( with inputs from Habil. Narahari Rao)
Two Strands of Scholarship
There are predominantly two strands of scholarship in the current academic milieu on the notion of bhakti. One is characterized by a sociological approach that sees bhakti as an instrument of social protest against the supposed Brahminic dominance (as we saw in the previous post), the other is characterized by a search to understand bhakti as a specific concept brought about by the Indian tradition in an effort to conceive a way of leading a good life.
How does the second variety go about with its enquiry? Given that we are predominantly trained in the institutions and currents of thought inherited from European tradition, one dominant distinction made use of is that between intellect/cognition and emotions. This is further associated with an endeavour to attain objective knowledge, on the one hand, and the subjective reactions, on the other. Further the (natural) sciences are associated with the former and the arts with the latter.
Bhakti: A Way of Leading a Fulfilled Life
A fascinating Symposium held by philosophers in 1988 (published in 2000) on the salience of bhakti as a living tradition in India, is brought together in Bhakti: A Contemporary Discussion (published in 2000). There are some thought provoking questions raised in this book. One of them relates to the relation between cultivating bhakti and that of jnana and karma, usually translated as ‘knowledge’ and ‘action’. What are the opponent positions (purva-pakshas) in the tradition against which the arguments for cultivating bhakti are articulated?
The chairperson of the symposium, Daya Krishna, an Indian philosopher, suggests that if our interest is to understand what the notion of bhakti can mean for us today rather than looking into what people in various eras have said about it, then it needs to be understood as suggesting a particular way of leading a fulfilled life.
Dayakrishna asks, “How to build a life of emotion of constant tone and direction?” He points out that within Western tradition, we have created structures of knowledge primarily in terms of logic, reason and search for truth. What if we can create cognitive structures that can provide support to our life of feelings. But, why, we may ask, should we do this? We do this because we experience emotional disturbance in our lives, and we desire to overcome the frequent emotional turmoil. We need to conceive cognitive structures for a different kind of emotional life in which we seek a life of permanent and constant tone, direction, and pleasure. According to him bhakti, which itself can be placed in the realm of feeling and emotions, is an attempt of a culture to do just this. God/gods are the support structure on which a life of permanent, constancy of emotion is built, and arguments to cultivate bhakti are meant to indicate that there is such a form of life of emotions. The artistic and performative traditions of India seek to develop this. His claim is that a life of feelings helps us to grasp the real in a way that reason cannot. The aim of cultivating bhakti is to become independent of objects/events in the world and maintain a constancy of emotional life. The performative arts, we can say, give us a taste of this desirable feeling in the form of rasa.
Bhakti: Within the Intellect versus Emotions/feelings Framework
The crucial question for this reading is how to make sense of the formulation ‘grasping the real through a life of feeling’. This formulation, it appears, is meant to translate the notion of bhakti yoga and assertions that bhakti is one of the paths to jnana, i.e., some kind of ‘knowledge’. However, in the scheme set out by Daya Krishna (as inherited from the intellectual traditions of Europe), the world of human beings is divided into three realms – the realm of knowledge, the realm of actions, the realm of feeling; bhakti is then placed in the realm of feelings. When cut up like this, it makes little sense to speak of bhakti as oriented towards knowledge or cognition (jnana). In other words, an incoherence results when the framework of intellect versus emotions or feelings is applied to articulate the discussion within the Indian tradition.
The way out is perhaps to say that cultivation of bhakti involves the cultivation of a particular state of being rather than the cultivation of a way of feeling. Then the question to be clarified is that of characterizing this state of being. One needs to examine how the state of being to be achieved by bhakti is talked about within the Indian tradition. But this involves going into a plethora of idioms: There are definitions (of bhakti), the process to be undertaken, the differentiation of bhakti marga from jnana and karma margas, the different types and different stages of bhakti, the stories of the life of bhaktas, whether bhakti is a rasa or a sthayibhava etc. We get caught in debates internal to the tradition rather than rendering it in contemporary terms.
To put it differently, any new framework must not only be sensitive to the traditional idiom but must be able to render the debate for the contemporary context. It must also throw some light on the practice for the practitioners.
An Alternative Framework
Such an alternative framework to that of intellect versus emotions does exist within the Indian tradition, and it is succinctly articulated in a basic text, Samkhya Karika, of the Samkhya school of thought. The crucial notion here is that of manas, a notion quite different from that of ‘mind’. By elaborating how it is different we can recast the notion of bhakti and its place in the Indian tradition. Bhakti is often talked of as a way of transforming the state of manas. Later in Bhagawata Purana, it is given an ontological status, as standing in for ultimate reality, as the fifth purushartha, superior even to moksha. What is crucial, therefore, is to enquire into the role occupied by the notion of manas in the Indian tradition as distinct from that of ‘mind’ in the European tradition.
Bibliography
Bhakti: A Contemporary Discussion— Philosophical Explorations in the Indian Bhakti Tradition, ed. Daya Krishna, Mukund Lath, and Francine E. Krishna. Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Delhi, 2000.