Bhakti

The distinctions that do the work

Bhava, and the fact that it is a state rather than a sentiment. The best short study of the Tamil devotional poetry puts the distinction in the title and the argument, describing that literature as articulating theology through lived experience, embodied through emotion and through surrender, and distinguishing it from doctrinal treatises and systematic exposition because it concerns itself with what the divine feels like from inside a life rather than with what is asserted about the divine. The study is careful about the terms: emotion is bhava, and the surrender it works through has its own Sanskrit name, saranagati. If you are looking for the tradition's account of whether feeling is enough, this is where it is, and the answer is no. The state is real and it is necessary and it is not sufficient, which is why the tradition has a great deal of apparatus around it.

The practice itself, which is a map and not a mood. The practice is the sung name, sung repeatedly and in company, and the form it takes in this library's own setting is documented in the cheapest possible material. A devotee in north India in the early twentieth century who could not read, and could not afford much, could buy a booklet of a saint's songs for the price of a meal and sing it with a group, and the scholarship on those booklets is unambiguous that they were a crucial technology for individual and group religious practice rather than a way of circulating literature. That is what a working practice looks like when you stop calling it devotion and ask how it is done. Its second component is repetition, and its third is the litany of dispositions already described, which functions as a self-examination rather than a compliment: the twelfth chapter's list is a set of things to check, in the same way the fifth chapter's list of the balanced person is a set of things to check. Its fourth is a round with a beginning, and a pilgrimage study of a sixteen-century practice in Bengal still drawing fifty thousand people to a single annual circuit is the standing evidence that this is not a small thing. The material's own account of why a practice of this shape matters is at 64.4, and it is worth having in view before reading anything else on this page: the contact treats the ritual, the song of praise, the thanksgiving and the communion as a way of configuring what reaches the trunk of mind, so that disciplined and purified love is generated, and it names such expression a protection for the one who walks the path of service. That is a doctrinal overlap with what this page describes, and it is the closest the material comes to the practice bhakti holds to be the path itself.

Saguna and nirguna, devotion with attributes and devotion without them, and the single most consequential distinction in the whole body of work. A study of the Dadu order in the Mughal-Rajput period is explicit that the tradition it describes is centred on devotion to the ineffable divine, and it names the term. The devotee of attributes addresses a deity with a face, a form, a name and a story, and the devotion is addressed to that. The devotee without attributes addresses what cannot be addressed that way, and the formlessness is not a refusal of imagery so much as a discipline about what may honestly be said. Both are devotion. They are not the same devotion, and a great deal of the apparent contradiction in this literature dissolves once you notice that two poets are not describing the same object.

Surrender as a category distinct from effort, which is the distinction a Western reader most often lacks. The Tamil study names saranagati alongside emotion as the two poles of the lived theology, and surrender there is not a weaker version of trying; it is a different act. The Bhagavad Gita gives the same structure with unusual candour, and the twelfth chapter's answer to a devotee whose intention falters is a graded offer rather than a rebuke: worship me steadily if you can, and if you cannot, give me lower service; and if your heart fails even at that, work for me, toil in works pleasing to me; and if that faint heart fails too, bring me your failure. Three levels, each one a real path, and the one offered is whichever the reader can actually sustain. No other chapter in the book builds a ladder like that, and the reason it appears here rather than elsewhere is the subject of the chapter.

And then the part of the twelfth chapter that is not devotion at all, which is the part that gets skipped. The list that follows is not a list of feelings. It is a list of dispositions, and it is worth reading as a list because it is the tradition stating what devotion is made of: one who hates nothing that lives, living himself benignly, compassionate, exempt from arrogance, exempt from love of self, unchangeable by good or ill, patient, contented, firm, master of himself, true to his word, seeking the divine with heart and soul. And then the criterion, repeated: that man I love. The litany of judgements in between is a list of what a devotee is not attached to, and the attachment to the divine is what stands in place of the attachments, not as one more item on the list. A devotee who was still attached to his own preferences has not started. This is a demanding thing to ask and it is the tradition's actual claim.

What devotion is addressed to, in the Gita, is a person. Read the third and twelfth chapters together and the object is a charioteer who speaks, argues, refuses to be worshipped, and tells his listener exactly which of his instructions he is disobeying. The action chapter's central instruction is to do the work offered to him, and the devotion chapter's is to worship him. That is not a metaphor the text is too embarrassed to make. It is a claim that the divine is available as a particular person with particular preferences, and a reader who wants a devotion addressed to the ineffable has to go to the nirguna poets, who are a different tradition making a different choice.

Finally, and this is the distinction the twentieth century made badly, the social shape of the movement. The received account has been that the saints of devotion came from the lower castes and voiced a subaltern protest, and a study of the Dadu order argues that this needs rethinking: the example it examines demonstrates that the social base of the saints was broad and that the interrelation of devotional practice with the courtly order was strong, with land grants from the kingdom corroborating the hagiographical accounts, and networks running through Rajput courts of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Devotion crossed caste lines. It also ran through palaces. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing and most popular accounts keep one.

Where it meets this material

The vocabulary is shared and the sharing is genuine. At 4.20 the Law of One is stated as everything being one with no polarity and no right or wrong and no disharmony but only identity, and the one is named as love and light and light and love. At 27.12 love is named as the focus, the choice of attack, and the type of energy that causes intelligent energy to be formed from the potential of intelligent infinity. A tradition that makes love the first principle and another that makes love the mechanism of creation are not saying the same sentence, and a reader should be suspicious of any comparison that claims they are. They are, however, both placing love at the foundation, and this is the tradition among the Indian ones where that is least surprising.

The heart is the place, and this is a structural correspondence with a real mechanism in it. At 15.9 the whole picture is given: love creating light becomes love and light and streams into the planetary sphere according to a web of points or nexi of entrance, the individual is like the planet in being a web of electromagnetic energy fields with those points, and in a balanced individual each energy centre is balanced and functioning brightly and fully. At 15.12 the centre of heart, the green ray, is named as the centre from which third-density beings may springboard towards infinite intelligence. Put the two together and you have a tradition in which love is a located capacity with an anatomy and a function, which the devotional poets do not have and which the twelve-Gita devotees certainly do not have. This is the point at which bhakti and the material stop being alike, and it is worth marking exactly, because it is also the point at which the material becomes legible to a reader who has spent a life in one of the Indian traditions and has never met this vocabulary anywhere else.

The service material is the third correspondence and the least expected. At 7.15 those who seek intelligent infinity through service to self create the same amount of power but weaken and eventually disintegrate, because the concept of separation is implicit in manifestations of service to self which involve power over others, and the answer is that service to others results in service to self, thus preserving and further harmonising the distortions of those pursuing it. That is a mechanism, not a sentiment: the thing that damages an effort is a specific structural feature of it. It is also, in its practical form, a defence of the devotional life against the charge of passivity, which is the charge the tradition has been absorbing since its beginning and which the field records as a live accusation rather than a solved one.

And the practice, at 5.2, is almost a restatement of the twelfth chapter's list in different words. The material asks for the examination of the self, and specifies what that means: the polarity of your dimension must be internalised, and where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience, and each thought a being has has in its turn an antithesis. That is a disciplines-of-contradiction method, and its structure is exactly the structure of the Gita's litany, which proceeds by naming a disposition and then the opposites it must survive unchanged. Two traditions, one continent, and a shared conviction that the work is to hold a pair of opposites in mind at once rather than to acquire a virtue and be finished with its shadow. The material adds a rule that the Gita does not state in this form, and the rule is that you may not pick and choose among the attributes, since that is how a being builds the roles that cause blockages and confusions in the already distorted mind complex. That is the tradition's warning against a spiritual shopping basket, and the material states it as mechanics.

One further point of contact, and it is a small one worth having. At 15.13 the material is asked whether exercises may be published and answers that it is important to allow each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to instruct, on the stated ground that otherwise the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. A devotional tradition that has spent five hundred years producing devotional manuals and hymnals has generally not drawn that conclusion, and the refusal is worth reading as a limit rather than as a courtesy.

One boundary to hold, because these two pages will be read one after the other and the two paths blur. Bhakti and the yoga of action are not two words for one discipline, and the Gita is the proof: it gives them separate chapters, it gives them separate objects, and it ranks them, with devotion highest and the others offered to the person whose intention wavers. The difference that does the work is the fate of the result. Action without attachment to the fruit is indifferent to how the action came out. Devotion is not indifferent to anything, because it is not primarily an action at all. Read the two together and a reader will conclude that the material is saying you should do the work and feel nothing about the outcome, which is a different teaching from either and is a mistake this page exists to prevent.

Where the material parts company, and where this library takes a side

The conflict is one sentence long and it is real. Bhakti holds that love is the means and is sufficient to the path's end. The material holds that love is an achievement, that it must be earned at a specific centre, and that it is then insufficient on its own. The passage is 85.16 and it is the most important thing in the comparison. It may take many, many essays into compassion, the material says, before true universal love is the product of the attempted opening and crystallisation of the green-ray springboard centre, and a student may therefore discover many other components in what had seemed to be all-embracing love, each of which may be balanced and accepted as part of the self. And then the sentence that settles the disagreement: love and wisdom are not opposites but faces of the same coin, and the balancing of a manifested love is not automatically a movement from compassion to wisdom.

Read that as an argument and it is a very good one, and it is better than the devotional position it is answering. A tradition that says love is the path has to answer a question it mostly avoids, which is how a reader tells the difference between love and the wish to be loved, between devotion and the acquisition of a flattering relationship with the universe, between a surrender that reorganises a person and one that confirms them. The answer, when it comes, is always some form of the twelfth chapter's litany, which is to say the answer is a list of disciplines. But the tradition states the list as the price of entry, and the material states the list as the thing that is being produced. One of them has already paid; the other is still working. The Gita's own graded offer, in which worship is the highest and the other two are what you fall back to, is a version of the devotional position, and it is a version this library holds to be the more graceful, because it does not claim the devotee has arrived.

The material's answer is better still, and this library thinks so for a reason it is willing to state. The devotional position, taken to its conclusion, has a problem at its far end that it is well known to share with the non-dual one it is usually contrasted against, and this library has already argued the case on its own advaita page: put the divine so far beyond affection and affection is left with nothing to attach to, and a person who concludes that they are already free has not started on the only thing that would help. Devotion to the ineffable has exactly this problem in an acute form, since the ineffable has no qualities to be devoted to, and the devotion becomes a relationship to the devotion. The nirguna poets knew this and their whole discipline is about it. But knowing it is not the same as solving it, and the material's blend at 33.20, where the compassion learned in fourth density is taken into wisdom in the fifth and wisdom is brought back into an understanding of compassion in the sixth, is a construction rather than an evasion, because it says what each stage adds and refuses to say that either has finished. That is more than the devotional tradition can say about its own far end, and this library says so because it is true rather than because it is symmetrical.

And the cost of the material's position, which is a real cost and which this library will not pretend is not there. The material's account makes love a function of a centre, a location in an energetic body, and it makes wisdom a balance to be achieved rather than a quality to be recognised. This is the same developmental framing that this library has already argued about twice, on the pages for developmental psychology and for subtle-energy, and readers who have followed those arguments will know where the pressure points are. The one that matters here is that a developmental account can say very little about a person whose love is real and whose capacities have not moved. The material has no vocabulary for this and no interest in it, because its question is what an energy complex is doing and not what a person is experiencing. That is a genuine limit and it is the cost of the better argument.

So this library takes a side, and names the judgment as its own: on the question of whether love is enough, the material is right and the devotional position is wrong, and the reason is that devotion is a method and the material is describing an achievement, and a method is not obliged to tell you when it has finished. Equally, and this is the half of the judgment that costs the library something, the material loses something real by refusing the devotional idiom at all. A seeker brought up singing the name has a way of knowing that is not sentiment, and the material's account cannot say what that way of knowing is because it has no word for it. This library holds that the two accounts are describing the same capacity and disagreeing about its status, and that the tradition which has spent a thousand years on the status has the better literature and the worse argument, and the account with the better argument and no literature at all.

What it is not

It is not sentimentality, and the Sanskrit is on the tradition's side. Bhava is a serious term for a condition that the devotional poetry treats as requiring everything, and the Tamil study's whole argument is that this poetry is theology rather than mood, formed as it is around bhava and surrender rather than around doctrinal proposition. A reader who has met Indian devotion only as a heightened feeling has met a nineteenth-century European category and not the tradition.

It is not one text, and the Ram case above is the demonstration. A text and a sect can run for three centuries on different theologies, and the moment they are identified, a great deal of the tradition's internal argument disappears into a harmony that never existed. The same applies to the Gita itself: it is a scripture within the tradition, a text that the tradition has not always read the same way, and the twelve-Gita devotees are a lineage within bhakti rather than bhakti entire.

It is not automatically egalitarian, and the received account will mislead a reader here in a direction that sounds virtuous. The Dadu evidence is that the saints' base was broad and their relations with courts were strong and their hagiographies are corroborated by land grants. Devotion crossed caste lines. It also sat near power and was financed by it. Holding both is not a demotion of the tradition; it is the difference between a history and a moral story about a history.

It is not politically innocent, and the Ram tradition is the reason. The same study that separates text from sect is explicit that the cult of Ram is the lynchpin of Hindu nationalist politics, that it is central to modern Hindu practice, and that text and sect were united under the patronage of a rising political order at the end of the eighteenth century. This is not a reason to distrust the poetry. It is a reason to notice that a devotional form can be made to carry a politics it was not composed for, which is a fact about how tradition is used and not about what the tradition says.

And it is not a practice this library teaches. This is a framework page and the teaching in it is a map, and the map is the tradition's own rather than this site's, because this library's own practice is the material's four disciplines and the charter's refusal of counselling. What a reader can take from this page is the ability to use the map: to know that devotion and action and knowledge are three disciplines the tradition separated, that devotion to the formless and devotion to the personal are different projects, that a text and its sect can diverge for centuries, and that the one question worth asking of any of it is the one the twelfth chapter asks, which is not whether the feeling is strong but whether anything has been let go.