Essay name: Bhakti-rasayana by Madhusudana Sarasvati
Author:
Lance Edward Nelson
Affiliation: McMaster University / Religious Studies
This is a study and English translation of the Bhakti-rasayana by Madhusudana Sarasvati (16th century)—one of the greatest and most vigorous exponents of Advaita after Shankara-Acharya who was also a great devotee of Krishna. The Bhaktirasayana attempts to merge non-dualist metaphysics with the ecstatic devotion of the Bhagavata Purana, by asserting that Bhakti is the highest goal of life and by arguinng that Bhakti embodies God within the devotee's mind.
Page 36 of: Bhakti-rasayana by Madhusudana Sarasvati
36 (of 553)
External source: Shodhganga (Repository of Indian theses)
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Devotional and Impersonalist Aspects
of Vedic Religion
Our understanding of the history of devotionalism in
the Vedic period is hampered by the lack of written records
of any form of religion but that of the Aryans who were, as
is well-known, relative late-comers to the sub-continent.
Of the earlier indigenous traditions of India, our direct
knowledge is very limited. Our first in depth exposure to
the religion of the sub-continent comes through the
scriptures of the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan immigrants, the
Vedas, which do give us a fairly good picture of the
spirituality of the priestly classes that composed them.
The Vedic hymns and especially their later philosophical
outgrowths, the Upaniá¹£ads, reveal types of religiosity
which, though containing certain devotional elements that
are fairly universal in human religion, are conspicuously
lacking in the kind of whole-hearted love of a supreme deity
characteristic of the later Hindu tradition. This leads
modern scholarship to suspect that the origins of bhakti are
to be found apart from the elite Vedic tradition in forms of
religion associated with such early cultures as that of the
Indus Valley and that of the Dravidians. Though we know
little about the spirituality of these peoples, the evidence
which we do have lends support to this view. As this data
is amply documented in any number of general works on the
