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

Comments

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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 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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...