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I have already indicated that the Gosvamins' teachings on bhakti and bhaktirasa may have influenced Madhusudana and that, even if this cannot be proved, they at least serve as the best example, in fully elaborated scholastic form, of the kind of Krsnaite devotionalism with which he was interacting in the Bhakti-rasayana They are therefore worthy of consideration here in some detail. The discussion in the remainder of this chapter will focus on the Gosvamins' understanding of bhakti in its metaphysical and, secondarily, social dimensions. The theory of bhaktirasa will be considered independently, as promised, in chapter six. The reader is warned at the outset that the tendency to delight in elaborate analyses, fine distinctions, and often tedious listings of principles, types, stages, and so on, common in Indian scholasticism since the rise of Buddhism, is indulged in to an extreme in the Gosvamins' writings. This occurs, it seems, under the double influence of the exponents of the highly technical Navyanyaya ("Neologic"), on the one hand, and the analytically-minded theoreticians of Sanskrit poetics, on the other, both groups being well represented in Bengal and the North in the sixteenth century. 26 An encounter with a number of such classificatory schemata in our discussion will therefore be unavoidable.