Mr. Swartz,

I have been reading your website and find it very interesting. I wonder if you could tell me a little about Bhakti Yoga. You seem to only talk about Vedanta. How does Bhakti Yoga fit into your teachings?

Carmen B.

Ram: There are only two paths proscribed in the Vedas: karma yoga for householders and jnana yoga or samkhya yoga for sanyassis. The idea of Bhakti as a special path came later. The reason for this is that bhakti is native to any and every path, even worldly endeavors, bhakti being a positive, some say loving, orientation toward a particular object. Bhakti therefore falls under the category of karma in so far as ‘bhakti yoga’ is a group of ritual practices. In the Vedas ritual is considered karma because it involves mental and physical activities. The karma kanda of the Vedas deals with rituals which are for doers who want to achieve certain results.

I do not know at what time Bhakti came to be considered a separate path, perhaps four or five hundred years ago when Chaitanya was alive. It is not clear, however, that Chaitanya thought of himself as a Bhakti Yogin. The name suggests that he didn’t, in so far as it means Consciousness…which suggests that he was a jnani. In Vedic culture the choice of name reveals one’s spiritual inclination or path or identity. It is a fact that people love to define themselves in very limited ways so that as the spiritual world developed ritualists wanted their own special ‘yoga’ and affixed the word yoga to bhakti to distinguish themselves from the intellectuals and the doers. It may also be that because of the many possible meanings that a single Sanskrit word can have people thought that Bhakti was a ‘yoga’ because in the Bhagavad Gita one Chapter is called Bhakti Yoga. However, usage determines the meaning of yoga in this case as ‘topic.’ So the meaning is that Chapter 12 considers the topic of bhakti.

By the time we get to Vivekananda, bhakti has been enshrined alongside jnana and karma as one of the major paths. Vivekananda also included Raja Yoga as a separate path but Raja Yoga is based on Patanjali Yoga and Patanjali yoga is karma yoga. It is for doers who want to achieve Self realization by exhausting their vasanas (chitta vritti nirodha). This is the first English formulation of four paths and constitutes what is called in India as ‘Modern Vedanta’ and in the West as ‘Neo-Vedanta.’ Swami Chinmayananda who had huge impact on Indian spirituality in the last half of the last century was perhaps the most famous ‘Modern Vedantin’ although the Swamis in the Ramakrishna Mission were also Modern Vedantins owing to their respect for Vivekananda. Now the Ramakrishna Mission is basically Bhakti Yoga.

If you read the Narada Bhakti Sutras, which is the definitive Pauranic text on Bhakti, but is considered to belong to the tradition of jnana yoga, there is no mention of Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti is considered to be of two types: guna bhakti and para Bhakti. Guna bhakti is devotion according to the psychology of the individual and Parabhakti is synonymous with jnana. The Bhakti Sutra with commentaries is included on this satsang page and in the Books section under the title, The Gospel of Love.

One thing I should tell you that the website does not contain ‘my’ teachings. I am a teacher of Vedanta. There is not one idea on the site with the exception of the Enlightened Opinion page which I can claim to be ‘mine.’ I am simply someone who has realized the truth of the teachings of Vedanta and try to present them to others in a clear simple way.

James