Love of God and Love of Neighbour in Indian Philosophy

Love of God and Love of neighbour are the two aspects of the Greatest Commandments given by Jesus Christ. These commandments are not meant only for his followers but for all human beings as these two aspects love belong to all human beings. In this article, I have tried to look at these two commandments in view of two instances in the life of the Hindu deity, Kṛṣṇa in Indian Philosophy.

Daya Krishna (1924-2007), a contemporary Indian philosopher, in his article Did Gopīs Really Love Kṛṣṇa?enumerates two interesting aspects of love. He mentions two episodes from the life of the Hindu God Kṛṣṇa. The first one is from the epic Śrīmad Bhāgavata where Daya Krishna takes the episode of Krishna with the gopīs (the young women in Vṛndāvana where he spent his youthful days). The gopīs deeply fell in love with Kṛṣṇa. These gopīs are shown as ‘living’ eternally in the memory of those days they had passed with Kṛṣṇa even in his absence. However, Daya Krishna shows that, the same gopīs never made the slightest effort to seek him out and meet him once more or even try to find where he is or how he is. The message of the gopī episode in Śrīmad Bhāgavata is that the ideal of love is the loving state of consciousness which can only be cultivated through a constant remembrance and dwelling in the memory of those moments when a person spent with the loved one. It is clearly said in ŚrīmadBhāgavata: “When her lover is far away, a woman thinks of him more than when he is present before her.” (10.47.35) On the contrary, this gives the impression that in the realm of feelings the imagined world is more real than the real world. The gopīs preferred to live with the mere feeling of love than the so-called real love (in action). In other words, they loved the feeling of loving Kṛṣṇa than loving Kṛṣṇa as a person.

The second episode is from the Bhagavat Gita. The whole Gita is the dialogue between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna like the conversation between two friends. In this particular episode, Kṛṣṇa shows his viśvarūpa(the real form of Kṛṣṇa that contains the whole of the universe) to Arjuna. There Arjuna begs to be forgiven if he had said anything for fun or in jest or play, not knowing the real nature of Kṛṣṇa. But what is more disturbing for the Arjuna in this situation is that this ‘real’ reality, which is not possible to be seen through mortal eyes, is so frightening that Arjuna implores him to assume his previous form so that he can have normal feelings toward him as he had been with Kṛṣṇa just before the revelation. (XI. 44-46). Thus Arjuna preferred to the ordinary familiar form of Kṛṣṇa than the almighty form which is supposed to be the real form of Kṛṣna since the real form perturbed Arjuna. I would like to compare these two narrations with the Greatest Commandments given by Jesus Christ. Jesus reduces all the Jewish rules and regulations with two commandments namely: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Mt. 22: 37-39)

The first episode of Kṛṣṇa with the gopīs can be associated with the second Golden Commandment namely the ‘love for neighbour’. This command urges to love one’s neighbour as one’s ownself. There is no doubt that gopīs loved Kṛṣṇa. The problem with these women that Daya Krishna speaks of is that they only loved the feeling of loving Kṛṣṇa than the person of Kṛṣṇa himself. And so they stopped looking for him when he was absent from Vṛndāvana. On the contrary, the commandment given by Jesus calls for love in action i.e. to love the other as one’s ownself. In fact, Kṛṣṇa in his sermon to Arjuna emphasizes on the love in action with the duty conscience than in meditation. This aspect of love does not stop itself in the world of imagination but in the world of reality. Thus it is the real love for the other.

The second episode of Kṛṣṇa’s encounter with Arjuna can be associated with the first greatest commandment – the love of God. This commandment of love requires one to love God unconditionally; accepting God as the ultimate meaning of life. In other words, looking at everything from God’s perspective and doing His will at all time. On the contrary, in the Gita episode, we find when Kṛṣṇa manifests his godly cosmic form Arjuna could no longer accept his nature and begs him to come back to the normal form. This phenomenon takes place often in the present era. Human beings wish to restrict the form of God according to our own experience, taste, convenience, etc. than to accept the real manifestation of God. Only the wise have understood the real nature of God and they confess that they are ignorant this nature. The only valid means of knowing God, according to them, is the well-known neti-neti method in Indian philosophy i.e. we know only what God is not. Thus loving God without any restriction is equal to accepting God’s manifestation without any restriction. This is similar to giving oneself to God’s will by carrying out his commandments with no expectations which Gita calls as niṣkāma-karma i.e. action without the desire for its fruit.

These few paragraphs give us another way of looking at the greatest commandment of Jesus Christ in view of two narratives from Indian philosophy. The love of God is to prefer God’s will than one’s own in life and the love of neighbour is to love the other person than to love the feeling of loving the other.