The importance of nāma-smaraṇam

The word smaraṇam shows up in various places in the Sandarbhas, the Bhāgavatam, and the Bhagavad-Gītā. Śrī Jīva Goswami discusses different types of smaraṇam in the Sandarbhas, including nāma-smaraṇam, līla-smaraṇam, rūpa-smaraṇam and guṇa-smaraṇam. Additionally, we saw that Śrī Kṛṣṇa places smaraṇam at the top of the bhakti hierarchy in the twelfth chapter of the Gītā – discussed here and here and here. In this article, I examine the definition of smaraṇam or remembrance and then discuss the importance of nāma-smaraṇam. I draw on the Bhakti Sandarbha and also the Tarka Saṅgraha in writing this article, including the commentary by Śrī Devadatta Pāṭil called Vidyādharī.

The definition of remembrance

Smaraṇa typically is translated as ‘remembrance’. The Tarka Saṅgraha defines smṛti or remembrance as follows:

saṁskāra-mātra-janyaṁ jñānaṁ smṛtiḥ

Knowledge that is generated by a saṁskāra alone is called smṛti or remembrance.

Here, the word ‘alone’ excludes knowledge gathered from the senses. Remembrance is not dependent on sensory perception in the moment. One could sit inside a dark room without any sensory input of any sort, and still remember events from one’s past, both recent and distant.

However, to understand this definition fully, we must know what a saṁskāra is. For this, we first recognize that remembrance is impossible without prior experience. We remember that which we have experienced.

Second, the experience itself has ended. For example, if we remember seeing an elephant in the zoo sometime in the past, that elephant or its experience are not in our present. They were firmly in the past. And yet, we know that all remembrance must be preceded by experience. Furthermore, we only remember that object which we have experienced in the past.

To relate a cause in the past with an effect in the present, we must therefore conjecture the existence of an intermediate cause that came into being when the experience occurred, and that continues to persist in the present. This ‘intermediate’ cause is called vyāpāra. Vyāpāra is defined as:

vyāpāro nāma yaḥ kāraṇāt jāyate karyaṁ ca janayati

vyāpāraḥ is that which is produced from the cause and produces the effect.

The definition of saṁskāra, or rather bhāvanā, which is a specific type of saṁskāra, is given in the Tarka Saṅgraha as follows:

anubhava-janyā smṛti-hetur bhāvanā

That which is produced by experience, and which is the cause of remembrance, is called [the saṁskāra named] bhāvanā.

Thus, saṁskāras are a vyāpāra – an intermediate cause which relates the cause, experience, to its effect, remembrance.

Śrī Jīva Goswami defines smaraṇam

Śrī Jīva Goswami defines it as follows in the Bhakti Sandarbha Anu 275:

manasā anusandhānam

Babaji translates it as

minute investigation with the mind

The word anusandhānam, which comes from the verbal root dhā in the sense of fix or direct (the mind) along with prefixes saṁ and anu, implies following something closely. Thus, the overall sense is

Close mental contemplation is smaraṇam.

Here, the meaning of smaraṇam takes a secondary sense – it is not in the sense of recalling that which we have experienced, but rather the conscious direction of our attention in a sustained way toward an object.

Despite the above secondary sense of smaraṇam, the mind still cannot operate without previously acquired saṁskāras. In nāma-smaraṇam, this presents no special difficulty because the name of Bhagavān is available to us as sound that we have heard or as letters that we have seen. The name does not need to be imagined. Thus,

nāma-smaraṇam = close mental focus on the name of Bhagavān

The trouble is, though, that nāma-smaraṇam requires a pure heart as Śrī Jīva Goswami points out —

nāma-smaraṇam tu śuddhāntaḥkaraṇatām apekṣate — A pure heart is required, however, for remembrance of Bhagavān’s name.

Thus, he recommends nāma-kīrtanam which does not require such purity. Babaji clarifies this topic in his commentary on the Bhakti Sandarbha Anu 276, that nāma-smaraṇam refers to the practice of japa. This process must be done in the broader context of bhakti practices which include kīrtanam.

The dangers of premature smaraṇam of rūpa, līlā or guṇa

The smaraṇam of rūpa, līlā or guṇa is different. A sādhaka does not have experience of Bhagavān’s transcendental form or His līlās or His guṇas. If śāstra describes Śyāmasundara as wearing yellow cloth, the “yellow” is necessarily derived from one’s previous experience of yellow. Thus, while śāstra describes Bhagavān’s rūpa, līlā or guṇas, contemplation on these in the mind inevitably uses already existing saṁskāras to form a mental image of these items. In this sense, imagination is unavoidable in any smaraṇam other than nāma-smaraṇam.

When even nāma-smaraṇam requires a purified heart, rūpa-smaraṇam and līlā-smaraṇam require still greater caution, because one’s own prior saṁskāras enter into that smaraṇam. Babaji has repeatedly emphasized that one should therefore concentrate on nāma. Through sustained nāma-smaraṇa, meaning mānasic japa, the other forms of smaraṇa can eventually manifest in the purified heart.