The God of yoga: Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda and divine pedagogy addressing divine hiddenness
Abstract
This chapter considers the problem of divine hiddenness as an issue potentially if not
explicitly addressed by the prominent 20th century proponent of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, A. C.
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1896-1977). In a four-part argument, Prabhupāda’s
identifying Kṛṣṇa as the perfect teacher, particularly in his role as Arjuna’s teacher in the
Bhagavad-Gītā, enables consideration of how the divine hiddenness issue is resolvable,
particularly by framing awareness of God’s existence and understanding of divine attributes
as an educational process encapsulated by the word “yoga”. This approach further enables
appreciation of the bhakti-yoga perspective—in its celebration of divine absence—as an
inversion of divine hiddenness as a philosophical problem into a theological solution to the
adept’s acute sense of divine absence, even while perceiving evidence of God’s existence at
every turn.