Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa

Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß = 0.16, p < 0.03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß = 0.16, p < 0.03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Disciplines Comparative Methodologies and Theories | History of Religions of Eastern Origins | Other Religion | Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Comments This is a manuscript of an article from Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (2016): 107, doi:10.1163/ 15685373-12342170. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/philrs_pubs/14 Submitted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 1 Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa Travis Chilcott Iowa State University Raymond F. Paloutzian Westmont College Author Note: This paper is based on a talk given at the conference “Homo Experimentalis: Experimental Approaches in the Study of Religion,” at the Laboratory for Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA) in Brno, Czech Republic, October 2527, 2012. The fieldwork for this research took place while the senior author was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We would like to thank Ann Taves, Justin Barrett, Richard Sosis, and Miguel Farias for their time and advice, Abhishek Ghosh for organizational help and translation of the materials, and all those in both the United States and India who facilitated this project in various ways. We thank Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, the Oxford Centre for Anthropology and Mind, and the Templeton Foundation for making this study possible, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, Claremont Graduate University, and Iowa State University for the use of resources. Correspondence concerning this paper can be addressed to Travis Chilcott, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011 (Email: [email protected]); or to Raymond F. Paloutzian, Department of Psychology, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA 931081099 USA (Email: [email protected]). Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 2 Abstract Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß= .16, p< .03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological,Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß= .16, p< .03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors. Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 3 Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa In a seminal psychological study of anthropomorphism, Barrett and Keil (1996) explored the extent to which people implicitly think about God in anthropomorphic terms in contrast to the non-anthropomorphic qualities that theologies and individuals often explicitly attribute to God. Using a variation of a narrative comprehension paradigm developed by Bransford and McCarrell (1974), subjects were read a series of narratives in which God was an agent, after which participants were asked to recall particular details. Each narrative contained two kinds of recall items: “base” items, or control items, which were concerned with the basic facts of the narrative and “test” items, which were concerned with how God was conceptualized. Test items were constructed in such a way that an inaccurate recall would indicate implicit attribution of anthropomorphic qualities to God that were inferred and not made explicit in the narrative. This indirect method was chosen in order to tap into God concepts that subjects use in everyday life rather than in the context of theologically normative expectations for how God should be conceived. Participants were also asked to fill out an explicit beliefs questionnaire that included ratings of self-religiosity, religious affiliation, and a series of multiple-choice questions concerning the specific properties God might possess. The procedure was run in two separate studies with two groups each distinguished by variations in the procedure. Two groups were read the narratives first, followed by the explicit beliefs questionnaire, and two groups read them in the reverse order to make explicit beliefs more salient. In all four cases, the groups indicated a strong tendency to implicitly anthropomorphize God in contrast with wide agreement amongst participants Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 4 that God is subject to few if any physical and psychological constraints typical of human beings. They interpreted these results as evidence that people intuitively make anthropomorphic assumptions about God. In order to explore whether such findings might be cross-culturally stable, Barrett (1998) conducted a similar study among North Indian Hindus. Allowing the participants to read the narrative comprehension tasks first and using adapted versions of the materials used previously, the word “God” was substituted with the names of four different Hindu divinities—Brahman, Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Kṛṣṇa—and subjects were randomly assigned one of the four versions. Finding no differences between the four groups, Barrett treated them as one group and again found that participants demonstrated a substantial difference between their explicit stated beliefs, which were strongly nonanthropomorphic, and the extent to which they implicitly attributed anthropomorphic qualities to the respective Hindu deity. These results have helped establish the crosscultural validity of Barrett and Keil’s (1996) earlier findings and interpretations. Subsequent studies have yielded results generally consistent with this (Hornbeck & Barrett, 2013; Huang, Cheng, & Zhu, 2013; Maira, Nyhoff, & Johnson, 2013). The Present Study The present study modified the experimental design of Barrett and Keil (1996) in order to explore whether (a) there is an association between frequency of engagement in particular religious practices and the tendency to implicitly or explicitly reason in anthropomorphic terms about divine agents, and (b) such a relationship would change when there is a shift in practice and style that emphasized the anthropomorphic dimensions of a deity as a “higher” conceptualization of the deity than when conceived in Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 5 his non-anthropomorphic dimensions. Like Barrett’s (1998) study, the present study focuses on indigenous North Indians. Unlike Barrett’s (1998) study, however, the present study focuses on a specific North Indian religious tradition, the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, for two important reasons. First, to hear of braman in anthropomorphic terms in the contexts of the kinds of narratives in which they were embedded would have likely seemed very strange to a common Hindu of any stripe, as brahman, which is denoted with a neuter gender, is generally conceived as the transcendent impersonal ground of all being and spoken of in those terms. Moreover, not all Hindus share the same conceptions of specific deities. For example, Gauḍīya Vaiṣnavas view Kṛṣṇa as an intentional agent who has a transcendent humanlike form that is viewed as ontologically superior to and the source of brahman, which is understood as the impersonal and transcendent ground of all being. However, many nonGauḍīya Hindus hold that brahman is superior to and the source of Kṛṣṇa (and all other deities), who are viewed as an expression of brahman. Focusing on a singular population that identifies with a particular Hindu tradition and deity assures greater theological consistency among participants. Second, a primary purpose of this study was to extend the concern of Barrett’s study from looking for global cognitive tendencies to implicitly reason anthropomorphically about divine agents to exploring the extent to which this tendency may be encouraged or inhibited by cultural practices. Theological Context and Setting The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition was chosen in part for its simultaneous explicit attribution of both non-anthropomorphic and anthropomorphic qualities to Kṛṣṇa. On the one hand, Kṛṣṇa is the ultimate source of all that is, unconstrained by any physical, Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 6 psychological, or biological limitations. On the other hand, Kṛṣṇa is understood to have an eternal anthropomorphic form; he lives in a simple transcendent cowherd village known as Vṛndāvana, which is actually a celestial realm replete with forests, flowers, lakes, rivers, breezes, fragrances, and unsurpassable aesthetic arrangements; and he engages in activities known as līlā, or “divine play,” wherein Kṛṣṇa and his intimate companions exchange expressions of intimacy and love. In the context of līlā, Kṛṣṇa is understood to cause his various companions to “forget” that he is the supreme deity in order to facilitate exchanges of increased intimacy, which would otherwise be inhibited by awareness of his status as supreme Lord. Cultivating an intimate personal relationship with Kṛṣṇa and entering into this līlā is the goal of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava practitioners. As a means of achieving this goal, Gauḍīya theology advocates two distinct styles of religious practices, viz. vaidhī bhakti sādhana and rāgānugā bhakti sādhana. Vaidhī bhakti means “devotion according to the rules of scripture.” Vaidhī practices can be thought of as a set of exoteric practices in the sense that they are recommended for all practitioners, especially those who are in the beginning stages of traversing the path of bhakti and developing a devotional mood towards Kṛṣṇa. Principal practices typically include venerating and worshipping the image of Kṛṣṇa (mūrti) with prayers, songs, and various ritual instruments; performing service for a guru and/or personal icon (mūrti) of Kṛṣṇa and/or Vaiṣṇava institution; and hearing and singing about Kṛṣṇa’s names (nāmas), forms (rūpas), qualities (guṇas), and various forms of divine play (līlās). Engagement in these practices is intended in part to redirect one’s thoughts and thought patterns away from selfish enjoyment and attachment to the temporary phenomenal world and towards acting exclusively for the enjoyment of Kṛṣṇa and developing exclusive attachment to Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 7 him. While these practices and the theology behind them tend to emphasize Kṛṣṇa’s nonanthropomorphic properties, they also serve to familiarize the practitioner with the various līlās of Kṛṣṇa and his intimate companions, who are described in highly anthropomorphic terms that are not only theologically acceptable, but are considered theologically superior to his non-anthropomorphic qualities. The divine is not ultimately a force, the divine is ultimately an intentional agent who acts in very human-like—and often child-like ways, even though not subject to human limitations. Rāgānugā bhakti, or “devotion that follows a passion,” can be thought of as esoteric in the sense that it refers to expressions of devotional behavior and internal meditations that are intended to develop a more intimate and personal relationship with Kṛṣṇa than is possible through the practice of vaidhī bhakti alone. Those who practice rāgānugā bhakti are encouraged to devote more attention to Kṛṣṇa’s anthropomorphic dimensions than those who focus more on the practices of vaidhī. A signature practice of rāgānugā practitioners is meditation on Kṛṣṇa’s aṣṭakāliya līlā, which refers to contemplative recollection of Kṛṣṇa’s līlās corresponding with eight specific times of the day. In the context of this recollection the practitioner mentally constructs a perfected spiritual body (siddha-rūpa) with which to perform mental service (mānasī sevā) to Kṛṣṇa in the mood and capacity of one of Kṛṣṇa’s intimate companions, usually as Kṛṣṇa’s lover but in some cases as a friend or guardian. Formal practice of rāgānugābhakti is usually reserved for more experienced practitioners and not neophytes or the general public due to its emphasis on relating to Kṛṣṇa in his anthropomorphic dimensions as a friend, parent, or lover rather than as the supreme Lord. As a consequence, rāgānuga bhakti practices tend to emphasize meditation on Kṛṣṇa’s Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 8 anthropomorphic properties while downplaying his non-anthropomorphic dimensions. Ideally the practitioner successfully brackets out these latter properties altogether since an awareness of them is understood to interfere with the various kinds of exchanges of intimate love that are thought possible between Kṛṣṇa and the jīva, or “soul.” Rationale and Hypotheses In view of the tradition’s strong anthropomorphic conceptions of Kṛṣṇa and the aim of cultivating a dynamic and personal relationship with Kṛṣṇa, we formulated two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that there is an association between frequencies of engagement in central vaidhī practices and the tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to Kṛṣṇa such that an increase in the frequency of engagement in these vaidhī practices will predict an increase in the tendency to implicitly reason anthropomorphically about Kṛṣṇa. We inferred that this would be due to the highly anthropomorphic properties Kṛṣṇa is said to possess despite his nonanthropomorphic properties. The second hypothesis was that this tendency to implicitly reason about Kṛṣṇa in anthropomorphic terms will be further increased due to engagement in the practices of rāgānugā bhakti. We reasoned that this would occur because of the increased emphasis on meditation on and relating to Kṛṣṇa’s anthropomorphic dimensions in intimate, personal, and human-like ways while intentionally bracketing out his non-anthropomorphic dimensions. Therefore, levels of engagement in principal vaidhī practices and rāgānugā practices were treated as predictor variables and the extent to which participants implicitly reason about Kṛṣṇa in anthropomorphic terms were treated as outcome variables. Accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognition and Culture (forthcoming, 2016) 9