Bhakti Yoga

Vivekananda opens without ceremony. Bhakti-yoga, he says, is a genuine search for God, and it is a search that begins, continues and ends in love. Love is not the reward you get at the finish, and it is not the fuel you burn to get there. It is the road, the walking and the arrival.

He borrows his definition from Narada, the old teacher of the devotional aphorisms: bhakti is intense love to God. Then comes the claim that tells you how seriously he means it. A single moment of the madness of that love, he writes, brings eternal freedom.

Narada adds what such a person looks like from outside. She loves all and hates none, and she is satisfied for ever. Keep that description in mind, because the rest of the chapter tests every kind of devotion against it.

Most spiritual methods are tools. Ritual work (karma) is done to earn a result; the disciplines of yoga are practised to reach a state. You pick up the tool, and once the job is done you put it down.

Narada ranks bhakti above both for exactly this reason. They are aimed at an object, while bhakti "is its own fruition, its own means and its own end." You do not love God in order to get something else. Loving is already the thing you were after.

That is why this love cannot be reduced to any earthly benefit. Think of someone who is kind to a friend only while the friend is useful: whatever that is, you would not call it love. The same test applies here, and it is stricter. As long as worldly desires run the heart, Narada says, this kind of love simply does not arrive.

Why does Narada rank bhakti above ritual work and yoga?

• It is the only path that the scriptures openly approve of
• It earns larger rewards in this life and in the next one
• It is its own means and end, not a tool for results✓Correct answer
• It works faster because emotions are stronger than thoughts

Karma and yoga are aimed at an object beyond themselves; bhakti is its own fruition. The book does call bhakti the easiest and most natural way, but Narada's ranking rests on love needing no further goal, not on speed or rewards.

So far this could sound like a description of any strong feeling. Vivekananda closes that door by asking a blunt question: love, for whom? For the Lord, he answers, and for no one else. Love for any other being, however great, is not bhakti.

His reason is that every created thing, "from Brahma to a clump of grass", is caught in birth and death and change. A heart fixed there is fixed on something that will not hold still.

The commentators make the same point through one Sanskrit word for devotion, anurakti. They read it as attachment that comes after knowing: love that grows once a person has understood something of God's nature and glory. Without that knowing, they say, blind attachment to a wife or to children would count as bhakti too. It does not. Intensity alone does not make devotion.

And yet the book does not ask for a pale, polite love. The best definition of all, Vivekananda says, belongs to Prahlada, the boy-saint he calls the king of devotees, and it is a startling prayer.

Prahlada looks at the ordinary person chasing the pleasures of the senses and notices how deathless that craving is. It never tires. It comes back every morning. And he asks that exactly this kind of love, turned towards God, should never slip away from his heart.

This is the model: not the feeling people have in church on a good day, but the hunger people have for things, with its target changed. The same stubborn pull that keeps a person reaching for what she wants is the raw material. Bhakti does not ask you to stop wanting. It asks you to want the one thing that does not pass away.

In the book's definition, any intense and selfless attachment, such as a parent's love for a child, already counts as bhakti.

False✓Correct answer

The commentators say explicitly that if it did, blind attachment to wife or children would be bhakti. Devotion is love directed to God and grown out of some understanding of His nature; intensity alone is not enough.