Skip to main content

Bhakti in Gita


The ultimate purpose of the Bhagavad Gita is to teach egolessness to humans. There are three ways of achieving the state of egolessness, according to the Gita. The first is Karma Yoga, which was discussed in the previous post. Today we are going to look at the second way, Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion.

Chapter 12 of the Gita discusses bhakti in particular though chapters 7 to 12 are more or less about bhakti and I’m going to look at that section today.

Bhakti or devotion is another name for love. Bhakti yoga is the process of discovering the divine through love. The love is so intense that the devotee surrenders himself totally to the divine. As a result, the devotee begins to see the divine in everything, in every creature. All that exists is now holy for the devotee. No real devotee can distinguish between people on the basis of caste, creed, language, etc. There is no place for such divisions since everything, everyone, is an extension of the divine.

The Gita speaks about different types of devotion. Not everyone will be capable of the absolute renunciation which is the ideal. Lesser devotees also can attain the divine through prayer and meditation, doing everything with the divine in mind (by performing all actions and functions for Me – 12.10), by being good to others (non-envious, merciful to others, free from egoism, forgiving – 12.13)…

As I was reading chapter 12 of the Gita, it struck me that the teachings are no different from what most other religions are saying. Why can’t then all these religions come together and agree on their core values and principles so that there will be peace and harmony in the world?  

The similarities are not confined to chapter 12. The god of this entire section – chapters 7 to 12 – of the Gita is quite similar to the god of the semitic religions too. This God who demands egoless devotion from the faithful is an entity full of ego and conceit, no different from Yahweh of Judaism and Christianity or Allah of Islam. How different is the God of the Gita who says “I am the beginning, and the middle, and the also the end of all beings” [10.20] from the Biblical God who says “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Revelations 22.13)? The same kind of bombastic claims made by the semitic god are also made by the god of the Gita. Sample this: Of the Adityas, I am Vishnu; of the luminaries, the dazzling sun; I am Marichi of the Maruts; of the stars I am the Moon… Of the senses I am the mind and I am the consciousness in beings. Of the rudras I am Shankara and Kubera of the yakshas and the rakshas; of the Vasus I am the Fire and I am Meru among mountain-peaks…” That goes on and on. Not quite a humble God, right? No different from the Semitic God, that’s right too.

And the devotee is supposed to be egoless as well as aspiring to merge into the Great Ego!

Well, I know that logic has no place in bhakti. But that is one of my chief concerns about building theocracies like Ram Rajya. In today’s Telegraph newspaper, some scientists raise this same concern. In the name of culture, India is promoting pseudoscience in the country, particularly in its schools. The Gita is proposed to be taught in the schools of the country as a guide for ethical and spiritual behaviour. Thank my stars, I chose to stop teaching. Otherwise my ego would clash with that of Gita’s God in the classroom.

Interestingly, this section of the Gita which demands egoless devotion from devotees shows the mightiest ego of God in the form of his cosmic manifestation: Vishwarupam. That cosmic form is a mirror image of the biblical god of the final judgment.

Maybe, instead of teaching the Gita in schools, the students can be asked to make a comparative study of the relevant scriptures of all the major religions in the country. The students should also be encouraged to examine these scriptures critically in the light of the knowledge available to us today. Let the students devote themselves to learning, to widening the horizon of their thinking, their imagination, their hearts too.

The third and last part of the Gita [chapters 13-18] discusses knowledge. I’ll come to that tomorrow.

I repeat what I mentioned in this space yesterday: these are my personal reflections and opinions. As long as thinking is still free (not chained yet) in this country, I hope I can let my mind go beyond the horizons of sacred scriptures with total bhakti to pursuit of truth. 


 

 

Top post on Blogchatter
Labels:

Comments

  1. Liz A.February 29, 2024 at 6:00 AM

    "Why can’t then all these religions come together and agree on their core values and principles so that there will be peace and harmony in the world?" I think the answer to this is that religions are not about their core teachings. Rather, they are a way for men to gain power.

    ReplyDelete
  2. marietta pereiraFebruary 29, 2024 at 10:13 PM

    Today religion is one of biggest divisive forces present in the world.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pooja MahimkarMarch 2, 2024 at 8:08 PM

    Half the things that Gita says are so misrepresented these days, ideally one should read it for themselves and understand

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more