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WorkSwami Vivekananda

Bhakti-Yoga

A monk of non-dual Vedanta, once a scorner of image worship, makes the case for loving a personal God.

by Swami Vivekananda97 passages held

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Original title
Bhakti Yoga
First published
(aged 33)
Original language
English

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Overview

As a young man in Calcutta, Narendranath Datta belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform society that condemned the worship of images, and he at first dismissed the ecstasies of Ramakrishna, a devotee of the goddess Kali and in time his teacher. Later, as Swami Vivekananda, a monk of non-dual Vedanta, the school that holds the self and the absolute to be one, he wrote this defence of devotion. Bhakti, he argues, is intense love of God, and it leads to the same freedom as knowledge, by a road open to people who are not philosophers. To make the case he reads side by side two commentators who disagreed: Shankara, the great teacher of non-dualism, and Ramanuja, who kept a real distinction between the soul and God, and he finds each of them making room for love. He defends symbols and images, the sacred syllable Om and the chosen form of God, as supports for a mind that cannot yet hold the infinite, while warning that devotion at this level breeds the fanatics of every religion, Hindu, Muslim and Christian. The book's second half turns to supreme devotion, a love that bargains for nothing, fears nothing and allows no rival. Vivekananda worked the material out in classes in New York in the winter of 1895–96; on 3 February 1896 he lectured there under the title of one of its chapters, on the naturalness of bhakti and its central secret. In March, shortly before sailing for England, he wrote to Alasinga Perumal — the Madras schoolteacher who had launched the journal Brahmavadin in 1895 — that the bhakti lectures ought to be published as a book, with a few hundred copies sent on to New York.

Key concepts

What does bhakti actually mean?

Bhakti is intense love of God, and bhakti yoga is the search for God that begins, continues and ends in that love. Vivekananda takes the definition from Narada's aphorisms on devotion: whoever has it loves all and hates none. He sets it beside knowledge and the training of the mind as a road to the same freedom, and the easiest one, because loving comes naturally to people who are not philosophers.

What is the difference between preparatory and supreme devotion?

Preparatory devotion needs concrete helps: names repeated, rituals, symbols, images, a teacher. Supreme devotion, para-bhakti, has outgrown them. Vivekananda says that in it forms vanish, books are superseded, and temples, churches and sects fall away of themselves. The way from one to the other is renunciation, and the book's second half is about that crossing. Only at the lower stage, he adds, does devotion turn fanatical.

What is a pratika?

A pratika is something that is not God but is worshipped as a stand-in for God, such as the mind, the sky or the sun. Ramanuja defines it as joining the mind in devotion to what is not Brahman, taking it to be Brahman. A pratima is an image in the narrower sense. Vivekananda's test for both is whether they are used as a help toward God or worshipped for their own sake.

Why does Om count as the best symbol of God?

Because, Vivekananda argues, it is the one word that covers the whole ground. Behind the visible universe he places the eternal Word, the power through which the Lord creates, and Om is its only possible symbol, the mother of all names and forms. Other sacred words express particular views of God, one quality or another; Om stands for God undivided, and so for all of them at once.

What are the forms in which love of God can be felt?

Vivekananda lists a ladder of human relationships turned toward God: the calm devotee's peace, the servant's loyalty, friendship, the love of a parent for a child, and the sweet love between lovers. Each removes some distance. Loving God as one's child, for instance, strips away the idea of power and with it awe. The highest, between lovers, borrows the strongest passion people know.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Love That Asks for Nothing

Most religion bargains with God, offering worship for safety or reward. Whether a love can exist that wants nothing back, not even freedom, is the wager of the book's second half.

Vivekananda draws love as a triangle: it never bargains, it never fears, and it allows no rival. Worship from fear of punishment sits on the lowest rung; above it the devotee may love God as master, as friend, as child and finally as beloved, borrowing the strongest human passion for the highest object. Renunciation then comes without a struggle, because a greater attraction has displaced the lesser ones. At the summit the lover asks to be born again and again, so long as God stays his love.

  • supreme devotion
  • divine love
  • love
  • devotion
  • bhakti
  • selflessness
  • universal love
  • renunciation
  • desire

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Props for a Mind Not Yet Ready

Images, symbols and sacred sounds help a person who cannot yet hold the infinite. The danger is that the same supports make a worshipper narrow, and the book weighs the help against the harm.

For the preparatory stage of devotion Vivekananda defends what the image-scorners of his day despised: symbols, images, the syllable Om, rules about food, a chosen form of God held as one's own. Even religions that reject images, he notes, find substitutes, as Muslims honour the graves of their saints. But devotion at this stage also breeds the fanatics of every faith, loyal to their own ideal the way a dog guards a house. The remedy is the chosen ideal held with width as well as intensity, until the forms fall away of themselves.

  • worship
  • ritual
  • religious symbols
  • language
  • meditation
  • purity
  • religious pluralism
  • spiritual practice

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A God Who Can Be Loved

A monk who holds the self and the absolute to be one still needs a God to whom love can be addressed. How the personal God and the human teacher fit into a non-dual world is what this part of the book works out.

Vivekananda calls the personal God, Ishvara, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind, and reads Shankara and Ramanuja side by side to show that both commentators made room for love. Knowledge and love, he says, are a bird's two wings, and in the end they meet. Love also needs a carrier: a teacher who knows the spirit of the scriptures, lives without sin and teaches for no money or fame, because love is the only channel through which spiritual force passes.

  • divine sovereignty
  • brahman
  • ramanuja
  • theology
  • knowledge
  • liberation
  • guru
  • teacher-student relationship
  • spiritual teaching
  • religious experience

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Within this work

passages held
97
distinct concepts
197
by passages held, corpus-wide
#505

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “devotion” and “liberation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
devotionliberation8
bhaktidivine love6
devotionknowledge6
devotionspiritual practice5
devotiondivine love4
knowledgespiritual practice4
devotionrenunciation3
divine loveliberation3
divine loveworship3
knowledgeliberation3
bhaktiliberation2
bhaktirenunciation2
devotionworship2
liberationspiritual practice2
bhaktidevotion1
bhaktiworship1
divine loveknowledge1
divine loverenunciation1
divine lovespiritual practice1
knowledgerenunciation1
liberationrenunciation1
liberationworship1
renunciationspiritual practice1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 Bhakti-Yoga (Bhakti Yoga) you are here EN
  2. 1896 Karma-Yoga (Karma Yoga)

    Printed within weeks of the New York classes it records, and the earliest of Vivekananda's yoga books to appear; the later ones turned to devotion, to knowledge and to the training of the mind.

     EN
  3. 1896 Raja Yoga

    Among Vivekananda's four yoga books, this is the one built on a classical text: class lectures on the discipline of the mind, followed by his own translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

     EN
  4. 1899 Jnana-Yoga (Jnana Yoga)

    Two lecture courses gathered under one title: the London talks of 1896 on maya and practical Vedanta, and seven New York lectures on Sankhya and Vedanta printed only after his death.

     EN
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