The Anthropology of Eastern Religions by Murray J. Leaf

Author:Murray J. Leaf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

Bhakti

The most important general scheme of ideas that explains the relationship between a guru and a disciple is bhakti. Bhakti means personal devotion, finding one’s personal relation to god that frees one from the demands of or the need for any sort of ceremonial, ritual, or other conventional intervention. So it may seem that it should be anti-sectarian, and in a fundamental way it is. There are many Bhakti schools. In the major ones, whose founders are well educated, the founder describes what this relation is and says how you, the devotee, can find it for yourself. They do not claim to do it for you or provide ceremonial or ritual intervention or mediation. They show why no such mediation is needed or possible. The followers are not followers of the individual guru as such but rather are people trying to find their own path for themselves and seeking guidance on how to go about it. This is precisely why the idea of being a follower does not carry any notion that if you follow x you cannot also follow y or z—any more than the idea that you need chemistry to help solve a problem would be taken as excluding the idea that you might also need mathematics.

I do not know if all major dharmas in the Hindu tradition in a broad sense would recognize themselves as part of the Bhakti tradition, but certainly most do. This includes many identified with specific gods. One important example is Vaishnavites (devotees of Vishnu), who base their understanding on the arguments and writings of the medieval philosopher Ramanuja. Another is Lingayats who take their name from the lingam of Shiva as it is assigned moral and social significance in the writings of the poet-philosopher Basavaraja, also called Basavanna. Other sects are named after their gurus directly, like the Radhasoamis, while others are named after the idea of following such gurus, like the Sikhs. The name is derived directly from the Punjabi verb sikhnā, meaning to study.

Bhakti teachers generally trace Bhakti to Vedanta or say that it is Vedanta. The basic idea of the relation to god one is trying to discover, and that one discovers in oneself, is nothing other than the Vedantic idea of god as atman and atman as god. But Vedanta doesn’t really connect this idea to the further idea that different patterns or types of worship are different paths to finding this god. For this, the first really explicit expression that is neither Buddhist nor Jain comes a few centuries after the formation of the Jain and Buddhist traditions, in the epic poem the Bhagavad-Gita. This was composed in Sanskrit in northern India probably between 200 CE and 350 CE, drawing on oral traditions. The Bhagavad-Gita is one of the three main epics of the distinctively Hindu tradition as contrasted with the Jain and Buddhist traditions. The other two are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, of about the same age and embodying substantially the same ideas and values.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.