The Body–Mind Challenge: Theology and phenomenology in Bengal-Vaishnavisms

Abstract

Recent studies of Asian religious traditions have critiqued Western philosophical understandings of mind–body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind–body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal—claimants to an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in imagination and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience—I demonstrate that, although these devotional groups stress on combating theologies, with emphases respectively on the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’, in their narrations of religious experiences, however, both groups allude to rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment. So, while influenced by ideas of (mental) ‘purity’ and (bodily) ‘actuality’, respectively, practices of both groups rely on similar states of mind–body continuum. So I argue that the mind–body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in the discursive and experiential domains of these non-Western religious contexts. Through my analyses of the texts and embodiments of these opposed devotional groups, I show that theology gets both organically entangled with as well as challenged by phenomenological experiences. I further argue that explorations in the tenor of religious studies sharply enrich the anthropology of religiosities. Also, such engagements between theology and anthropology have been relatively lacking and need more emphasis in studies of contemporary South Asian religions.

Devotee/Ethnographer: My Struggle at the Boundary Walls of Participant Observation

“…Simply, how should one identify and represent the 'mind' and 'body' in Asian religious contexts? (Sarbadhikary 2018(Sarbadhikary , p. 2082 The Vaishnava conception of the body is as an instrument capable of cognition. I experience this, as I merge uncomfortably into the heaving, chanting, dancing crowd-even as I remain distinct from the crowd as one that is not dancing but crying profusely.…”