365bet娱乐

The choice of the word The term bhakti, when translated in this study, is consistently rendered as "devotion." This regularity is to enable the reader to be certain of the underlying Sankrit when encountering the translation. "devotion" is of course not purely arbitrary. Bhakti refers to that exceedingly important aspect of Hindu spirituality which corresponds most closely to what the English-speaking world identifies as devotional religion, that is to say, the spirituality of the "heart" rather than the mind or intellect. Hindu devotionalism is a religion of love of, and surrender to, a gracious and personal supreme deity. As with any other religious term, bhakti has gone through various stages of development and has meant somewhat different things to different people in different times and places. Following Hardy's lead, for example, it is useful to distinguish between a contemplative bhakti, associated with yogic or Vedantic meditative disciplines, and an 20

21 ecstatic bhakti, characteristic of later highly emotive forms of Krsna devotionalism.l Although this distinction is not crucial to the present study, I will have occasion to refer to it as we proceed. The etymology of bhakti has been carefully documented by a number of researchers, most recently Dhavamony and Hardy, both of whose works are generally available.2 There is therefore no need to repeat here the details which they have presented so well. Suffice it to By say that the term stems from the verbal root bhaj, which has the basic meaning: to share, partake, participate. extension it comes to express resorting to, liking, fondness, and especially love in all its various manifestations, ranging from attachment and enjoyment, through secular love, to love of God and even, on occasion, God's love for humanity.3 In the classical Hindu tradition it comes to mean primarily an intense loving concentration of all one's faculties on a God that is adorable, blissful and bliss-giving, all-powerful and yet readily approachable. An experience which is rewarding in itself, often ecstatically so, it serves as a means of focusing one's psychic energies in such a way as to penetrate behind the world of appearances and gain access to true being, which for the devotionalist is the same as bhagavat ("the Blessed Lord") or Isvara ("the Lord"), that is to say, God. Being

22 such, bhakti is for many Hindus--perhaps the majority--a yoga or path to salvation that is sufficient unto itself.4 Indian spiritual discipline has always aimed at direct experience of the divine and understood salvation to be dependent upon such experience. Conceptions of the nature of the transcendent reality, however, and the means to its immediate realization, have varied radically from age to age and from one school of thought to another. We should not expect, therefore, to find a strict developmental continuity between earlier movements of Indian religious history and those which come later, and we should not be surprised when one strand of spirituality recognized as "Hindu" seems vastly different from, even contradictory to, another. "Hinduism," if it is in any way an entity, is a composite of elements from many different sources, sources not all of which can be documented historically or even identified with any precision. The result is that the tradition is in some respects strained, but in many others enriched and even vivified, by a number of internal tensions and polarities. Of these, the opposition between knowledge and devotion, the focus of the present study, is one of the most central.5 It points to two basic ways in which India has thought of the divine. "The religious history of India," writes Hardy, "is marked by the conflict and the interaction of two major trends: to conceive of the absolute

23 either in terms of a (mystical) state of being or as a personal God."6 Used as a device for understanding, this typology can be extremely helpful in sorting out the bewildering variety of the tradition. Within Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta is the preeminent representative of the former tendency, and emotional Krsna devotionalism one of the prime examples of the latter. These particular forms of the two basic types, it should be noted, do not emerge until the second half of the first millenium C.E. While they each obviously have their antecedents in earlier forms of Indian spirituality, a detailed exposition of their roots, development, and interactions--even insofar as these can be known from the limited documentation--is beyond the scope of the present study. 7 I do, however, want to touch in this chapter on certain key moments in early Hindu religious history with a view to sketching a rough picture of the place of bhakti in the tradition and its relation to impersonalistic ways of thought in the time prior to Samkara. I shall naturally focus on the most important scriptures of this period, namely the Rgveda (Rigveda), the Upanisads, and the Bhagavad Gita (Bhagavad Gita), though bhakti itself, as we shall see, does not emerge in the Sanskrit tradition--and the light of history--until the time of the last of these.