GEMS FROM THE
VISION AND PRACTICE
BEACH 10: HINDUISM FOR THE
NEXT GENERATION
WAVE 4: ESSENTIALS OF BHAKTI:
AN ADVANCED LESSON FOR THE
FAITHFUL
Bhakti means intense devotion. The concept of
devotion is more or less the same in all religions. But in Hinduism there are
certain extra subtleties which make the concept comparatively more complicated.
These are four in number: viz.,
1. the One Reality
versus many ‘Gods’ of worship;
2. deity worship through ‘ idols’;
3. the freedom to
choose one’s own ‘favourite deity’, at the same time
not being exclusive; and 4. the interactive ramifications of God’s grace, fate and free
will.
An
integrated but brief presentation of all these will be attempted here in the
context of bhakti.
Morality
and ethics are only the first steps in the religious life of a man. Man’s
mental anguish very often takes him to situations wherein he needs the solace
of a more superior power than himself. In his first stages of such
introspection he ends up discovering the superiority of Nature over him. This
makes him analyse the powers of Nature and in doing
so for a length of time he discovers that however deep he penetrates into the
complexity of nature there is something deeper than what he knows to be true. This is actually the progress of the
scientific spirit. But man actually took several centuries of his civilised life to arrive at this stage. Long before he
arrived at this stage he had already postulated a Supreme Cosmic Power as the
motive force behind every expression of Nature. In the early history of Man’s
ascent this perhaps gave him the motivation to invent the concept of God.
But
the concept of God in Hinduism is more complex than this naive conception of a
Cosmic Power. The Upanishads take pains to explain how
every physical expression amenable to sense perception is nothing but an
expression of the divine. Since everything is God, you should not delineate it
by one name and form and circumscribe it by the limitations of worldly
expressions and imagery. In fact, anything that has name and form is a creation
of the human mind. So we have to transcend the concept of name and form to get
to the true nature of God. The Upanishads declare that there is a substratum of
existence behind all the manifest presentations to the mind. This is just like
gold being the substratum of existence in all gold ornaments, plastic being the
substratum of existence in all articles of plastic or the movie screen being
the base of all the presentations on the screen.
This
substratum – named brahman, by the Upanishads – permeates everything in
the world. It is the common content of all that has a name and/or form. For
that very reason, it has no name or form for itself. It is spoken of as ‘THAT’
in the neuter gender by the Upanishads. This is the unique Godhead of
Hinduism. There is no other. There is no
second. It is the source of all energy, of all power, either in nature or in
living beings. But the difficulty with
this concept is this: there is no subject-object relationship in this context, brahman cannot be the object of cognition, since brahman has no
second. In fact nothing can be predicated about brahman
without delimiting the infiniteness of brahman. So Hindu Vedanta, with a mathematical precision,
has postulated that the moment one wants to think of brahman as
an object of thought, one has already delimited brahman and is only thinking of Iswara, otherwise called saguna brahman, brahman with
attributes.
Iswara is the all-powerful Almighty which is the subject of all religions.
It has all the supreme qualities of brahman – if brahman could be
said to have qualities or attributes – and, in addition, it could be the object
of our thought process. By its very nature all names and forms suit it. The
Vedic logic here is really very subtle, interesting and should be enjoyed as
such. It has no name or form and therefore it could be called by any name and
could be given any form. The concept of idol worship is the practical
implementation of this unique logic of Hinduism. Hinduism has the daring to carry the
rationale of this to its logical conclusion and hence it is we find a plethora
of ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ in the Hindu framework.
Since no single name
or form of God can fully describe the infinite grandeur that is God, since each
name or form is only a symbol that points to something that is beyond this
visual representation and since each is only a representation of some aspect or manifestation of the supreme
Divinity, it is the entire array of all names and forms of God that will
approximate to the fullness that is God.
In
spite of all this, knowing the weakness of Man, Hinduism recommends that each
person may choose his deity of worship. This is called the principle
of ishTa-devatA,
which is another distinguishing feature of Hinduism. If the grossest
manifestation is the only thing that suits your taste, or mood, or
psychological make-up or intellect, you are free to worship God in that
form. Even the same person may worship
an idol at one time and at another time may meditate and attempt to merge in
the transcendental para brahman which
is the basic divine chip that we are all made of, if we care to look within
ourselves. One may choose an ishTa devatA as per one’s taste and worship that as
the Ultimate.
It
is this train of thought in the Hindu mind which lives with different purANas extolling different deities. The Siva Purana may say that Siva is the greatest God, every other
God is subordinate to it and the Vishnu purANa may
say the same thing of Vishnu. There is no contradiction meant, implied or
slurred over. This is the remarkable beauty of
Hinduism. When they say that all Gods are nothing but names and forms of the
same Ultimate para brahman,
they mean it. If we understand it the wrong way, we are
the ones to blame, not Hinduism. This is why when we explain Hinduism to a
non-Hindu or to a novice we have to start from the philosophical end. Naive
explanations of Hinduism without touching the basic philosophy inherent in
everything in Hinduism not only do not give the truth but they misrepresent the
religion. These naive explanations would crumble even in the understanding of
the Ramayana serial on the TV network, because it is shown (rightly) there that
on one side Rama
worships Siva and on the other side Siva worships Rama.
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