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Tradition has it that the Bhagavadgita contains the distilled essence of all the Vedas and, especially, of the Upanisads.92 Modern scholarship, while recognizing that the work owes much to those earlier scriptures, sees it in addition as a wide-ranging response to certain pressing religious problems of its time, including the need for a more universally appealing, personal conception of the ultimate. It attempts to bring together and coordinate a number of diverse strands of spirituality, both Vedic and non-Vedic, that were present in the contemporary (ca. 200 B.C.E.) religious milieu.93 The degree of success it achieved in this regard is impressive. The reader who turns from the Upanisads to the Gita will be struck especially by a new theme not encountered in

44 the older philosophical texts, one which emerges strongly in the midst of the Gita's multi-leveled orchestration of religious ideas. This new note is the doctrine of salvation through bhakti, understood explicitly as loving devotion to a personal God. The teacher, first of all, is no longer a seer or a sage, but God himself. He is Krsna, the supreme personal deity of the extra-Vedic Bhagavata school, who is identified in the Bhagavad Gita as equivalent or even superior to the Upanisadic Brahman. Although the theme of bhakti emerges only gradually in the course of the narrative, from the end of the sixth chapter it begins to dominate. In the eleventh and twelfth chapters it reaches a climax in Krsna's grand theophany and in the subsequent recognition of bhakti as the highest path to salvation. Then, in the summary of the teachings at the end of eighteenth chapter, the devotional mood attains a final crescendo: "Having become Brahman, " .94 he attains supreme bhakti to me"; "Through devotion, he knows Me truly, how great and who I am"; 95 and "Having resorted to Me, by My grace he attains the eternal, imperishable abode."96 At 18.66, Krsna gives his "supreme word," the "most secret" of all: "Take refuge in Me alone, for I will deliver thee from all sin. sin."97 We thus no longer have to search for traces of bhakti; it is in the Gita impossible to miss. The noun itself appears fourteen times in the text, the verb form

45 98 nineteen times. Though, being unsystematic like the Upanisads, the Gita does not define bhakti explicitly, we can easily gather from usage and context how it understands the term. Bhakti is a taking refuge in God with one's "whole being."99 It is an all-encompassing attachment to bhagavat, a constant focusing of the mind on God 100 that affects the devotee's entire life; it is worship that is at the same time both loving and constantly disciplined. 101 Accordingly, Krsna teaches his disciple: Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in worship, whatever you give in charity, whatever austerity you perform, do it as an offering to Me. 102 Have your mind absorbed in Me, be My devotee, worship Me, bow down to Me, have Me as your highest goal. Having thus disciplined yourself, you will surely come to Me. 103 To be a devotee (bhakta), one must perform all actions for God 104 and take refuge in God. 105 One must have one's mind 106 and heart constantly fixed on God, one's life absorbed in God, 107 one's inmost Self lost in God. 108 In short, God must be one's all in all.109 Such a centering of all of one's faculties on the Lord is bhakti, which is not authentic unless it is one-pointed and unwavering. 110 According to Krsna, the devotee's mind must go to no other object.111 Despite this emphasis on bhakti, however, the Gita does not use the extensive vocabulary of devotion common to the later Vaisnava schools. Such synonyms for ecstatic

46 spiritual love as preman, anuraga, sneha, pranaya, and so 112 do not on, used by the medieval devotional writers, appear in the text. The only precise word for love employed, other than bhakti itself, is priti. This occurs once, in an interesting context, at 10.10: "To them who are constantly disciplined and worship Me with love, I give the discipline of the intelligence by which they come to Me." Note here the association of love with discipline (yoga), and intellection (buddhi) 113 The bhakti of the Gita is clearly not the ecstatic and outwardly emotional love of the later Vaisnava sects. Rather, it is a devotion associated with yogic concentration and knowledge. Indeed, as Zaehner has pointed out, the Gita's teaching on bhakti presupposes that the aspirant is yukta, i.e., already disciplined in 114 yoga. "With his mind tranquil," says Krsna, "free from fear, established in his vow of celibacy, his mind controlled and focused on Me, let him sit disciplined (yukta), intent on Me."115 This is the contemplative bhakti which we have indicated is distinguishable from later ecstatic forms of devotion. Hardy identifies it as a type common to the Bhagavad Gita, the Visnu Purana, and the Vedantic theism of Ramanuja. 116 It is, to use the terminology of the Bengal Vaisnava school somewhat anachronistically, the "quiescent devotion" (santabhakti) of the meditative and selfcontrolled yogin or jnanin. 117

47 This observation is confirmed by Bhagavad Gita 7.16-19, a passage that has been important to commentators of all persuasions. It is particularly interesting for the present study of the relation between Advaita and bhakti because it asserts that the jnanin, the person who possesses knowledge, is the highest type of devotee. As repeated reference to this passage will be made in the pages that follow, it is worth reproducing here in full: Persons of good deeds who worship Me are of four kinds, 鈼� Arjuna, the afflicted, the seeker of wealth, the seeker of knowledge, and the possessor of knowledge, O Best of the Bharatas. Of these, the possessor of knowledge, constantly disciplined, whose devotion is one-pointed, is the best, for I am exceedingly dear to him and he is dear to Me. Noble indeed are all these but the possessor of knowledge I regard as My very Self, for he, with disciplined Self, has resorted to Me as his highest goal. At the end of many births, the possessor of knowledge resorts to Me, thinking "Vasudeva [Krsna] is all that is." Such a great soul is exceedingly difficult to find. 118 The emphasis on knowledge here as an apparent preliminary to love of Krsna certainly points to the contemplative nature of the Bhagavad Gita's bhakti. For Advaitins, the term jnanin means one who has achieved the realization of identity with Brahman. Hence, ignoring the possibility of a final mingling of love and knowledge that these verses suggest, they are able to take them as confirmation of the superiority of the path of knowledge.119

48 Other passages in the Gita also provide support for the non-dualist position. At 5.16-17, for example, a distinctly impersonalist tone is struck: But for those whose ignorance has been destroyed by knowledge, knowledge illumines That Supreme (tat param) like the sun. Thinking of That, their being absorbed in That, making that their end and highest goal, they attain a state from which there is no return, their sins destroyed by 120 knowledge. Bhagavad Gita 4.36-39 praises knowledge as the boat which rescues the worst sinner, the fire which reduces all karma to ashes, and the greatest purifier. "One who has faith," Krsna tells Arjuna, "whose senses are controlled, who is intent on That, gains knowledge and, having gained knowledge, quickly attains the highest peace. "121 A good number of verses magnifying the power of knowledge could be cited in addition 122 Indeed the whole to those already referred to. exposition of the nature of the atman in chapter two and the distinction between the "field" and the "knower of the field" in chapter thirteen, as well as the descriptions of the enlightened sage at 2.55-72 and 12.12-20, are entirely in accord with the non-dualist vision. At the same time, however, there are at least as many passages which extol bhakti and are consequently troublesome for the strict Advaitin. The first eight verses of chapter twelve are especially important in this regard, since they suggest the superiority of bhakti to the quest

49 for knowledge of the impersonal absolute. They begin with a question that, for the first time in the scriptural traditions known to us, brings the theme of the present study into explicit focus. Confused, we can imagine, by Krsna's alternate praise of devotion to him as the personal God, on the one hand, and his exaltation of knowledge of the ultimate as an impersonal "That, on the other, Arjuna asks: "Those devotees (bhaktas) who, ever disciplined (yukta), worship Thee and those again who [meditate on] the ## imperishable Unmanifest, which of these is better versed in yoga?"123 Krsna's answer is that the ones who are "most perfect in yoga" are the disciplined devotees. 124 The path of knowledge is fraught with difficulty, but salvation for the true bhakta is swift and sure: Those who, offering all their actions to Me, are intent on Me, who worship Me, meditating on Me with yoga directed toward no other, Those whose thoughts are fixed on Me, I quickly deliver from the ocean of death and rebirth, O Partha. 125 Since the Lord's final recommendation is that his disciple follow the path of devotion, this passage portends difficulty for Sankara's position. We shall see in chapter two that his handling of it is not totally convincing. Also worthy of mention in this connection is 14.27, in which Krsna identifies himself as the foundation (pratistha) of the immortal, imperishable Brahman. 126 Zaehner and others take this as a clear triumph for theism,

50 and it is indeed possible that it was originally intended to express the superiority of Krsna to the Upanisadic ultimate.127 In interpreting this or any part of the Gita, it should be remembered that its concluding emphasis, as mentioned above, is on the sufficiency for salvation of surrender to the personal God. Many commentators, with considerable justification, take the injunction at 18.66 to abandon all for Krsna as a decisive--and, as it were, retroactive--determinant of the meaning of the entire text. While all of this is obviously supportive of the devotionalist's position, it leads to difficulties for those who are interpreting the text from the standpoint of the path of knowledge, i.e., that of orthodox Advaita. The truth is that the Gita, in a manner typical of the great scriptures of the world, is concerned more with the directness of its insight into the divine than with the problems that later systematic interpreters might face. It holds together seemingly conflicting interests in a way that no doubt was frustrating for the commentators who saw the paths of knowledge and devotion, and the associated visions of impersonalism and personalism, as being mutually exclusive. Evidently, its author did not feel such apparent contradictions as acutely as did the teachers of the Vedanta who were to follow. He was able to bring impersonalism and personalism together in a kind of dynamic tension which, in

51 the final analysis, is one of the important secrets of the 128 text's enduring appeal. As we shall see in chapters three and five, both the Bhagavatapurana and Madhusudana, its student, make attempts to juxtapose Advaitic thought and bhakti that are, each in their own way, comparable to that of the Gita. More commonly, however, it seems to have been thought that the paradoxes involved in this kind of enterprise were too great. Thus we will find Samkara, in chapter two below, and the Gosvamins of the Bengal Vaisnava tradition, in chapter four, choosing formulations that emphasize a single side of the polarity. It may be that in doing so they sacrificed something of the creative dynamism evident in scriptures such as the Gita for positions more easily developed into rigorously consistent systems of thought.