A reflection on the Bhakti tradition in Hinduism:
“Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.”
This verse, written by Basavaņņa, offers a poetic summation of three important components of the Bhakti movements: the personalization of man’s relationship to God, the rejection of the usually accepted social relations and practices (“things standing shall fall”), and the emphasis on the movement of the heart exclusively towards God as the sole purpose of life (“the moving ever shall stay”). The devotionalist movements made a significant turn from the traditional pantheon of deities towards a monotheistic understanding of Hindu faith, whether towards Śiva or Krishna or Rama. God’s love for the devotee is valued above all else (including puja, meditation, knowledge, or renunciation). Bhakti is characterized by putting love for the chosen deity above all other concerns; Bhakti is epitomized in the experiences of the sant-poets, whose songs have been sung throughout the ages as examples of the majesty of their experiences of loving union with God. Founders of the Bhakti movements are thought to have achieved total union with God and are therefore divine in their own right, their words revered as the words of their Lord. The love they write of is not learned, it is felt. The love for and from God they serve witness to is fostered by the devotee’s thinking of nothing other than God, rather than on scriptural knowledge.
The theme of moving towards God by thinking of and loving only Him is paired with the turning away from the conventional ways of the world. Krishna as a young child in the Gita-Govinda cares little about the normal social order and yet his rebellion is non-threatening to the citizens; in fact, they adore his antics and admire his freedom and the harmony is brings to the village. Also, Rādha’s love for Krishna is cross-caste and cuts through conventional Hindu society’s practices which would normally outlaw their relationship. This rejection of “things standing still” is amplified by the social activism associated with the Lingayats, their rejection of discriminations against women, the inequalities of caste, and animal sacrifices. These traits are more understandable in the context of their new relationship with God and how this new relationship dissolved the long-standing “superiority” of God over men: for the devotionalists, God and man long to realize one another, and when each realizes the other the supreme goal of creation has been achieved: union of man and God (or, transcendence of the illusion of separation). We see this especially in Krishna’s love for Rādha and his telling her to put her foot on his head early on in the Gita-Govinda, an act of equating God with man, rather than placing Him above man, a discourse in stark competition to the prevailing Brahmanical order. Bhakti achievement is the enactment, mobilization, and realization of the nature of Divine Love, perhaps best expressed by Vidyapati when writing of how he felt when overcome by Krishna: “Love is transformed, renewed, each movement.”
The fluidity of God’s love is expressed in the personalization of names for God in Śiva devotionalist poetry, with Basavanna writing to his “Lord of the meeting rivers,” Dāsimayya to “Rāmanātha,” and Mahādēvi writing to her “Lord White as Jasmine.” These titles and their varying from poet-to-poet emphasizes the unique and intimate relation the bhakta has to his or her God, each displaying an aspect of spiritual life—different poets have different conceptions of the one God, yet all long for loving from Him and wish to merge with Him. These different conceptions are considered complementary rather than in competition. The Tamil saints used their poetry and songs to draw an image of Śiva that is both terrifying and beautiful. Karaikkal Ammaiyar sees Śiva as perpetually dancing victoriously in the cremation grounds with matted hair and bloody fans. Others of the Nayanmar poets unabashedly call Śiva a “Madman!” while simultaneously affirming that if a human could only see His maddening dance then “even human birth on this wide earth would become a thing worth having”—in divine union, there is divine vision, there is divine purpose for life. For these poets, Śiva is Lord of the Dance, and through total, self-sacrificial love for Śiva (to the point of being a “slave” to Him), a devotee can see his beautiful dance and ultimately merge with Śiva in His creation. For Mahādēvi, Śiva gradually gains the total attention of her love. She thinks of Him as a husband who needs her just as she needs Him and she forsakes the world to be His bride. In her poetry, Śiva is angry at His separation from her and the separation must be annihilated: both human and devotee long for absolute union. For Dāsimayya, when this separation is annihilated, the bounds of time, space, and the “separate self” all cease to exist in oneness with Śiva; his poetry dissolves both man-god and man-woman boundaries and he writes “[Rāmanātha ], your body is in mine” and “the self that hovers between is neither man nor woman,” indicating his experience of union with God. In Basavaņņa’s poetry, we find both the longing for union with Śiva and the overwhelming joy experienced after merging with the God. Śiva is only imaged as the “lord of the meeting rivers,” displaying the spiritual longing between both human and god as a process of each finding themselves in the other—two rivers revealing themselves to be one River, always moving to one another to be One. In each case, we find the bhakta moved towards union with god and motivated only by merging with Him; the uniqueness of their poetry only emphasizes the intimacy of the relationship between bhakta and God.
In comparing Siva bhakti to Krishna bhakti, one finds many similarities. Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda, a poem set to ragas chronicling Krishna and Rādha’s love, is the seminal text of Krishna bhakti and in this text we see many similarities to the poems of the Vīraśaivas. As in Mahādēvi’s poems, the Gita-Govinda shows the relationship between Rādha and Krishna as a human-deity relationship pervaded with longing, jealousy, and separation, though throughout we know that both Rādha and Krishna long for reunion. The pain associated with this separation is felt throughout all the bhakti literature. There is also the common theme of human-god union as being felt bodily and in both cases this union is humanly real, sometimes erotic and sexual, and it is all-consuming. Just as the Siva devotionalists longed for merging with God, so too do the Krishna devotionalists—they long to live forever in Brindaban with Krishna, the perfect, heavenly setting of the Gita-Govinda, where Krishna lives forever in eternal peace, a place of beauty and natural harmony. Just as Basavanna envisioned God as two waters meeting, so too did Govinda-dasa who says, “Let the water of my body join the waters of the lotus pool he bathes in,” and later, “Let me be sky, and moving through me/that cloud-dark Shyama, my beloved.” Dvija Chandidasa says of Krishna, “He draws me—to become an outcast, a hermit woman in the woods!” echoing the same intuitions expressed by Karaikkal Ammaiyar, who lived as a hermit in the woods to watch Siva’s terrifying dance, or Mahadevi who lived naked in the woods to become as intimate as possible with her Lord. Even Mahadevi’s conception of Siva as “white jasmine” is replicated in the Gita-Govinda, only this time it is Krishna addressing Radha (not a human addressing God, but vice-versa), where Jayadeva writes for Krishna, “[Radha] your teeth are white jasmine. Love’s flower arms conquer worlds by worshipping your face.” This verse epitomizes the devotionalist realization that God longs for man just as man longs for God—Krishna is saying (my phrasing), ‘Radha, as you worship my face, I, too, worship yours.’
“Love’s flower arms conquer worlds by worshipping Your face.”
Worlds stand still, yet fall. Love, in worship, is always moving. Paradoxically, “the moving stay.” The implications, the true, experiential realities bound to them, known only by God and in the lives of the devotionalist movement’s great sant-poets and most blessed bhaktas, are certainly beyond the scope of mere words and language. But their words are a testament to both their experienced reality and the power of expressing our own deepest realities as verse or social movement or song or, ideally, by our being. The devotionalist movements found in their Hindu faith an experience of the personality of God, each experience unique unto them, and wrote to show their longing for Him, His longing for the devotee, and the spiritually transformative power unleashed when this love is allowed to flourish in the world. They show witness to our own potentiality to ascend to where they have been; ascension to this point is where Bhakti points, is where love for God points. It is somehow the moving experience of a God who remains ever-peacefully stayed. Where can we say one river first becomes two? Wherever that centered stream flows, wherever Krishna and Siva eternally dwell—This is where bhakti directs a devotee’s thoughts, attention, and above all, a devotee’s love.
"identity which is not convulsive ceases to exist" ---breton
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