What do Radha and Krishna Represent?
Questioner: Pranaam, Acharya Ji. I am in my final year of Chemical Engineering. My question is, what is the bond between Goddess Radha and God Krishna? From holy books, we have seen that they are symbols of devotion, but nowadays, whatever we see, watch on television, and read on wedding invitation cards, they are symbols of love.
You know, behind every divine existence, there is a certain message that needs to be delivered to humanity. So I am not getting what kind of bond it represents.
Acharya Prashant: See, very ideally, very truly, the relationship between Sri Krishna and Radha has to be much the same as between Shiv and Shakti. That has to be the ideal relationship. Unfortunately, in popular culture, that relationship has been totally distorted. Totally distorted. The way they are depicted these days is something that should not be acceptable at all.
They have been presented as symbols of the usual carnal love between a man and a woman. All Road-Romeos love to call their sweethearts as Radha, which is quite unfortunate. No? When I talk about the shallowness of the usual kind of love - the man-woman kind, even teenagers come up and say, “But if Shri Krishna could love Radha, why can’t I?” So all that is quite…
You see, we could not take much liberty with Shakti because Shakti has been very properly documented in the scriptures.
There is an entire stream—the Shakta Marg—that has its own scriptures, adherents, and even its own Upanishads. Because that scriptural base is present, the scriptural rigidity and discipline are there, so common imagination could not take much liberty with Shakti. So, Shakti, therefore, fortunately, retains her dignity. But when it comes to Radha, you must know that there is not much scriptural base there.
The character of Radha is not present in any of the Upanishads, obviously, not in the Vedas. It is not sufficiently present even in the Puranas. With respect to the character of Sri Krishna, there are two Puranas mainly. Do you know of Puranic Literature? Puran, you know? There is the Shrimad Bhagavad Puran and there is the Harivansh Puran. In these two you have, in fact, these two are dedicated to Sri Krishna.
Even in these two, Radha is scarcely mentioned. So what happens? The scriptures are not talking about Radha at all. Even if they talk about Radha, it is somewhere in passing. What has that meant? That meant that later on, all kinds of people could simply expand their imagination and say whatever they wanted about Radha. Now, they cannot do this kind of vile thing with Shakti or Parvati or Devi, right? Because you have Upanishads present there.
You have Shri Durga Saptashati there. You have other Agamas of the Shakta Marg. So you cannot do this thing with Devi. But with Radha, all these people have simply imagined, built up, inflated, and distorted her character. All kinds of just imaginative stories have come up.
And because people don’t read the scriptures, they believe in those stories. So Radha deserves a lot of dignity.
The character of Radha Devi deserves a lot of respect. Unfortunately, you see what happens when people are and from religious podiums and religious gatherings when they are talking about Krishna and Radha. The way the two of them are depicted and narrated, and the way their relationship is painted is not dignified.
It is also spiritually unedifying. The way those dances and depictions happen, there is hardly any spiritual lesson in them, which is not right. As I said right at the beginning of my response, ideally, the Krishna-Radha relationship should be depicted in the same way as the Shiv-Shakti relationship—nothing short of that, nothing lower than that.
