Imagining reality: Ritual visualization in Jīva Gosvāmī's Bhakti-Sandarbha

In Bhakti-sandarbha, the fifth volume of his seminal treatise, Ṣaṭ-sandarbha, the sixteenth century Indian religious thinker Jīva Gosvāmī presents a brief and tradition-specific description of a set of widely practiced meditation rituals that are preparatory to the worship of the representative-image of a deity, or mūrti. Whereas many traditions other than his own Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism regard the visualizations in these rituals imaginative, his descriptions couch their imaginative content in a paradox, namely: the imaginal of the deity visualized as part of this ritual enactment is not imaginative. Moreover, the prospect for reconciling this paradox is compounded by Jīva’s further classifying the mental-image as a non-visually manifest reality. Seeking clarity on the role of imagination in generating or capturing this reality, this thesis initially looks to the feasibility of various relationships between the mental-image and the non-imaginative object, such as those of representation and mediation. However, it turns out that these do not satisfactorily resolve the paradox. Eventually it is found that the paradoxical notion of reality in the imaginative rituals can be reconciled through addressing it in terms of the relationship between the imaginer and the imaginal. The exploration of this relationship takes this thesis beyond the analysis of mental-images and objects to the author’s appeal to an ancient dramaturgic and poetic theory which his tradition had mapped onto its theology. This theory analogically defines the reality accessed through imagination in the terms of a real participation of audience and actors in a play. For Jīva, real participation occurs in an imaginatively enacted cosmic play, the object of which is the deity’s original but ordinarily unseen theatre of activities. Although this is the described experience of those who no longer are required to perform rituals, it is nevertheless prefigured in Jīva’s articulations of ritual visualization and, hence, impact his expression of reality as accessed by imagination in the rituals