The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia.

• Author: Kinsley, David

The book consists of ten articles, originally presented at a conference held at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University in April 1989, on "The Concept of Lila in South Asia." The book also contains an introductory article by Sax that summarizes the eleven contributions, plus a concluding reflection on the subject by John Carman. At least one other paper (by Edward Dimock) presented at the conference and published elsewhere is not included in the volume.

In his introduction, Sax says that a central aim of the conference was to bring together historians of religions, who have "traditionally focused on scripture and theology, that is, on texts," with anthropologists, who focus on the more ahistorical, performative aspects of culture. In line with this approach, the book has two main sections: "The Theology of Play," with five articles, and "Religious Play in North and South India," with another five articles.

Sax also says in his introduction that the book tries to avoid what he terms an "essentialist" approach to the subject (in which an aim would be to define once and for all the idea of lila) in favor of a "Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances," in which an idea or term is thought of as having a "network of partial, but overlapping, similarities" (p. 5).

The individual articles are, for the most part, astute reflections on the theme of lila in the Hindu tradition (the title, perhaps, should have reflected the fact that all the papers deal with Hinduism in India). In the theological section (part I), several papers take up Hein's thesis (in the first article) that lila historically and theologically is strongly associated with Krsna devotion, myth, and cult. Hein makes the point that lila is a central theme in Krsna mythology and that dramas based on these myths (called lilas) are central to Krsnaite cult. That lila is somehow distinctively Krsnaite or Vaisnavite, though, is fairly well disproved by papers by Bettina Baumer (in which she discusses the idea of divine play in Kashmir Saivism) and Malcolm McLean (who discusses lila in Bengali Saktism). Taken together, the papers in part I demonstrate that lila is not a sectarian concept but probably an idea that is intrinsic to Hinduism generally. All of the articles in part I stress the idea that lila is a theological or philosophical concept that seeks to express the free, spontaneous, sometimes unpredictable and incomprehensible nature of the divine and to...