Why do scriptures contain provocative descriptions of female beauty as in the Mohini Murti pastime?

Transcript

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question why do scriptures contain provocative descriptions of female beauty for example in the Mohini Murthy pastime the description that is given is quite agitating the scriptures are meant to free us from sexual attraction why do they contain such explicit descriptions answer the scriptures are written they are ultimately revelations of the Lord but at the same time when they are composed when they are spoken or recited whether Sukadeva Swami, Suta Goswami are speaking it or say Valmiki Rishi is speaking it in Ramayana they are also conforming to certain standards expected of speech and for generally these are Kavyatma these are poetic works and it is described in the rules of Kavya Shastra that there has a Kavya in order to be of a high quality it has to have Shringar Rasa in it and that Rasa is based on the male-female attraction so that is done through such descriptions now we have to understand that there are there is a difference between romantic erotic and pornographic so romance basically talks about attraction between male and female erotic talks about the male-female attraction in artistic terms so for example the female form or the male form may be sculpted or described and that is considered a work of art and pornographic means there is nothing artistic over there there is simply the intention is to aggravate people’s lowest basis lusty impulses and to make money out of that or whatever so certainly there is nothing in the scriptures that is in this last category of pornographic now with respect to romantic and erotic there are certain sections which do fall in that category so when the scriptures talk about the description of the female beauty so it comes in various places even Ravana when he sees Sita at that time he describes Sita’s beauty and similarly when the when the Mohini Murthy pastime is going on at that time the Asuras are bewildered by the beauty of Mohini Murthy so now the art does not involve just bringing in some provocative descriptions for provoking people no to bring about the impact of the pastime that means that those Asuras who had earlier fought a war and who are now work strenuously for the sake of getting Amrita how can they just suddenly give up Amrita casually it appears as if they are stupid but actually yes they are stupid but that stupidity is not incomprehensible when we consider how lust can captivate people and while describing how lust can captivate people then to or how lust specifically how lust deluded and befooled the Asuras such as the Asuras in this Amrit Manthan Leela then as a part of the narration it is described the the cause of their bewilderment that is Mohini Murthy so without describing Mohini Murthy’s beauty the impact of that the realisticness of that particular pastime gets minimized so if you see at the end of the pastime what is described you know if somebody wants to become sexually agitated then that person can like like a pig going goes towards stool just go to that and say point says you know scriptures contain this no that’s not the purpose of the scriptures because if you look at the end of the pastime what is said is that those who are divinely disposed they don’t get agitated so we see that the Devatas saw the same beauty of Mohini Murthy but they did not become agitated in that way and similarly we see that Ravana was ready to reject the counsel of everyone and even risk his life to get Sita why? because Sita was so captivatingly beautiful and that description of Sita’s beauty indicates the extent of Ravana’s besottedness how he is captivated and deluded by lust so that is not in one sense so the realisticness of the story why would Ravana do such a thing unless the person to whom he was attracted was extremely beautiful but then if we look at the full narrative of the Ramayana what is described in this kind of attraction it can lead to destruction as it happened to Ravana it can lead to defeat as it happened to Dasaraj and Dasar Mohanlila so for the purpose of Kavyatma Rachana for poetic purposes which require according to the rules of poetry to describe to have Shringara Rasa there is some description like this and secondly that also drives home the realistic nature of the narrative that is described in the past time and that is not intended to provoke us it is intended to communicate the lesson that is given in the past time and that lesson is never to glorify lust, to glamorize lust so as devotees if we find such past times slightly find it agitating such description agitating then we can skip those descriptions and we can move forward Srila Prabhupada told us even about Raslila if we read the description of Krishna’s and Gopi’s past times and we find that agitating that means we are not yet pure enough to be able to focus on what is being conveyed, we just get caught in the details and we are not able to understand what is the purpose that is being conveyed over there so we can be we can recognize our own impurity and develop humility by avoiding those specific details in the past times if we find them agitating that is not a flaw in the scripture that is a flaw in our level of purity scriptures are not intended to provoke us but we can’t expect the scriptures to censor themselves just because conditioned souls are hyper agitated then practically everything so many things in scripture will have to be censored Srila Prabhupada also when he translates and comments on this he just goes about it and he describes he gives a translation about it he doesn’t think of, he doesn’t censor it also in his translations the important point is that there has to be when we feel agitated by certain descriptions in scriptures we at an intellectual level understand the purpose and if we find it disturbing then we do a certain level of self-censorship over there and avoid reading those sections so the scriptures definitely don’t contain anything pornographic why there are certain architectures which seem explicitly pornographic I have explained in another answer on the website I won’t go into that over here they are generally not a part of the Vedic culture at all but this is for a particular purpose Thank you Why do we need mathematical knowledge to go back to Godhead?