We all know so many clever jokes about how hell should be preferred “because of the good company” and about how boring should heaven be. Let me take the chance to focus on the Śrīvaiṣṇava heaven, i.e., Vaikuṇṭha, and see whether they apply also to it.
Why exactly is Vaikuṇṭha such a great place? For the mystical poets who first mention it (the Āḻvārs) the main reason seems to be that one is in the same world with one’s beloved One. The 14th c. philosopher Veṅkaṭanātha adds some more theology to it, speaking of the fact that one does not only share sālokya ‘being in the same world [with God]’, but also paramasāmya ‘supreme identity [with God]’. This last state seems to violate exactly the residual dualism necessary in order to allow for love and service to God, and therefore, Veṅkaṭanātha explains that this paramasāmya is not tādātmya (as for the philosophers of Non-Dual Vedānta), but rather sādharmya ‘having the same characteristics’. Still, the person having attained sādharmya is not equal to God in every respect. For instance, they cannot create the world. So, the sādharmya regards other aspects, most notably bhogasāmya ‘equality of enjoyment’. In other words, one enjoys all the blessing experiences of God in Vaikuṇṭha, although one does not have the same level of independent agency (but still a lot of freedom, according to Veṅkaṭanātha, Tattvamuktākalāpa 2.63).
The idea of equal enjoyment with God raises the problem of embodiment, since it seems difficult to imagine enjoyment without a body. Veṅkaṭanātha in the Tattvamuktākalāpa says that in fact the soul can at their own will get a body, which is not determined by karman and is therefore not a vehicle of bondage.
Within the sādharmya there is also the attainment of omniscience, which in fact was the natural condition of the soul but was temporarily blocked by karman. (So, in Vaikuṇṭha you will finally be able to understand perfectly Tamil and Sanskrit and solve any philosophical puzzle you wondered about!)
Why should it not get boring at a certain point? Veṅkaṭanātha does not directly address this question, but his Rahasyatrayasāra seems to point to the idea that one would be busy with a continuous flow of beautiful experiences, all connected with the fact that one is with nice people (the other liberated ones) and especially with the object of one’s love, Viṣṇu.
Does it sound convincing? Or would one still eventually get bored?
Eternity is long… Yes, but one might also speculate that during cosmic dissolutions everything is reabsorbed in Viṣṇu, so that eternity is long but always interrupted. I will get back to this in future posts.
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I was prompted to write this post by a Twitter remark of Helen De Cruz.
Cross-posted, with more Sanskrit and Tamil passages and more historical background, at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
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