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The Tenth Lesson: The Religions of India. Part II1321
these several schools and their founders have been described in the
preceding lesson. We do not consider it necessary to repeat the descriptions
here, and must content ourselves with the bare mention in connection with
what we have said in the preceding lesson regarding them.
We make an exception of the school of Chaitanya however, for his
influence was most marked on the Krishna-Vaishnava cult, and in fact,
there are schools of the cult that hold that he, himself, was a subsequent
incarnation of Vishnu, or Krishna. The teachings of Chaitanya have exerted
a great influence over the entire cult of the Krishna-Vaishnavas, inasmuch as
he laid such great stress upon the Bhakti or “Love” doctrine. The result has
been that the entire body has been noted for its extreme manifestation of
the “Love-of-God” conception, rather than for its philosophical teachings.
The followers of Chaitanya exalt Rahdi, the consort of Krishna, to a high
position, regarding her as the Love-Principle which emanated from Krishna.
There have been a number of “reform movements” in the various schools
of the Krishna-Vaishnavas, and some of the reformers have carried their
followers far beyond the original bounds of the cult, some tending toward
an extreme liberal eclecticism, while others tend toward a very narrow form
of deism scarcely resembling the broader pantheistic idea. Some of the
schools are marked by a very high degree of morality and form of worship,
while others have wandered off into low forms of ceremonial and worship,
in a few cases degenerating to a degree but little removed from the old
Phallic worship, and in which the “Love” element is prostituted into low and
ignoble forms. This, however, should not be urged as a reproach against
the general cult, as these degenerating tendencies have been evidenced in
nearly every religion the world has ever known at some time in their history,
and are really departures from the pure religion, rather than a development
of it.
Some of the several Krishna-Vaishnava schools are noted for their
insistence upon the worship of the “infant Krishna,” with a related Madonna
worship, which was a departure from the older schools, and “which bears