Muni, the disciple of Puṇya Araṇya. Nṛsiṃha Araṇya is mentioned together with other devotional sannyāsins in Nābhadāsa’s Bhaktamālā (182), but no other details are given about him than that he wrote the

VBC. While never printed, the 75 manuscripts listed in the New Catalogus Catalogorum (Dash 2013: 194–195; the description there of the text containing “devotional tales” is a mistake) show that the

VBC must have attained some popularity. Like the

HBV, the

VBC is a nibandha describing the ritual life of the Vaiṣṇava devotee, in 16 parts and around 4500 verses. Both the contents and their order are the same as in the

HBV, with the exception of the

VBC ending after the festivals of the year, thus not containing the material on building a temple and installing an image in the last three chapters of the

HBV. In contrast to the

HBV, the original text (mūla) of the

VBC is mostly prose, but the main difference between the

VBC and the

HBV is that the

VBC focuses on the worship of Viṣṇu and particularly Nṛsiṃha, with the main mantra being the 12-syllable Vāsudeva mantra.⁶⁷

Many of the illustrative passages of the

HBV are culled second-hand from the

VBC,⁶⁸ but for some reason, Sanātana Gosvāmin only once mentions the name of the

VBC (at

DDṬ 9.2), just as he mentions it once in his auto-commentary to the Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta (1.2.5). In the

HBV, Sanātana Gosvāmin refers to the

VBC once as “Vaiṣṇava Tantra” (1.99) and another time simply as “Vaiṣṇava” (1.120), but otherwise he obscures his indebtedness to this earlier text. I only learned about the relationship between the

HBV and the

VBC by finding a manuscript of the

VBC in the Vrindavan Research Institute.⁶⁹ The first and last folios of the manuscript are damaged, but otherwise it is complete. The manuscript comprises 60 small folios of country-made paper with 12 lines to a page, the text being written in black ink in careful, small Bengali letters. According to the colophon at the end, it was copied on the new moon day of the month of Caitra in the Śāka year of 1456, corresponding to the 22nd of March, 1534 

CE, on the banks of Rudrakuṇḍa next to Govardhana.⁷⁰ On the cover of the manuscript, the scribe is given as Sanātana Gosvāmin; I find no reason to doubt the ascription, as the appearance and material of the manuscript corresponds exactly with other manuscripts from the same time.⁷¹ This manuscript is almost certainly the same manuscript of the

VBC that is mentioned in Rādhā Dāmodara temple manuscript list (Śarmā 2016, 73). That it has survived to the present day is probably due to its obscurity; since Sanātana Gosvāmin copied it to use it in his work on the

HBV, it has likely seen very little use and therefore, little wear.

Another earlier ritual text used by Sanātana Gosvāmin is the Nṛsiṃhaparicaryā (

NP) by Kṛṣṇadeva Ācārya,⁷² a prose text on the worship of Nṛsimha that includes some verse citations. In the introduction to his edition of the text, Rāmanārāyaṇa Vidyāratna called it “very old” (bahu prācīna), but it seems more likely that it is a century or so older than the

HBV. The emphasis on Nṛsiṃha may point to mediaeval Odisha (Venkatkrishnan 2018: 54), as may its extensive treatment of the Damanakāropaṇa festival. The text comprises ten chapters. The first chapter deals with the guru and initiation; the second, with puraścaraṇa or the rituals for perfecting a mantra; the third to seventh chapters, with various festivals around the year; the eighth chapter, with the Śālagrāma stone; the ninth chapter, with preparing for pūjā or the main worship; and the tenth and last chapter, with the pūjā itself.

The

HBV draws extensively on this text, as almost all of the verses in the first chapter, for example, dealing with the guru and initiation, are incorporated into the

HBV, including one original verse (

NP1.18) given vaguely as “Tantra” (

HBV1.209). Some of the prose text is also incorporated into the commentary.⁷³ Contrary to the case of the

VBC, Sanātana Gosvāmin mentions this text several times, calling its author “expert at Vedic ritual practice” (vaidikavyavahārapravara at 3.262).

While the order of topics in the

NP differs from that of the

HBV, Sanātana Gosvāmin in many cases follows the presentation of the

NP. For example the morning routine simply delineated at

NP9.2—getting up at the time of brāhmamuhūrta, passing urine, cleaning hands, face and feet, brushing the teeth and washing the mouth, doing ācamana, going to the temple, ringing the bell, reciting the Veda, waking the Lord, reciting verses such Bhāgavata Purāṇa 3.9.25, removing offered leaves and flowers except for Tulasī, offering the Lord water for cleaning his hands, feet, face and mouth and then offering Tulasī leaves, offering the “auspicious ritual of lights” (maṅgalanīrājana) and more hymns and then going for the morning bath—differs from the routine in older texts (see Broo 2005) but forms the basis for much of the third chapter of the

HBV.

The Vrindavan Research Institute holds a manuscript of the

NP as well, purportedly copied by Rūpa Gosvāmin.⁷⁴ Again, this may very well be the manuscript of the text consulted by Sanātana Gosvāmin, as the material and state of the manuscript corresponds to that of the

VBC described above, and as a marginal note on folio2b contains a verse not included in the printed edition but included in the

HBV (2.237). This manuscript is also most likely identical with that of the

NP mentioned in the Rādhā Dāmodara temple library list (Śarmā 2016: 73).

The third earlier ritual text that Sanātana Gosvāmin made use of is the Rāmārcanacandrikā (

RAC), a text on Rāma worship written by Ānanda Vana, the disciple of Mukunda Vana, sometime in the 15th century (Barkhuis 1995a: 79) and primary based on the 12th-century Agastya Saṃhitā, one of the first texts to deal exclusively with the worship of Rāma (Barkhuis 1995a: 78).⁷⁵

The

RAC is written in verse and divided into five chapters. The first chapter deals with the guru, the disciple, mantra and initiation. The second chapter deals with the duties of the morning and preparing for pūjā, including many different types of nyāsas. The third chapter deals with pūjā and all of its parts. The fourth chapter deals with the duties of the last parts of the day and of the beginning of the night as well as puraścaraṇa and various yantras or sacred diagrams. The fifth chapter, finally, deals with the various festivals of the year.

In the first four chapters of the

HBV, the

RAC is cited by name twice: once on the twig for brushing the teeth (3.234), and once on bathing (3.353). The commentary identifies two unnamed citations as coming from this text (2.16, 3.354) and provides a lengthy extract itself, on Vaiṣṇava ācamana (3.202–208). A close comparison between the

HBV and the

RAC, however, shows a still closer relationship. The

HBV cites verses of the

RAC many times anonymously or with some vague attribution.⁷⁶ The context also indicates that several citations from other texts are also taken from the

RAC rather than from those texts directly.⁷⁷ Further, variant readings in the citation from the Agastya Saṃhitā at 1.144–150 and 1.198 show that these sections of the text are taken second-hand from the

RAC, where these passages occur in that same form, rather than directly from the Agastya Saṃhitā, though other passages cited from this text (e.g., 1.64–69) but not included in the

RAC indicate that Sanātana Gosvāmin did have access to the Agastya Saṃhitā itself as well.

The fourth text used by Sanātana Gosvāmin is the Jayamādhavamānasollāsa (

JM), a nibandha on the duties of a Vaiṣṇava devotees in ten chapters and around 8000 verses by king Jayasiṃha of Gorakhpur, written in the beginning of the 15th century. This is an unpublished text of which the New Catalogus Catalogorum lists only nine manuscripts.⁷⁸ I have made use of the manuscript of the text kept at the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, dated Saṃvat 1526 (1470 

CE) and described in some detail by Haraprasad Shastri (1925: 842–852).⁷⁹

No manuscripts of this text are found at the Vrindavan Research Institute and it is not mentioned in the Rādhā Dāmodara temple library list, but as Sanātana Gosvāmin explicitly mentions the text once (

DDṬ to 2.226–230) and quotes text from it both in the main text and in the commentary, it is evident that he made use of this work as well, though perhaps only borrowing the manuscript he used without taking the trouble to copy it.⁸⁰

The fifth source for material cited second-hand in the

HBV is Keśava Kāśmīrin’s Kramadīpikā (

KD), a work in eight chapters on Vaiṣṇava ritual written in often cryptic verse.⁸¹ In contrast to the above-mentioned texts, the

KD is not a compilation but an original work throughout. The dating of Keśava Kāśmīrin is disputed, as is the affiliation of this text with the Nimbārka saṃpradāya that today is taken for granted (see Agrawal 1987: 9–10). Ramnarace (2014: 264–265) holds that this text was written before Keśava’s initiation into the saṃpradāya. Roma Bose (2004: 122) placed him in the 15th century, noting that he is traditionally held to have flourished in the 14th century. Mālavīya (1989: 20) goes even further back, locating him in the early part of the 13th century. Sanātana Gosvāmin at any rate often cites the

KD, including a lengthy visualisation (dhyāna) in the fifth chapter,⁸² and even when not directly citing the

KD, he often bases his own presentation on that of the

KD. In this volume, this is most evident in Sanātana’s treatment of ritualistic initiation (kriyāvatī dīkṣā,

HBV2.31–184) based on the fourth chapter of the

KD.

Sanātana Gosvāmin many times also cites or makes use of the commentary of one Puruṣottama Vana on the

KD, a text that I have not been able to locate. This appears to have been an elaborate, technical commentary; it is not identical with that of Govinda Bhaṭṭācārya often printed with the

KD. Whether this Puruṣottama Vana is identical with the one that commented on the Mahāvidyā (Dasgupta 2006: 120) is unclear, but as he cites the 15th-century Saṅgītadāmodara in his commentary cited at

HBV5.188, he cannot be earlier than that.

It is noteworthy that three of these earlier and influential authors have daśanāmin sannyāsa names: Nṛsiṃha Araṇya of the

VBC, Ānanda Vana of the

RAC and Puruṣottama Vana of the

KD. We know next to nothing about these persons, but they may have been—together with the Mādhavendra Purī so influential in establishing Kṛṣṇa-bhakti in the Vraja area—part of a group of renunciant Vaiṣṇava bhaktas before the forming of the saṃpradāyas of Caitanya and Vallabha. Lacking institutional backing, today they live on only through their texts—or in the case of Puruṣottama Vana, only through his name.

What Sanātana Gosvāmin particularly borrows from the

KD is its emphasis on the 18-syllable mantra of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa.⁸³ What he does in his

HBV, then, could perhaps be called a “Kṛṣṇaisation” of the earlier Vaiṣṇava nibandhas

VBC,

NP and

JM, with the help of the

KD, shifting the emphasis from Nṛsiṃha or Viṣṇu to Gopāla Kṛṣṇa of Vṛndāvana. To find more scriptural basis for such an emphasis, Sanātana cites first-hand several late Tantric texts emphasising the mantra and worship of Gopāla Kṛṣṇa.

A good example of this “Kṛṣṇaisation” of the

HBV is the passage of the first chapter dealing with different Vaiṣṇava mantras (1.118–191). After dealing with mantras for Viṣṇu, Nṛsiṃha and Rāma (1.118–151), mostly basing his presentation on material found in the

VBC,

JM and

RAC, Sanātana Gosvāmin goes on to deal with the 18-syllable Gopāla mantra (1.152–191).⁸⁴ His main scriptural source here is the Gopālatāpanī Upaniṣad,⁸⁵ a late Upaniṣad (13th–14th century?) in which the first part contains a lengthy description of the Gopāla mantra (Brzezinski 2019). Here Sanātana Gosvāmin follows the lead of the

VBC and

RAC which similarly cite the Nṛsiṃhatāpanī and Rāmatāpanī Upaniṣads for their descriptions of the Nṛsiṃha and Rāma mantras. Sanātana Gosvāmin follows up with citations from various late Tantric texts, such as the Gautamīya Tantra,⁸⁶ a text that is cited several times later as well, though the attribution is sometimes left vague (

HBV2.3–4, 2.19, 2.21) and some citations have been added later (e.g. after 4.163 or 5.298).⁸⁷ The unpublished Bṛhadgautamīya Tantra is also cited in this connection,⁸⁸ as is the Trailokyasammohana Tantra⁸⁹ and the Sanatkumāra Kalpa.⁹⁰ I have not been able to trace the latter two texts.⁹¹ Sanātana Gosvāmin also had access to Lakṣmaṇadeśika’s Śāradātilaka (11th century; see Goudriaan & Gupta 1981: 134–136), an extensive work on Tantric ritual, though he sometimes cites it second-hand as well.⁹²

Apart from these Kṛṣṇa-centred Tantric works, Sanātana Gosvāmin adds material to the

HBV from other primary sources in his possession. This includes several Purāṇas. Sanātana Gosvāmin had access to manuscripts of the Bhāgavata and Viṣṇu Purāṇas, both with Śrīdhara’s commentaries, but also to the Kūrma and Varāha Purāṇas, as well as to shorter purāṇic texts associated with the Padma or Skanda Purāṇa, such as the Vaiśākhamāhātmya or the Kāśīkhaṇḍa. Several such manuscripts are mentioned in the Rādhā Dāmodara library list (Śarmā 2016: 65) and some of them have survived to the present day.⁹³ Sanātana Gosvāmin also had access to the Harivaṃśa,⁹⁴ from which he quotes a few times in the

HBV⁹⁵ but at length in his later Bṛhadvaiṣṇavatoṣanī. He also sometimes refers to the Haribhaktisudhodaya, a text purporting to be part of the Nārada Purāṇa that in twenty chapters retells the stories of Dhruva and Prahlāda from a very devotional viewpoint.⁹⁶

Sanātana Gosvāmin appears to have had access to two Pañcarātric texts as well: the Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra and the Nārada Pañcarātra. The first is a voluminous text from the 8th of 9th century (Raddock 2011: 80) on the fashioning of images and temples in three parts (khaṇḍa), of which only the first has been published.⁹⁷ Sanātana Gosvāmin will quote it at length towards the end of the

HBV; in the chapters of this volume, it is cited only three times.⁹⁸ The Nārada Pañcarātra, on the other hand, is cited throughout and on many kinds of topics. Now, as noted by G.C.Tripathi (1976), the text usually known as the Nārada Pañcarātra or Jñānāmṛtasāra⁹⁹ is a late text not identical with the one often cited in mediaeval nibandhas.

This is true in the case of the

HBV as well, as no verses cited here are found in that work. Rather, the Nārada Pañcarātra of the

HBV is identical with the Jayākhya Saṃhitā, one of the “Three Jewels” (ratnatraya), that is, the oldest and most respected of the Pañcarātric texts, a text of 33 chapters and around 4500 verses, written perhaps towards the middle of the fifth century (Matsubara 1994: 21).¹⁰⁰ It is unclear to me why Sanātana Gosvāmin calls the Jayākhya Saṃhitā “Nārada Pañcarātra”, but the Rādhā Dāmodara Temple Library list contains a mention of a Nārada Pañcarātra Saṃgraha (Śarmā 2016: 73), which may have been a collection of verses from the Jayākhya Saṃhitā. At any rate, when the

HBV refers to the Nārada Pañcarātra, it should be understood to refer to the text generally known as the Jayākhya Saṃhitā.¹⁰¹ However, associating the name “Nārada Pañcarātra” with the Jayākhya Saṃhitā does not seem to have been a universal practice, as none of the verses attributed to the Nārada Pañcarātra that are taken from the secondary sources utilised in the

HBV are found in the Jayākhya Saṃhitā.¹⁰² The text that these passages refers to remains a mystery.

In my translation, I have endeavored to locate every citation in the

HBV in the primary and secondary sources. Quotations taken first-hand from purāṇic texts are usually found in modern vulgate editions of the texts (such as when Sanātana Gosvāmin cites the Kūrma Purāṇa); in the case of second-hand citations, they are much harder to locate. I have indicated verses not found in the editions I have used with (-); if there is no parentheses after a source, that means that I have not been able to locate that text.

Some sources remain elusive. In a few places (e.g., 4.56–95), Sanātana Gosvāmin adds verses from a whole host of Smṛti texts. There is no evidence of his having had access to all these texts, but while I have been able to find most of the verses in earlier compendia such as the Śuddhikāṇḍa of Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru (12th century) or the Śuddhikaumudī of Govindānanda Kavikaṅkanācārya (ca.1535), they are not there given in the exact same order or form. It thus remains unclear to me exactly which Smṛti compendium Sanātana Gosvāmin used. There are also other verses that seem to be taken from as of yet elusive secondary sources.¹⁰³

Rather than two hundred texts, Sanātana Gosvāmin thus seems to have used around twenty-five sources for his

HBV, but that is still much more than one would expect a renunciant “sleeping every night under a different tree” to have access to. If Sanātana Gosvāmin ever led such a life, the writing of the

HBV represents another, more settled phase of his life, probably spent in co-operation with the other Gosvāmins of Vṛndāvana, particularly his brother Rūpa (who seems to have copied many manuscripts that Sanātana made use of). Eventually all the manuscripts owned by Rūpa and Sanātana were given to their nephew Jīva, becoming the nucleus of his Rādhā Dāmodara temple library, the remains of which are kept at the Vrindavan Research Institute (Śarmā 2016), but it is not known where Sanātana Gosvāmin did his writing. What we do know is that he copied the

VBC at Rudrakuṇḍa by Govardhana hill. This Rudrakuṇḍa lies next to Jatipura, an important Puṣṭimārga centre at Govardhana (Entwistle 1987: 354–355). In the early 16th century, the Govardhana area was much more developed than Vṛndāvana. It is possible that this is where the

HBV was written.

8 The Haribhaktivilāsa in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava History

As we have seen above, Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote the

HBV for all devotees of Kṛṣṇa in the Mathurā area. In some ways, he failed in his aim. There is little evidence of his text becoming popular outside of Śrī Caitanya’s saṃpradāya. Further, Krishnadas Sinha (2009: 2–3) writes that the text was “clearly marginalised historically” by other worship procedures within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava community. To some extent this is true, as shown by already Jīva Gosvāmin feeling the need to write a guide to the joint worship of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, something almost absent in the

HBV, as mentioned above (p.30). Jīva’s book, the Rādhākṛṣṇārcanadīpikā, can be seen as a kind of appendix to the

HBV in how it cites and expands on the verses on Rādhā and Dāmodara in the

HBV (16.172, 174–175), but it is much more theological than ritualistic in nature, giving in the end very little advice on the concrete worship of the divine couple. On the other hand, while the style, purpose and disposition of Jīva Gosvāmin’s Bhaktisandarbha differs very much from the

HBV, Jīva Gosvāmin there makes extensive use of the

HBV, often following the ritual procedure of the text¹⁰⁴ and reproduces many verses cited in it, often in the exact same order as in the

HBV.¹⁰⁵ The exact relationship between the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, the

HBV and the Bhaktisandarbha remains an understudied topic.

Apart from in the case of trying to reconcile bhakti with brāhmaṇically orthodox ritual (karma) in Jaipur as mentioned above (p.14), or in 19th- and early 20th-century attempts to align a perceived corrupt Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava morals with brāhmaṇical norms, such as in Rādhikānātha Gosvāmin’s 19th century Bhaktiśikṣā or in Vipinavihāri Gosvāmin’s Haribhaktitaraṅginī from 1902 (Wong 2020: 247–248), the

HBV is seldom cited by later Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authors. This is a fate that seems to have befallen Sanātana’s Bṛhadbhāgavatāmṛta as well. Nevertheless, the number and spread of manuscripts of the

HBV show how popular the text soon became. The size of the text called for abridged versions, and such were soon produced as well, as we have seen above (p.9–10).

Abridged versions have also been created in various vernaculars, such as the Bengali Haribhaktivilāsaleśa by Kānāidāsa (De 1938b: xlvii–xlviii). A relatively recent example of this is the Maṇipurī Haribhaktivilāsakaṇa (“A particle of the

HBV”) of Atombapu Sharma (1958). This text extends to 84 printed pages with Sanskrit verses on the daily duties of the Vaiṣṇava excerpted from the

HBV—from the duties upon rising in the morning to how to eat mahāprasāda, but leaving out all the scriptural support and sections on the greatness (māhātmya) of rituals—with simple prose explanations in Maṇipuri.

While I do not believe that there are any Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas that follow everything in the

HBV to the letter—something that Sanātana Gosvāmin himself never did and, as I have tried to show, probably never imagined anyone doing—that does not mean that the

HBV is irrelevant in the ritual life of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas today. As the tradition in the 20th century gradually has become a global one, the

HBV is today studied far away from its homeland in Mathurā. This is perhaps best seen in how manuals on ritual within the tradition both with in India and abroad always use the

HBV as a source (see e.g.,

GBC Deity Worship Group 1994, Mahārāja 1995, Mahārāja 2005), mixing instructions and verses from the

HBV with later verses and procedures.

9 Sources for the Critical Edition

For this critical edition of the

HBV, I have examined 93 manuscripts of the text in various places of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Unites States. From these manuscripts, I have on the basis of age, geographical spread and particularities chosen eleven that I have collated and on which I base my critical edition. I have also examined nine printed editions of the text. Below I describe these manuscripts and printed editions.

The first group of manuscripts (with the sigla used in the critical notes) are those from Vṛndāvana (V).

V1 is Jiva 6 at the Jiva Institute of Vaishnava Studies, Sheetal Chayya, Vṛndāvana, called Bṛhaddharibhaktivilāsa on the cover. This manuscript is written in a clear and tidy Devanāgarī script with black and red ink on fair paper. It comprises 578 folios with 14 lines a page. The manuscript is complete and includes the Digdarśinī commentary. It includes two folios of index at the beginning and has two vertical red lines as margins on both sides. A later hand (V1²) has filled in some omissions and also glosses some words in chapters three and four by referring to the famous lexicon of Amarasiṃha. This later hand also sometimes notes other readings (e.g., at 5.388). This manuscript includes the section on the ten-syllable Gopāla mantra¹⁰⁶ at 1.155 found mostly in Bengali manuscripts.

The manuscript is dated Sunday, Agrahāyana Śukla 5, Vikrama Saṃvat 1828 [11December 1771],¹⁰⁷ but for some reason, the line after the date, where one would have expected the name and place of the scribe, has been painted over. The scribe also gives the number of ślokas or units of 32 syllables of the whole text (24173), splitting them up between the main text (12015) and the commentary (12158).¹⁰⁸ This was often done to show for practical reasons: to show how large the text is, but particularly to show the commissioner of the copy for how much work he or she had to pay.

V2 is

VRI692 kept at Vrindavan Research Institute, Raman Reti, Vṛndāvana (listed in Maiduly 1976: 20–21). This manuscript is written in a clear, good Devanāgarī script with black and red ink on yellow, soft paper. It comprises 447 folios with 16 lines a page. The manuscript is complete, including the commentary, but the pages with verses3.25–30, 4.131–139 and 5.244–447 are missing through mistakes in the digitalisation of the manuscript. Between folios8 and 9, the last folio of a Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta manuscript by the same scribe is mistakenly inserted. It almost consistently misspells -hn- as -nh- (e.g., Janhavī at 3.303). Several lacunae are corrected by another hand (V2²).

Copied by Bālakṛṣṇa in Bhūviluthanikuñja, Vṛndāvana, on Friday, Āśvina Śukla 2, Vikrama Saṃvat 1868 [20September 1811].¹⁰⁹

The next group of manuscripts is from Rajasthan.

R1 is

RORI9343, kept at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Jodhpur (Jinavijaya 1965: 4–5). This manuscript is written in careless Devanāgarī script with black ink on tan paper. It comprises 491 folios of 9 lines a page. One folio of index at the beginning. The manuscript is complete but contains only the main text (mūla). The first and last folios are a little damaged. Two vertical black lines on either sides function as margins. Each folio has, apart from the folio number, also the name of the chapter in the upper left corner.

The final page is damaged, so not all of the colophon is readable. It nevertheless says in Brajbhāṣā that the manuscript was finished on Phālguna Kṛṣṇa 9, Vikrama Saṃvat 1800 [8March 1744]. It states that together with the

HBV, the king had given Harilāla Miśra¹¹⁰ other books and money (for copying, presumably). The scribe also copies the colophon of the exemplar, stating that it was given by king Jai Singh

II to Harilāla and completed by his son (the first part of whose name is unfortunately illegible, but as it ends with -va and the metre requires two syllables before that, perhaps Yādava, Mādhava or Keśava) in “delightful Jaipur” by the mercy of Gopīnātha, on Tuesday, Māgha Śukla 8, Saṃvat 1794 [28January 1738].¹¹¹ The present manuscript is thus a copy of the book given by the king to the astrologer.

R2 is

RORI14223, kept at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Jodhpur (Jinavijaya 1968: 5–6). The manuscript is written in clear and bold Devanāgarī script with black ink on brownish paper. It comprises 40 folios with ca.14 lines a page. This manuscript contains only the main text and is incomplete, ending at 4.133c. Two vertical black lines function as margins on either sides. The manuscript is carefully written with very few mistakes. As the end of the manuscript is missing, there is no colophon and thus no date, but Muni Jinavijaya (1968: 6) judged it to belong to the 18th century.

The particularity of this manuscript is that the beginning of the first chapter contains a longer declaration of contents (lekhyapratijñā, 99 verses compared to 23) that gives numbers to all subheadings within a chapter and then adds those numbers to the subheadings in the text below. In this way, chapter one, for example, gets 13 subheadings and chapter two, 17.

R3 is

RORI9932 kept at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Jodhpur (Jinavijaya 1965: 6–7). The manuscript is written in bold and regular Devanāgarī script with black ink on tan paper. It comprises 360 folios with 15 lines a page. The manuscript contains only the main text and is missing several folios (1, 26–27, 29–39, 48–57, 70–74, 77–85, 131–144, 226, 332, 361). The parts missing in the chapters in this volume are 1.1–5, 3.26–67, 3.88–356 and 4.203–5.71. There is some damage from water in the middle of the manuscript. Two vertical red lines are used as margins on either sides. The scribe uses no daṇḍas.

Like R2, this manuscript contains the long version of the declaration of contents, but this manuscript also contains the section on the ten-syllable Gopāla mantra in the first chapter (see appendix one) and is thus not directly related to R2. This manuscript also contains some unique verses at

HBV2.24.

The next manuscript is from Varanasi.

Va is

SB44418 kept at the Sarasvati Bhavan library of the Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya, Varanasi (Anon 1965: 24–25). It is written in clear, careful and bold Devanāgarī script with black ink on fair paper. It comprises 337 folios with 14 lines a page. It is complete but contains only the main text. It seems to have been copied from an exemplar containing the commentary, as the verses are numbered in the usual way. No daṇḍas. Some glosses from the commentary have been added in another hand in the margins and at least once (3.114, by mistake?) within the main text itself.

According to the catalogue (Anon 1965: 25), the manuscript is dated 1767, but as I have only been given copies of the first one hundred folios, I have not been able to consult the colophon myself.

The next manuscript is from Patna, Bihar.

Pa is kept at Śrī Caitanya Pustakālaya, Gaighat, Patna, and has been digitised by the Bhaktivedanta Research Centre, Kolkata. This manuscript is written in Devanāgarī script with black ink on tan paper and comprises 335 folios with 14 lines a page. Headings and names of texts have been marked with red. The manuscript is complete, but it includes only the main text. The first four verses are numbered, showing that at some point a scribe has been aware of the commentary. The scribe uses no daṇḍas. There is a unique verse after 3.93.

This manuscript was finished in Karorī, on Monday, Caitra Śukla 2, Vikrama Saṃvat 1835 (March30th, 1778) by the ascetic Keśo Dāsa of the Śyāmānanda branch of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism.¹¹² I am not sure what place “Karorī” refers to; Karoli in Rajasthan, the residence of the Madanamohana image of Kṛṣṇa worshipped by Sanātana Gosvāmin, could be one alternative.

The following manuscripts are from Bengal.

B1 is 4 H1808 kept at the Society Collection of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata. This manuscript is written in Bengali script in black ink on tan paper and comprises 452 folios of 10–12 lines a page plus another folio with an index in another hand. The manuscript is complete and includes the commentary. The scribe often fills out the last line of a page with Vaiṣṇava phrases and prayers.¹¹³ This manuscript represents the Bengali recension of the text, including the extra line at 1.5, the portion on the ten-syllable mantra at 1.155 and the extra verses at 3.9.

According to a verse in the final colophon, the manuscript was copied by Daivakīnandana for Nityānandavara Gosvāmin, on Monday, Caitra Kṛṣṇa 13, Śāka 1695 (19April 1773).¹¹⁴

B2 is manuscript 9089 kept at the Sanskrit College, Kolkata. This manuscript is written in Bengali script in black ink on tan paper and comprises 238 folios, with 9 to 12 lines a page plus up to 20 lines of commentary, so that some pages are very full of text. The manuscript further includes four closely written folios of index and is on the cover stamped as received at the Sanskrit College Library in 1965. The manuscript is complete, including the commentary.

The letters va and ra are here differentiated in the opposite way than is usual in Bengali orthography, that is, va has a dot underneath. The scribe has added a short prayer at the end of the commentary at 1.156: “Kṛṣṇa, master of Lakṣmī, master of Vraja, destroyer of suffering! Save me, fallen as I am into the terrible ocean of birth and death! Śrī Śrī Hari is my shelter. My mind is a bumblebee at the lotus feet of Śrī Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. Śrī Śrī Gopāla is my shelter. Obeisance to Śrī Śrī Govinda!”¹¹⁵

According to the final colophon, the manuscript was copied by Kṛṣṇaprasāda in the month of Caitra in Śāka 1711 (March or April 1789).¹¹⁶

B3 is manuscript

IIID16 kept at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata (Nyāyabhūṣaṇa 1899: 238–239). This manuscript is written in beautiful and correct Bengali script with black and dark red ink on yellow modern paper. It comprises 418 folios with 16 lines a page. It is complete with the commentary until folio361 (the end of the 15th chapter), after which the 51 following folios contain only the main text in another hand and with only black ink. Folio33 is also missing (2.146–160). There are also four folios of index at the beginning in yet another hand.

The manuscript is not dated but registered and stamped at the College of Fort William in 1825. The scribe was evidently a scholar, since he points out a metrical mistake at 1.16 and also adds a note at 1.103. Sometimes śrīramaḥ śaraṇam has been added in the margin next to the folio number. This manuscript is very close to the readings of the printed editions but sometimes adds readings from the Bengali recension in the margins (e.g., at 1.5).

The next manuscript is from Odisha.

Od is

BS21 kept at the Odisha State Museum, Bhubaneswar (Mahapatra 1958: 124–125). This manuscript is written in Bengali script with brown ink on cream paper. It comprises 390 folios with 13 lines a page. The text is complete with the exception of folios42 and 43 (3.357c–4.20). The manuscript includes only the main text, apart from the commentary to the first five verses on a separate folio in the beginning, in another hand. Some parts of the commentary are also given later (2.65–74). After folio18, four folios follow repeating the main text but this time together with the commentary, covering 2.43–105.

In contrast to many other manuscripts, this one has been carefully studied, as evinced by many small annotations in the text. Is has many glosses and comments in the margins, often taken from the

DDṬ (e.g., at 2.129) but not always. A quotation from Brahma Purāṇa (234.59) ascribed to “Sāradā” on the two types of Brahman is given at 1.32 and an explanation of the three siddhis at 1.48 and of krośa at 3.167.

According to the final colophon, the manuscript was copied by Jagannātha Devaśarman, the son of Vrajanandana, on Phālguna Śukla 11, Śāka 1692 (25February 1771), who also mentions having obtained the book in Murshidabad.¹¹⁷ Kedarnath Mahapatra adds (1958: 125) that the Odisha State Museum found the manuscript in the Kujanga area near Cuttack.

Finally, I have made use of the nine printed editions of the text that I have been able to locate.

Vidyāvāgīśa is the editio princeps of Muktārāma Vidyāvāgīśa, printed in Bengali script at the Saṃbād Pūrṇacandrodaya Press in Kolkata, 1845 (for this press, see Khan 2001: 241–249). 732 pages. The book contains both the main text and the commentary, but no translation. The text is printed as continuous lines on the pages, not according to the ending of verse lines. The numbering of the verses follows that of the manuscripts, that is, verses are numbered if they have a commentary, so that the numbers in the first chapter run to 104.

The book is furnished with a table of contents and a short Sanskrit introduction, where the editor writes that he with much effort collected many books in famous places such as Mālipāḍā in Navadvīpa and that he compared their readings with the commentary and edited the text together with the best paṇḍitas.¹¹⁸ The author is given as Mahāmahopādhyāya Paramabhāgavata Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, with no mention of Sanātana Gosvāmin.

Haripada Adhikary (2012: 104) gives this edition as an example of a “sophisticated” early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava publication geared to a more educated readership than those of the more popular (and often rather less well edited) Batatala publications, adding that Muktārāma Vidyāvāgīśa undertook the publication at his own cost.

Gurudayāla is the second edition, edited by Gurudayāla Vidyāratna and Candraśekhara Vidyāvāgīśa and printed in Bengali script at the Vidyāratna Press, Calcutta, 1860.

732 pages. Apart from using a different and better font and therefore slightly different formatting, this book is to the letter, including the Sanskrit introduction, identical with the editio princeps.

Vandyopādhyāya is the third edition, published by Durgācaraṇa Vandyopādhyāya in Bengali script at the Directory Press in Calcutta, 1881. 724 pages. The book contains a short preface by Bihārilāla Nandī, noting the need for an edition of the text supplied with a vernacular translation for the benefit of “all Hindus”, and another note by the publisher mentioning that the translation sometimes supplies explanatory material within the “English sign” (īṃrājī cihna) of brackets. Otherwise, there is no other introductory material.

The Sanskrit text and the numbering is the same as in the editio princeps, but the text is formatted in a more airy and modern way, with the Bengali translation of Bihārilāla Nandī printed at the bottom of the page. Some information taken from the commentary has been added as footnotes (e.g., that the Raghunāthadāsa mentioned at 1.2 was a great soul who was born as a Kāyastha).

Vidyāratna is the next edition, edited by the famous Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava scholar Rāmanārāyaṇa Vidyāratna and printed in Bengali script at the Rādhāramaṇa Press in Murshidabad, 1882. 1404 pages. The book contains not only the main text and the commentary but also a Bengali translation of the main text, as well as a table of contents, a short preface and a dedication to Vīracandravarma Māṇikya Bāhādūr, the king of Tripurā, mentioning also his private secretary Rādhāramaṇa Ghoṣa, the person behind the Rādhāramaṇa Press that brought out many Vaiṣṇava texts (Adhikary 2012: 97).

The table of contents and the Sanskrit texts are taken directly from the editio princeps with no acknowledgement. The numbering is the same, but here the lines of the verses have been separated in a modern manner and the pages have been printed in a fancy way with a frame around them. There is a simple diagram of the siddhādiśodhana yantra on p.66. There are some explanatory footnotes as well.

Śarma is the following edition, edited by Kṛṣṇadāsa Śarma with a Hindi translation by Kanhaiyalāla Miśra and printed in Devanāgarī script at Madanagopāla Press in Vṛndāvana, 1908. 1352 pages in two volumes. This edition contains only the main text and the translation, printed in two columns under the Sanskrit text. Quoted verses are distinguished from original verses by being indented. The text includes a short preface by Viśvambhāranātha Śarma Vrajavāsī and a dedication to Nīlakaṇṭha Gosvāmī of the lineage of Advaita Ācārya.

The Sanskrit text is here as well taken from Vidyāvāgīśa, but via Vidyāratna, with no acknowledgement of either, as many of the explanations of that edition are copied here, as is the siddhādiśodhana yantra (here on p.37). The verse numbering is also the same. While the commentary is not included in this edition, the Hindi translation incorporates some matter from it. However, the notes do also incorporate original material, such as some alternate manuscript readings, particularly towards the end of the first chapter.

Kaviratna is the next edition, edited by Śyāmacaraṇa Kaviratna and published in Bengali script at Victoria Press, Calcutta, 1911. 1331 pages. This edition includes the main text, the commentary and a Bengali translation, all printed below each other separated by lines. The quoted verses are indented as in the Miśra edition above. The book is also furnished with an introduction, a very brief life sketch of Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, the same table of contents as in Vidyāvāgīśa and a Bengali prayer to Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.

The Sanskrit texts are the same as before, including the verse numbering, but this time the direct source is Miśra, as the translations and notes are exactly the same, only translated into Bengali. The introduction deals in particular with understanding Vedic citations in the

HBV.

This edition has been reprinted several times, sometimes with a new introduction by someone else. An example of this is the edition of Mahānāmbrata Brahmacārī (Kalikātā: Maheśa Lāibrarī) printed 1993, 1997, 2001 and probably several times since, where apart from a new preface by the publisher and a new introduction, the rest of the book is unchanged.

Purīdāsa is the next edition, edited by Purīdāsa and printed in Bengali script at the Mañjuṣā Print Works in Dhaka, 1946. 864 pages. This edition contains the main text and the commentary printed in two columns underneath it. Here the verses have been numbered consecutively, so that, for example, the first chapter has 235 verses. The book includes a Sanskrit introduction and chapter summaries at the beginning, and at the end, two appendices with further details on how to calculate two types of Mahādvādaśīs, a verse index and an index of cited works.

Purīdāsa writes in the introduction (p.3) that this edition is based on four previous editions (Vidyāratna, Kaviratna, Mādhava Candra Tarkacūḍāmaṇi, and another unnamed one, perhaps Miśra?) and two manuscripts: one from Mathurā and one from the University Library of Dhaka (nr. 2453 with 442 folios in Bengali script). Unfortunately, and unlike in some of his other excellent editions, he notes no variant readings and almost invariably follows the text established by Vidyāvāgīśa; but he has made some corrections, such as adding the ending to the commentary at 1.203. The text has been slightly edited by adding numbers to verses cited from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and commas, semicolons and lines to make the commentary easier to read.

With its indices, appendices and scholarly introduction, the Purīdāsa edition is a clear advance on the previous editions. In the introduction, Purīdāsa tries to resolve the authorship question by suggesting that the

HBV that we have today is Gopāla Bhaṭṭa’s expansion of Sanātana’s original text (see above at 24–25). He also suggests that the book’s name may have been inspired by king Pratāparudra Deva’s (r. 1497–1540) Sarasvatīvilāsa.

Haridāsa is the following edition that I have consulted, edited by Haridāsa Śāstrī and printed in Devanāgarī script by Gauragadādhara Press in Vṛndāvana, 1986. 1374 pages in two volumes plus a small third volume of 200 pages of a verse index and an index of cited works. This edition contains the main text, the commentary and a Hindi translation printed underneath each other as in the Kaviratna edition, though the numbering follows that of the Purīdāsa edition, from which also the chapter summaries, indices and appendices are taken en bloc and as usual without any direct acknowledgement. The book is also furnished with the same table of contents found already in the Vidyāvāgīśa edition.

In general, this edition is thus heavily dependent on the Purīdāsa edition, as seen also in how the introduction borrows some ideas from it. Haridāsa Śāstrī (p.12) mentions having consulted it as well as the editions of Śyāmacaraṇa Kaviratna and Rāmanārayaṇa Vidyāratna. The Hindi translation is unique and not related to the Miśra edition.

Tīrtha is the final edition that I have consulted, edited by Bhaktivallabha Tīrtha Mahārāja and printed in Bengali characters by Śrī Caitanya Gauḍīya Maṭha in Māyāpur, 2000. 657 + 831 pages in two volumes. This edition begins with a short preface by the editor, fairly lengthy biographies of Sanātana and Gopāla Bhaṭṭa Gosvāmins, the ordinary table of contents and the verse index from Purīdāsa’s edition.

The text itself is printed differently than in any other edition, that is, in two columns on each page, with the Sanskrit followed by a rather free translation by Paṇḍita Kānāīlāla Adhikārī Pañcatīrtha and then the commentary, which is not translated but which at times is summarised in the translations. The Sanskrit text and the verse numbering follows that of Purīdāsa, though this edition omits its chapter summaries and appendices.

This edition is the basis for the English translation of Bhūmipati Dāsa and Pūrṇaprajña Dāsa (2005–2006), who also translate its introductory matters with no acknowledgement whatsoever. The translators conveniently leave out the first and last paragraphs of the original text, as these identify the original publisher, editor and translator.

The eight editions are in the critical apparatus collectively known as Edd, and as they with very few exceptions all fall back on the text of the Vidyāvāgīśa edition, I have distinguished between their readings only in the first chapter. Such a plagiarising of earlier editions is unfortunately common within early Indian editions, as noted in my previous work on the Rādhā Tantra (Broo 2017a: 40).

Figure1

Stemma codicum

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Figure1

Stemma codicum

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Figure1

Stemma codicum

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Because of extensive contamination between manuscripts, the relationship between the different sources is somewhat complicated. It can nevertheless be visualised through the above stemma codicum (figure1).

Here α stands for the autograph of the

HBV, written by Sanātana Gosvāmin around 1538 in Devanāgarī letters. β stands for Sanātana’s copy of his own text, similarly in Devanāgarī letters, but with some changes, such as changing the two last two padas at 1.4, adding two padas at 1.5, adding verse3.5 and making a mistake at 5.287.¹¹⁹ Both of these manuscripts were still preserved in the Rādhā Dāmodara temple library in 1597, but unfortunately neither has survived, probably since they were worn out by study and repeated copying. Perhaps they were entombed in the so-called Grantha Samādhi near Sanātana Gosvāmin’s own tomb below his Madanamohana temple (Entwistle 1987: 402).

From α begins at any rate one line of recensions, represented by Devanāgarī manuscripts R1 and Pa, which we can call the Simple recension as it is not accompanied by the commentary (which did not yet exist when α began to be copied). From the Simple recension another recension branches out, represented by manuscripts R2 and R3. We can call this the Jaipur recension, and it is characterised by a longer declaration of contents. It is represented by only a few manuscripts.

Based on β, Sanātana Gosvāmin wrote a commentary to the

HBV in Bengali script some time after 1541. It is probably the autograph of the commentary that is mentioned in the Rādhā Dāmodara temple library list, but again, that manuscript has been lost. However, some inconsistencies between the main text and the commentary (e.g., at 1.4, 1.41, 3.5 and 5.182) indicate that when the commentary was first combined with the main text, in archetype γ, it was by mistake joined with a copy of α, rather than manuscript β that it was actually based on. By this time, it also appears that the last folios of the commentary had been lost, as the commentary found in all manuscripts abruptly ends at 20.278, ignoring the last one hundred verses.

From γ stems the most widespread recension of the

HBV, including manuscripts both in Devanāgarī and Bengali scripts (V1, Va, B3, Od). I call this the Common recension. The editio princeps and all Edd of the

HBV was based on manuscripts belonging to this recension. From γ, too, stems another combination of main text and commentary, archetype δ, which also incorporated elements of the first copy of the text, β. From this δ stem what I call the Bengali recension of the text, which is characterised in particular by a section on the ten-syllable Gopāla mantra at 1.155. This recension is also widespread and has (as indicated by the dashed lines in the stemma) contaminated manuscripts R3, B3 and V1.

All the manuscripts I have seen belong to one of these four recensions.¹²⁰ Which recension, then, most closely represent the original text? The answer is not simple. While the Jaipur recension is clearly a later development, its origin, the Simple recension, is the closest we get to Sanātana Gosvāmin’s archetype α. While the Bengali recension is the farthest from archetype α, it retains elements of β, which was also written by Sanātana Gosvāmin and represents his own last take on the

HBV. The text of the commentary is retained both in the Common and the Bengali recensions, but it has been better preserved in the Bengali recension (e.g., at 3.51), no doubt because of originally having been written in Bengali script.

10 Conventions in the Critical Apparatus and Translation

As presenting the main text in Devanāgarī script and the commentary in the Bengali script would be unnecessarily excluding, I have opted to transcribe all of the text into Roman script according to the standard

IAST system. I have chosen to present the commentary immediately after the verses commented on, so that, for example, the commentary that in the printed editions is assigned to verses5.315–357 in toto has been split up and placed in the proper places (after 5.315–319, 5.327, 5.328, 5.343, 5.349–352 and 5.354–355).

The critical apparatus that follows the Sanskrit text beneath a horizontal line on the page is a negative one, so that the manuscripts mentioned are the ones that differ from the adopted text. Several variants are differentiated with a colon. For example, “11 prayuñjanti] V1 yuñjanti : Edd prayuñjate” means that on line11 from the top, instead of the word prayuñjanti, manuscript V1 has (the unmetrical) yuñjanti, while the printed editions read prayuñjate. Superscript numbers after sigla (e.g., V1²) indicate corrections or additions by a second hand in the manuscript in question. The order of variants given follow that of the largest amount of manuscripts and then the order of the list of mss given above (1.9). When the reading of one of the sources of the

HBV differs in some important way, such readings are indicated in the apparatus by the abbreviation of the source in question (e.g.,

RAC or

VBC).

The Latin abbreviations within the critical apparatus are the ones ordinarily used (see Maurer 2015). As in my earlier work on the Rādhā Tantra (Broo 2017a), I differentiate between om. (omittit) and deest by having the first to refer to cases where something has been omitted by an obious mistake (through haplography, for example), while the second refers to cases where the omission seems to follow an omission in the exemplar. An ellipsis in square brackets, […], refers to text missing because of physical damage to the manuscript. Finally, I use ins. (inseruit) for text inserted into a sentence or line and add. (addidit) for additional sentences or lines.

To avoid cluttering the critical notes, I have tacitly disregarded simple mistakes (such as jānhavī instead of jāhnavī). Contrary to many manuscripts, I have chosen not to germinate consonants after an r (e.g., dharmma), and I have changed all final anusvāras into the letter m. I have removed all references added by earlier editors into the Sanskrit text both in the main text and in the commentary, placing them in the translation instead. I have followed the numbering system of Purīdāsa, that is, numbering all verses (and the few prose passages) consecutively, but as there are verses accepted by Purīdāsa that have been relegated to the critical notes in my edition, the numbers are not always the same. For example, Puridāsa has 235 and 253 verses in the first two chapters, while I have 234 and 250.

I have resisted the temptation to emend mistakes and inconsistencies in the main text, with one exception. The optative of √nyas “one should place down” is spelled both nyasyet och nyaset in different manuscripts and even within the same manuscript, though the Bengali manuscripts favour nyaset. The printed editions feature both without any system, even within the same verse (e.g., 5.157). I have standardised the spelling in the critical text to nyasyet, except for when nyaset is demanded by the metre (2.52, 2.53, 2.202, 2.207 twice, 2.235 and 3.172). The author himself seems to have vacillated between the two, as there are also instances when the metre demands nyasyet (5.93, 5.113, 5.119).

The manuscripts and editions differ in their punctuation of the commentary. I have in general followed that of Purīdāsa but simplified it a little. The commentary and the scribes are also not consistent in terms of sandhi, often leaving sandhis unresolved for the sake of clarity. As I have followed the usual contemporary style of separating non-compounded words except in cases of vowel coalescence, I have been able to be a little more consequent with sandhis without losing clarity (e.g., writing yānty apayānti rather than yānti apayānti at 5.388).

In the translation, I have sometimes sacrificed grammatical exactness for readability. As the Sanskrit text and its translation are printed side by side, the interested reader can easily compare both. For example, I sometimes translate passive sentences in the active voice. For the same reason, I have sometimes divided the Sanskrit text into paragraphs. I have translated the ordinary śloka verses of both main text and commentary as prose, while rendering other metres in free verse to show that the style of the text has changed.

I have retained Sanātana Gosvāmin’s chapter names (given in the chapter colophons) and his division of the chapters into shorter sections. When such a section is introduced with a sentence or word prefaced with atha, I have made that introduction into a subheading, but when such a section is further divided into parts not introduced with an atha (such as when the greatness of remembrance is subdivided into different results), I have not made these further introductions into subheadings or noted them in the table of contents.

Translating a Sanskrit gloss such as the Digdarśinīṭīkā is challenging, as most of what it does is explain words that in translation may not require explanations. In such cases, I have tried to choose a simpler word for the gloss. Sometimes, when the translation itself has taken care of all that the commentary explains (such as word order or syntax), I have simply left the passage of the commentary in question untranslated and indicated that with (…). I have placed words cited from the main text in italics to differentiate them from their explanations, sometimes adding “means”, “refers to” or the like afterwards. For example (at 5.424), when the commentary reads “In this context, offerings refer to all kinds of worship and sacrifices refer to rites such as the Aśvamedha characterised by killing”, the words “offerings” (yajña) and “sacrifices” (medha) are cited from the verse from the Garuḍa Purāṇa that is under discussion. Mantras and words or syllables used as mantras are given in caps (e.g., KLĪṂ). As most of the readers of this book will be particularly interested in Hindu ritual, I have kept some technical vocabulary untranslated (e.g., Mudrā or Nyāsa), as such readers would most likely find a translation (e.g., “seal” or “placement”) more confusing than helpful. Such words are capitalised and explained in the glossary at the end.

I have maintained the distinction so common to Sanskrit commentaries between the literal meaning (ity arthaḥ) of a word or sentence and its implied meaning (iti bhāvaḥ), rendering the third level sometimes supplied by Sanātana Gosvāmin (iti dik) as “this is the drift”. As usual in Sanskrit auto-commentaries, Sanātana Gosvāmin refers to the author of the main text (granthakāra) in the third person, and I have retained that in the translation. Finally, I have added footnotes to the translation (shown by a, b, and so on) to indicate the direct source of passages cited second-hand and to explain passages difficult or interesting in terms of content or grammar.