Bhakti

The devotional revolution that swept across medieval India — a religion of passionate, personal love for God, sung in the mother tongue by weavers and washerwomen and untouchables, needing no priest, no temple, and no Sanskrit, only the heart — and the honest distinction between what the movement taught, what history can date, and where devotion has wrapped its saints in legend.

The flowers under the shroud

When Kabir died, around 1518, the story goes that his followers fell to quarrelling over his body. He had been raised a Muslim and revered by Hindus, and now the Muslims wished to bury him and the Hindus to burn him. As they argued over the corpse, someone lifted the shroud — and found beneath it not a body but a heap of flowers. The Hindus took half to cremate and the Muslims half to bury, and the poet-saint who had spent his life mocking the boundary between the two slipped free of it even in death.

The tale is almost certainly a legend, and it is the right place to begin — because Bhakti is a tradition whose truth lives in its poetry and whose saints live, very often, in devout legend rather than firm history. What is beyond doubt is the movement itself: one of the great religious upheavals of the medieval world, a tide of love that broke the monopoly of priest and Sanskrit and caste, and remade the spiritual life of a subcontinent.

What Bhakti is

Bhakti — from a Sanskrit root meaning "to share, to participate, to love" — is devotion: the path of intense, personal, self-giving love for a personal God, held to be superior to ritual sacrifice, to philosophical knowledge, and to ascetic works. Its claim was radical in its simplicity. To reach God one needs no priest, no temple, no Sanskrit, no ritual purity, and no high birth — only love (prema), surrender (prapatti), and the constant repetition of the divine name. That claim threw the doors of Hindu religious life open to everyone the old order had shut out: the low-caste, the untouchable, the illiterate, and women — many of whom became the movement's greatest saints.

From the Tamil south

Bhakti's scriptural seed lay in the Bhagavad Gita, which had already named loving devotion as a path to God. But the movement itself was born in the Tamil south, between the sixth and ninth centuries, in the songs of two bands of poet-saints. The Alvars — twelve devotees of Vishnu, among them the woman saint Andal — poured out hymns of love gathered into the Nalayira Divya Prabandham. The Nayanars — some sixty-three devotees of Shiva, including the woman saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar — sang the hymns collected in the Tevaram. They sang not in Sanskrit but in Tamil, challenged caste and Brahmin privilege, and set the pattern the whole movement would follow. From the south it spread, over the following centuries, across the whole of India, cresting between the fourteenth and seventeenth.

The philosophers of devotion

Bhakti found its intellectual defender in Ramanuja (traditionally 1017–1137), who answered the austere non-dualism of Shankara — in which the individual self dissolves wholly into an impersonal Absolute — with Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism," in which God and the soul remain distinct enough that love between them is real and eternal. Crucially, Ramanuja taught that even shudras and outcastes could reach salvation by complete surrender. Madhva (13th c.) pressed further into outright dualism (Dvaita); Nimbarka and Vallabha developed their own devotional Vedantas; and Chaitanya's followers would frame achintya-bheda-abheda, "inconceivable oneness-and-difference." Between them these thinkers gave the religion of the heart a rigorous philosophical spine — and preserved the one thing devotion cannot do without: a real Other to love.

Saguna and nirguna

The movement divided over a deep question: does God have form? Saguna bhakti loves God with qualities and form — Krishna with his flute, Rama, Shiva, the Goddess — present in the image and the temple, approached through story and festival. Nirguna bhakti loves the formless, attributeless Absolute beyond all image, and in its boldest voices (the northern sants) grew hostile to temple and mosque alike, to idol and to scripture, insisting that the God worth loving cannot be carved or caged. The line between them runs through the whole tradition.

The saints

The soul of Bhakti is its saints — a great, unruly company drawn from every corner of society.

• In Karnataka, Basava (Basavanna, twelfth century) founded the Lingayat (Virashaiva) movement, rejecting caste, temple, and Brahmin ritual, and pouring his teaching into terse vachana prose-poems in Kannada; the naked, God-intoxicated woman saint Akka Mahadevi sang beside him.
• In Maharashtra, Jnaneshwar (thirteenth century) wrote the Jnaneshwari, a luminous Marathi commentary on the Gita, and Namdev — and later Tukaram (seventeenth century), whose abhangs are the summit of Marathi devotion — sang to Vithoba of Pandharpur, building the enduring Varkari pilgrim tradition of communal song.
• In the north, Ramananda carried the movement's fire, and from his circle came its most famous voice: Kabir (fifteenth century), the weaver of Banaras, a nirguna poet who ridiculed the pretensions of Hindu and Muslim alike and sought the one God beyond both — whose verses were later gathered into the Sikh scripture itself. Beside him stood Ravidas, the leather-worker (and so "untouchable") saint whose hymns also entered the Sikh canon.

The climax: Krishna, Rama, and the love-mad saints

The movement crested, from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, in a blaze of Krishna- and Rama-devotion. In Bengal, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534) — held by his followers to be Krishna and Radha in one body — launched an ecstatic movement of public sankirtan (mass chanting and dancing of the divine name) and founded Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the Radha-Krishna devotion that, four centuries later, would circle the globe as the Hare Krishna movement (Chapter 35). In the Braj country, Vallabha founded the Pushtimarg "path of grace," and the blind poet Surdas sang the child-Krishna in Braj Bhasha (the Sursagar). In the north, Tulsidas recast the Ramayana as the Awadhi Ramcharitmanas (1574), the "Bible of North India," making Rama-devotion the popular faith of a vast region. And the Rajput princess Mirabai abandoned palace and husband for a life of scandalous, single-minded love for Krishna as her divine bridegroom — the most beloved of all the women saints.

Their devotion drew on a rich erotic-mystical theology. The Bhagavata Purana (c. 9th–10th c.) told the enchanting stories of the child and cowherd Krishna and his rasa-lila, the circular moonlit dance with the gopis (cowherd women); Jayadeva's Sanskrit Gita Govinda (12th c.) sang the passionate love of Krishna and Radha. From this the theologians built a science of devotional emotion (rasa), and above all exalted madhurya bhava — the mood of the lover — as the highest love of all: to long for God as Radha longs for Krishna, the soul as the beloved and God as the divine lover.

The practice of love

Bhakti's devotion took set forms — classically the nine (navadha bhakti): hearing God's stories, singing them, remembering, serving, worshipping, bowing, serving as a slave, befriending, and utterly surrendering the self. Its warmth came from the bhavas, the moods in which one loved God — as master, friend, child, or lover — each a different intimacy. Above all it sang. Kirtan and bhajan, communal devotional singing often set to ecstatic music, carried the movement into every village; and the endless repetition of the divine name — Ram, Hari, Krishna — was itself the shortest road to God, needing no learning at all. There was no priest between the devotee and the beloved, and that was the whole point.

The believer's lens

To the devotee, Bhakti is the discovery that the infinite God wants to be loved — and that love, not ritual or learning or high birth, is the one thing that reaches Him. The whole apparatus of Brahminical religion — the Sanskrit only priests could read, the sacrifices only they could perform, the temples the low-caste could not enter — falls away as unnecessary, even as an obstacle: God is as near as the name on one's lips and the song in one's chest. This is intoxicating good news for exactly those the old order despised, which is why weavers, leather-workers, and women became its saints and its scriptures. For the saguna devotee, God is gloriously personal — the flute-playing Krishna, the child in his mother's arms, the divine lover for whom the soul aches as Mira ached — and worship is relationship, tender and particular. For the nirguna sant, the same love reaches past every image to the formless One beyond Hindu and Muslim alike. Either way, the goal is not to dissolve into God (as the philosophers of pure non-dualism taught) but to love Him forever — and the saints' verses, still sung daily by hundreds of millions, are the living proof that this love is real to those who feel it.

The skeptical lens

The historian honors the poetry and withholds judgment on the miracles. The lives of most Bhakti saints come to us through hagiography — devotional legend written down generations later and thick with wonders: Kabir's body turning to flowers, the poison Mira drank turning to nectar, Chaitanya's divine ecstasies. These are matters of faith, not documented biography. Dates for many saints are uncertain, and the poems attributed to them were transmitted orally and compiled later, so that a corpus like "Kabir's" or "Mirabai's" is layered, expanded, and partly the work of other hands — the historical Kabir is glimpsed only through a much-edited tradition. And a genuine scholarly debate concerns the movement's social reach: did Bhakti's ringing anti-caste message actually reform society, or was it spiritually revolutionary while being socially absorbed — the low-caste saint revered in song while caste endured in life? The evidence points both ways, and honest history reports the tension rather than resolving it. What is not in doubt is the poetry itself, and its overwhelming effect on the languages, music, and religious life of India.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Bhakti's genius was to hide nothing and give everything — yet it, too, encoded the sacred in distinctive ways.

• Its central sacred vehicle is the vernacular song — the pada, abhang, vachana, and doha — deliberately composed in the mother tongue so that anyone could receive the divine. In doing so the movement became the single most powerful force in shaping the modern Indian languages: Tulsidas made a scripture of Awadhi, Surdas of Braj, Tukaram of Marathi, Mirabai of Rajasthani, Chaitanya's followers of Bengali, Narsinh Mehta of Gujarati.
• The divine name (nama) is itself sacred and sufficient: to repeat it (nama-japa, and the ecstatic public sankirtan of Chaitanya) is to hold the deity present in sound — the Indian devotional cousin of the Sufi dhikr (Chapter 27), the tantric mantra (24), the Kabbalistic divine names (26), and the Shinto kotodama (25), all met in one age.
• Krishna-lila is a whole symbolic language of love: the flute that calls the soul, the stolen butter, the rasa dance, and Radha's longing all read at once as charming story and as the encoded drama of the soul's love for God.
• Kabir's riddling ulatbamsi, "upside-down language" — deliberately paradoxical verses that turn the world inside out to jolt the hearer awake — is his own version of the coded speech that runs through the esoteric traditions of this book. And the Lingayats' ishtalinga, a small symbol of Shiva worn on the body and worshipped anywhere, encodes the whole radical claim of Bhakti in an object: the divine carried in the heart and on the person, not housed in a temple that only some may enter.

Connections

Bhakti grew from the Vedic and epic Hinduism of the earliest eras (Chapters 5, 11) and from the devotional current already in the Gita, and it rhymes with the Tantra of the neighboring chapter (24) as another intensely experiential path. Above all it met, in medieval India, the Sufism of this very era (27): the two love-mysticisms cross-fertilized for centuries, and Kabir stands squarely at their meeting point, claimed by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike. It fed directly into the birth of Sikhism (Chapter 34) — Guru Nanak's hymns and Kabir's and Ravidas's verses share a scripture — and, through Chaitanya's Gaudiya line, carried Krishna-devotion around the modern world as ISKCON (Chapter 35). With Bhakti the High Medieval age closes: from the Kabbalah and Sufism of the Abrahamic west, through the great scholastic systems, to the temple religions of the Americas and the love-religion of India — each, in its own way, seeking the hidden God through love, order, or blood.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch30.html · a comparative library of the sacred.