Among the lovers of Krishna, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s name is the most outstanding. There is a huge amount of literature on love in the form of poetry and epics and philosophical treatises. One can become knowledgeable about love, write great treatises on love, yet in reality he will not actually know what love is.
There is another person who has not read a word about love, but has experienced it, lived it. What is the difference between this man and the one who has gone through a huge pile of literature on love? This man knows love through experiencing; the other man knows it through words and concepts.
When Chaitanya says that unity and separateness of the world and God is beyond thought, he means much more than what meets the eye. Meera will say it is unthinkable, but she was never given to serious thinking – she was through and through a woman of feelings. But as far as Chaitanya is concerned, he was a great logician, renowned for his sharp mind and brilliant logic. He had scaled the highest peaks of thinking. Pundits were afraid of entering into argument with him.
He was incomparable as a debater; he had won laurel after laurel in philosophical discussions.
Such a rational intellect, who had indulged in hair splitting interpretations of words and concepts throughout his life, was one day found singing and dancing through the streets of Navadeep. Meera, on the other hand, had never indulged in pedantry and scriptures; she had nothing to do with logic.
She was a loving woman; love was in her blood and bones. So it was no wonder when she walked through the streets of Merta with a tanpoora in her hands, dancing and singing hymns of love. It was just natural.
But Chaitanya was her opposite; he was not a man of love, and he turned to love and devotion – which was a miracle. This one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in his life demonstrates the victory of love over logic.
He had defeated all his contemporaries with his logic, but when he came to himself he found it to be a self-defeating discipline. He came to a point where the mind lost and life and love won.
That is why among people who walked the path of Krishna, Chaitanya is simply extraordinary, incomparable. When I say so I am aware of Meera, who loves Krishna tremendously. But she does not come near Chaitanya.
It is unthinkable how a tremendously logical mind like Chaitanya could come down from his ivory tower, take a drum in his hands, and dance and sing in the market place.
Can you think of Bertrand Russell dancing through the streets of London? Chaitanya was like Russell – out and out intellectual. And for this reason his statement becomes immensely significant.
He makes his statement that reality is unthinkable not with words, but with a drum in his hands – dancing and singing through the streets of his town, where he was held in great respect for his superb scholarship. It is in this way that he renounces mind, renounces thinking and declares that, “Reality is beyond thought, it is unthinkable.”
Chaitanya’s case demonstrates that they alone can transcend thinking who first enter into the very depth of thinking and explore it through and through. Then they are bound to come to a point where thinking ends and the unthinkable begins.
This last frontier of mind is where a statement like this is born. That is why Chaitanya’s statement has gathered immense significance; it comes after he crosses the last frontier of mentation.
Meera never walked on that path; she came to love straight away. She cannot have the profundity of Chaitanya.
Excerpted from “Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy.” The 527th birth anniversary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu will be observed on February 18.
Osho
