Prema

Prema is love, and in the devotional traditions of India the highest, purest love of God. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition founded by Caitanya in sixteenth-century Bengal made prema the supreme goal of human life, beyond the four traditional aims of duty, wealth, pleasure and even liberation (mokṣa). The devotee, they taught, does not want to be liberated into Brahman; they want to love Krishna forever.

Caitanya’s disciples, above all Rūpa Gosvāmī, developed a subtle theology of love, describing the stages by which devotion ripens into prema and the moods or relationships in which a devotee can love God: as servant, friend, parent, or lover. The love of the cowherd women for Krishna, and above all of Rādhā, was the model of the most intense prema, a love that forgets itself entirely.

Prema has been compared with the Sufi ʿishq and the Christian love mysticism of the Song of Songs. Like them, it insists that love, not knowledge, is the highest relation to God, and that the separation of lover and beloved, with its longing, is itself a form of union.