"As It Is" and other hermeneutical approaches to scripture in Gaudiya Vaisnavism

Recently a god-brother of mine, Vidyapati (Mikey), has been writing about his experience of Krishna Consciousness in ISKCON over the past 7 years. His blog is at xkrishnax.blogspot.com.

I find his writing lucid, reflective, insightful, and respectful.

I would like to point out here that ISKCON is a federation of allied local communities, and is by no means a homogenous entity, so his experience is the personal experience of one person in one particular situation. It has been very useful as a topic of conversation here, and I have had several in-depth discussions about issues around it with my friends here, especially with David Jorm and Vrajadhama.

I posted a comment on a recent post of Mikey's, one in which he talks about difficulties that he and others experienced in reconciling the hermeneutical approach (that means how scriptures are interpreted) advocated in their community, with their own independent thinking and intellectual integrity.

I'm reproducing my comment here on my blog to put it front of a wider audience. Understanding the philosophy of Krishna Consciousness to this level is what works for me. My realization is that to stay interested and engaged in Krishna Consciousness over the long term, you have to find out what works for you. Krishna Consciousness is simple for the simple, but if your intellectual capacity is more complex, then Krishna Consciousness does not lack depth of philosophy; and I wouldn't let someone else harangue you into thinking that it's just for dummies and that intellectuals are evil. When this starts to happen we end up with an organisation that runs on a personality cult (religion without philosophy + guru), and would resonate with statements such as: "When I hear the word intellectual, I reach for my Luger". Just to further invoke Godwin, I'd like to point out that Nazi Germany also ran on the twin principles of guru-bhakti (Heil Hitler!) and "Purity is the Force". It is a very dangerous dynamic - a razor's edge. Independently thoughtful, intellectually honest philosophers loyal to the core values of Krishna Consciousness (brahmanas) are necessary to keep it real. These people derive their validity from their own internal conviction, not from social convention, and thus can be a real pain in the ass, and a valuable counter-balance to excessive swings due to group think.

Below the line is my comment from Vidyapati's blog:

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In terms of epistemology, we had some interesting discussions at our recent retreat, where we discussed the six philosophical systems over three days. One point that came out is that Prabhupada's explicit hermeneutical strategy ("As It Is") is largely rhetorical. For example, he contradicts it in Bg. 3.29, where he renders a purport practically in contradiction to the verse, using an interpretative strategy other than "As It Is".

His rhetorical choice of hermeneutic is linked to a previous philosophical interpretation that he is seeking to refute - Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta had in turn refuted a previous school, Karma-mimamsa, which used exactly the hermeneutical strategy of "As It Is". The Karma-mimamsa epistemology was that scripture was of divine origin, and so everything in it was literally true. Thus, if you perform the rituals in there, since the scripture must be true, the result must come.

Everything there was literally true: "as it is". They de-emphasised metaphysics by saying that anything that wasn't an instruction on how to achieve a result was not important.

To undermine the influence of this school, Sankaracarya accepted the Vedic scripture, but introduced a different hermeneutic.

Sankaracarya stated that pramanas (epistemological sources) have their domain of authority. The authoritative domain of scripture is transcendence. In other mundane areas, such as cosmology, if sastra-pramana (scripture) contradicted pratyaksha and anumana (empirical observation and logic), the description of scripture could be retired. Sankara called these paramarthika (the transcendental part), and vyavaharika (the mundane part)

With this hermeneutical strategy many modern-day ISKCON controversies, such as the relative distances of the Sun and the Moon, or the structure of the universe, disappear.

However, Sankara then applied this hermeneutical strategy to descriptions of Brahman, designating some of them as saguna (mundane) and others as nirguna (transcendental). I personally feel that he overstepped the mark with this, and I'm not the only one.

Rather than quibble over where this distinction should be applied, Prabhupada has opted for the Karma-mimamsa hermeneutical approach. This gets rid of some problems - such as Sankara's characterisation of some descriptions of Brahman as mundane, but introduces others - such as cosmological controversies, and instances where Prabhupada violates his own stated hermeneutical strategy.

Once you understand that, it becomes possible to consider the Bhagavatam using Sankara's hermeneutic, but without his fault of over-extension (ativyapti in Sanskrit - where a definition is so broad that it includes within it things that should not be included). This is precisely what Bhaktivinode Thakur does in his book Sri Krishna Samhita. Bhaktivinoda Thakura also uses Sankara's terms paramarthika and vyavaharika often, while you won't find them at all in Prabhupada's writing.

You can understand why this approach isn't a standard practice amongst ISKCON devotees too - most people would be thoroughly confused just reading this, what to speak of trying to apply it.

However, it is also part of the tradition.

Keep it simple for the simple, but remember - Krishna Consciousness is also complex for the complex.

I have to say that in a number of cases of my godbrothers who have given up on the philosophy, my feeling is that it is because they didn't go deep enough into it. Of course, that is discouraged in some circles, but at some point we have to own our own relationship with the tradition.