Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.1 (2015) 49 The Cause of Devotion in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Theology: Devotion (bhakti) as the Result of Spontaneously (yadṛcchayā) Meeting a Devotee (sādhu-saṅga) JONATHAN EDELMANN UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA Devotion (bhakti) is the deining religious practice and central theological concept of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, and this article is about the catalytic event that is said to instigate bhakti in the non-devoted. I examine how Jīva Gosvāmin (c. 1517–1608) and Viśvanātha Cakravartin (l. 1679–1709), two important theo- logians in this tradition, argue that the cause of bhakti in the non-devoted is a meeting with a devotee. In this meeting, the non-devoted may develop conviction (śraddhā), which in turn gives him or her the motivation to continue along the path of bhakti, the steps of which were charted in the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of Rūpa Gosvāmin (c. 1470–1555). Based on a few key passages from the Gauḍīya’s pri- mary scriptural source, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Jīva and Viśvanātha argue that this conviction for bhakti is developed spontaneously (yadṛcchayā). Since the sponta- neous conviction to practice bhakti can only occur in sādhu-saṅga, or a meeting with a devotee, what causes that meeting? The devotee always acts freely and independently (like the Lord Kṛṣṇa himself); thus his or her motivation to meet and inspire conviction in the non-devoted is not reducible to a divine plan, divine grace, the piety (or impiety) of the receiver, special features of the receiver’s soul, high birth, or any other designation. Rather, the cause of sādhu-saṅga is the bhakti “living in the heart” of a devotee. This bhakti makes the devotee feel compassion (kṛpā) toward the non-devoted, which leads him or her to provide sādhu-saṅga, which then creates conviction (śraddhā), which eventually leads to bhakti. Within the Vaiṣṇava traditions, two central theological issues are the root cause of bhakti (devotion) and an individual’s eligibility for it (adhikāra). 1 Prior to the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, there was extensive investigation of questions such as: Why does one person feel bhakti for God and another not? and Are bhakti or liberation (mokṣa) accessible to people of any status, or are special qualiications needed? 2 Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas gave increasingly greater attention to these questions as the tradition spread throughout North India, and here I shall address them from the perspectives of Jīva Gosvāmin (c. 1517–1608) and Viśvanātha Cakravartin (l. 1679– I would like to thank Dr. Satya Nārāyaṇa Dāsa Bābā for reading a number of important Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava texts with me. I also beneited from reading key texts with Kiyokazu Okitz and David Buchta in a Summer Sanskrit Reading Group in Boston in 2013 and from the comments of two anonymous readers and of Stephanie Jamison. 1. Conventions in this article: verses cited in commentary are set of by quotation marks; bold text indicates words from the mūla text that are glossed or commented upon in a commentary; and words in brackets are my addi- tions. Unless indicated, all translations are mine. 2. Frederick Smith discusses the hierarchy of souls and their diferential eligibilities for various forms of bhakti in Vallabha Ācārya’s (c. 1479–1531) Puṣṭipravāhamaryādābheda. For Vallabha certain forms of bhakti are eternally closed of to certain types of souls, while other types “are exclusively predestined to achieve the ideally situated soteriological objective of the school” (italics my own, Smith 2011: 218). B. N. K. Sharma (1986: chaps. 33–35) passionately defends Madhva Ācārya’s concept of jīva-traividhya, three types of soul, each with its own innate, predetermined eligibility for certain states or conditions (svabhāva-bheda). For Madhva, too, the highest forms of bhakti and mokṣa are not open to all.