A Devotional Ideal Rather Than a Formal Creed

The Encyclopedia of Hinduism notes that Gaudiya Vaishnavism has never reduced the status of Radha's love to a single formal doctrinal proposition recited as a creed, holding it instead as a binding conviction expressed chiefly through poetry, song and the structured practice of bhakti rather than through philosophical argument of the kind that settles a school's position on, say, the relationship between soul and God. A Survey of Hinduism situates this preference for devotional and poetic expression over systematic definition within the wider Gaudiya tradition's own account of religious knowledge, in which the highest truths about God are held to be better conveyed through the aesthetic and emotional registers of story and song than through propositions a reader could simply assent to without any change in feeling. That does not make the conviction any less binding within the tradition, since generations of Gaudiya theologians have written at length elaborating exactly what Radha's love means and why it stands as the highest condition rather than one devotional attitude among others, but it does mean a newcomer to the tradition encounters the doctrine first as poetry to be entered into rather than as a sentence to be memorized, the emotional shape of the teaching arriving before its systematic statement rather than after it.