Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/99

 LQVE IN HINDU LITERATURE. 85

terms of paradise, .angels, and so forth, simply because it is customary to associate anything great with the un- known world of spirit. But the weakness of the spiritual world is too patent when one is required to define the ecstasy of life in that region. All " God-intoxicated men," people who have drunk deep of the celestial bliss, the mystics and seers of the transcendental truths ■have to declare their Divine Union and Infinite Love in terms of the sexual union, the raptures of sensuous love. They do not seem to know of anything higher than this ! The sacredness of sex does not require any further evidence. And this is independent of the validity or otherwise of the alleged identity of all forms of love, i.e, apart from the value to be attached to the extremist mystical equation, Sexual Ecstasy = Spiritual Ecstasy.

The love of Radha and Krishna is human love, generally speaking. But it became the conventional syrhbol also of Love- Divine, the attraction between the Soul a:nd God in mediaeval Indian thought, the "plasm" of Bhakti cult; Radha may then be said to have stood for the Beatrice- of Hindu Dantes, who began to "write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman." Chinese literary tradition also knows df such "types" of romantic and mystic love between man and woman, .e.g., those immortalized by the great Po Chu-i in his Everlasting Wrong, of which the hero is the Tang Emperor Ming Huang. But to see one "grand allegory of 'spiritual experience in the whole mass of Radha- Krishna: lyrits is more than can be accepted. Vidyapati; at any rate, in his Idylls of Radha, is not at all swayed by the c allegoristic tendency. He is a humanist pa^