The Yoga of Devotion: The Spiritual Practice of Bhakti Yoga

As Swami Sivananda explains in Easy Steps to Yoga, the term Bhakti comes from the root ‘Bhaj’, which means ‘to be attached to God’. The bhakta or devotee strives to attain pure, selfless love for the Divine without any selfish expectations.

What is Bhakti?

Bhakti Yoga is not sentimentalism, but a systematic process of purifying one’s emotions and deepening one’s capacity for love. It requires thorough discipline and training of one’s will and mind.

While it regards love as natural to all human beings, Bhakti seeks to widen and purify this love. Pure love is regarded as the complete opposite of attachment. Attachment means that love has become stationary, narrow and self-centered. Bhakti Yoga means developing a constant flow of love towards the Divine. The Divine is not only regarded as an object of love, but as love itself. The ultimate aim of Bhakti is to merge oneself in the ocean of Divine love through the process of devotion.

Types of Bhakti

Devotion can be classified in various ways. One way is to differentiate between Sakamya and Nishkamya Bhakti. Sakamya Bhakti is devotion motivated by a personal desire, such as financial and professional success, health, relationships, progeny and so on. All these are seen as valid reasons for devotion and devotion can be seen as a means for fulfilling one’s desires. However, such self-centered devotion will not bring the supreme satisfaction of spiritual liberation and immortality, moksha. This can only be realized through the selfless devotion called Nishkamya Bhakti.

The Bhagavad Gita (7,16) mentions four kinds of devotees: the distressed, the ones desiring wealth, the ones thirsting for knowledge and the wise. The distressed seek freedom from suffering and disease from God. Those desiring wealth pray for the joys and comforts of wealth. Those thirsty for knowledge address the Divine as the supreme teacher. They see God as the source of all knowledge, art and wisdom and desire knowledge, proficiency and wisdom. The highest type of devotee, the jnani, doesn’t seek anything from God but lives and acts from the realization that God is all and all is God. The wise desire nothing but to realize and become one with the Divine itself. They love God for her own sake.

Another classification of Bhakti is Apara-Bhakti and Para-Bhakti. Apara-Bhakti is the beginner-stage in Bhakti Yoga. In this stage, the devotee practices devotion through rituals and ceremonies as well as idol worship. These exterior things are necessary at first to develop concentration. In order to visualize the Divine, the otherwise formless and limitless is limited to a particular name and form and worshipped through an idol or image. Devotees on this stage often tend to be sectarian and dogmatic, claiming their chosen form of God as the highest and most powerful. Para Bhakti is the higher devotion which sees the Divine in all of creation and goes beyond the narrow boundaries of name and form, ultimately realizing the Divine as Cosmic Consciousness.

Loving God as a Person

Since love requires another to be loved, Bhakti Yoga is one of the more dualistic paths, which addresses the otherwise formless Divine through its many different forms, such as Rama, Krishna, Shiva, Devi or others. In Bhakti, the Divine Absolute is personalized and addressed as the supreme Person. Bhakti Yoga is therefore not very different from other devotional paths such as Christian mysticism or Islamic Sufism. And interestingly, the bhakti marga, the path of devotion, gained prominence in India in the early middle ages, around the same time when Christian mysticism was at its height in Europe.

Important works of Bhakti literature are the ’Narada Bhakti Sutra’ and the ’Bhagavad Gita’.

Feb 3, 2009 2:23 PM

bv avadhut :

Excuse me, but there is no mention anywhere in any of the five hundred and fifty-five sootras of the Vedaanta Sootra that 'brahman' is formless, impersonal and non-qualitative. If 'brahman' is not in possession of qualities, then from where comes His quality of mercy? If 'brahman' is not in possession of a personality, then how is it that one can have a relationship with Him? And if 'brahman' is not in possession of form, then why is it that so many saintly souls have written prasises to the dust of His lotus feet?
Shankarachaya, the chief promulgator of 'mayavada' has cleverly interpolated the gnostic and anti-theistic concepts of Buddhism and expertly superimposed them in his commentary to the Vedanta-sootra.
The Supreme Lord empowered Mahaadeva Shiva to descend to Earth as his deputed servitor and take birth in a Brahmin family. In this incarnation he developed a philosophy the was logically acceptable by those opposed to pure devotion (bhakti)to the point where they would accept the Supreme Lord as impersonal - in other words possessing no form, no personality and no qualities. This is revealed vividly by Shiva to Parvati, his wife in the Padma Purana:
vedaarthavan mahaashaastram maayaavaadam avaidikam mayaa eva kathitam devi jagataam naashakaranaat
"The great scriptural theory of impersonalism is non-Vedic, though taking its meaning from the Vedas, O Goddess and it is I who has spoken this philosophy which will be the root of the destruction of the worlds."
Therefore bhakti without the concept of a devotee, the act of devotion and especially the Supreme Lord, who reciprocates the love of such a devotee is meaningless. Real bhakti begins on the liberated platform where these three aspects are never transcended. They form the basis of eternal transcendental love. The Narada Bhakti Sutras and the Sandilya Sutras all confirm this fact.

Most of the educated classes of people like professors, teachers, academics, and 'panditas' lean towards monism and impersonalism for the simple reason that modern education transmits a doubt-based method of inquiry rather than a faith-based one. But the precepts of monism are illogical, and lack support from any revealed scriptures. Hence, no one should feel at a loss, that he would become like rudderless drift-wood on the ocean of material existence if he were to renounce he pursuit of monism. Monism and Mayavada are one and the same and their ship is permanently moored in the mire of materialism.