What is the difference between advaita vedanta and bhakti devotion

Some of the invaders settled and extended their patronage to Buddhism and Jainism and other religions which rejected caste.

The Brahmins and their upper caste co-religionists responded by broadening the basis of their own support. Non-Aryan cults had always flourished among the humbler sections of society, and gradually many of them came to be adopted, in modified form, by the upper castes themselves. The Brahmins developed the legendary parts of their own traditions and absorbed some elements from local and non-Aryan cults.

The outcome was a new body of religious tradition focused on the old Vedic deities Visnu and Siva now elevated by their worshippers to the status of supreme deity.

Unlike Vedic ritualism, the new cults were predominantly devotional in character. Honour, not to say reverence and adoration, was restored to the deity. The new cults evolved their own forms of ritual, mainly consisting in image-worship puja in temples, a form of religion unknown in the Vedic texts. New meditative techniques for gaining contact with the deity on the mental plane were also adopted. He did not regard the more recent practices taught in the Smrtis, such as temple worship or repetition of the Name of God, as forming part of the discipline of the monk who had embarked on the Upanishadic path to liberation.

And it appears that his own impulse to search for the Absolute on the Upanishadic path may well have owed something to a pious upbringing in a Smarta Vaishnava environment.

There is little in his commentaries to connect him with Siva-worship. But he invokes Narayana, equatable with Visnu, at the beginning of his Gita commentary in what the sub-commentator Anandagiri calls an obeisance to his chosen deity ista-devata. Though, as mentioned earlier, we cannot say for certain that any of the devotional hymns attributed to Sankara are genuine, there can be little doubt that he had the capacity for composing devotional poetry of a high order.

Whether Sankara also worshipped Siva as well as Visnu must be accounted doubtful in the present state of our knowledge. We have seen that there is little evidence of it in his commentaries. But we have the verse commentary called the Manasollisa Varttika attributed to his pupil Suresvara on the Shaiva hymn called the Daksinamirti Stotra attributed to himself. On the one hand, the authenticity of the commentary is doubtful, and even if it could be proved there would still be, as its learned editor remarks, nothing in it to connect Sankara with the hymn.

On the other hand, certain features of the commentary do suggest that Suresvara may have been its original author. And there is a passage in the Brahma Sutra Commentary of the early post-Sankara author Bhaskara, in which he appears to be recalling the image of a perforated pot inverted and placed over a light, that occurs in the hymn, and attributing it to Sankara.

Although certain Tantrika hymns have come down falsely associated with his name, there is no trace of the influence of Tantrika ideas in his commentaries. Certain branches of it included woman-worship, in both its loftier and cruder forms. Sankara attacked the orgiastic variety of Tantrika worship as sinful according to Vedic law.

Even when the Upanishadic texts do smack of dualism, pluralism or theism, they are mere provisional affirmations, of practical utility to the student. The Brhadaranyaka verse I quoted in the beginning of this article is one of the several verses scattered in different Upanishads which deny any creator God as the final reality. True, as the article illustrates, he showed that he shared some affinities with Vaishnavism, yet he was a true follower of the sampradaya of non-duality which only accepts conditionings on Brahman provisionally for the sake of the student, only to negate all of them to intuit the final non-duality of Brahman: God being a conditioning to be negated like all other conditionings.

A brief dialogue on how God is treated as a conditioning which is negated to intuit Brahman is presented as an Appendix to this article in page 2. You are commenting using your WordPress. In deriving satya and ahimsa from what were essentially religious notions he not only gave spiritual values a social significance but also infused into his political vocabulary an other-worldly flavor.

Patrick, I could also be mistaken. Also, I do not want to represent what I think to be the right option, but rather to describe what a theist would answer to the objection that, in the back of her mind, she is serving God in order to attain liberation.

As Elisa rightly noted, a theist like Jiva Gosvamin would call bhakti that aims at brahmaikya, one-ness with brahman, as a transaction, not true love. Patrick, thank you for this. Thanks, Ryan. I am reminded of the paradox of charity, first identified by Bishop Butler. Loving makes us happy.

While something like bhakti may have instrumental value for the sake of gnosis e. Gita 7. This is one of its great contributions. But one can further argue that this approach is not necessarily of a kind with bhakti for its own sake.

Two paragraphs of that review are especially pertinent to this thread. Ram-Prasad argues that this move is not merely a gesture toward apophatic theology and the via negativa, a critical awareness of the limitations of our language in speaking of God. He God is central to the project of our own inquiry into being and discovery of the deep self which is brahman in that God allows us to redirect ourselves toward that self which is our truest essence, by directing ourselves toward him.

The personal God is thus both a cognitive bridge to discover the self as well as a praxiological compass to direct us toward the self. Thanks for sharing this wonderful material with us Matthew. At our thanksgiving dinner, Nandini Iyer now retired from teaching and I discussed some of the issues raised here perhaps to the consternation of others at the table!

Small world! If anyone wants to be in touch with him I am not sure if he is a member of this blog , please let me know. Thanks, Ram. I invited Niranjan to write a guest-post here and will ask him to read and comment on this post if he has enough time and energy to do that. Easwaran, Eknath. Canada, Nilgiri Press, Feuerstein, Georg. The Deeper Dimension of Yoga.

Boston, Shambhala Publications, Inc. Lindsey, Robert. Embodied Philoshopy. Long, Jeffery D.. Yoga is a way of life and should be accessible to all.

Community is important. Everyone is a valuable member and we are here to serve our community. Everyone is perfect just as they are. Everyone has their own path and is at a different point in life. From physical abilities to beliefs, everyone is at the right place at the right time. Cambio Yoga. Oh My! Paths to Liberation: Two Vedanta Traditions by Amber Richman The spiritual aim of most Vedanta traditions is something called moksha, or liberation, from the suffering that is a seemingly inherent part of the human condition.

Works Cited Basham, A. The Upanishads. Schweig, Graham. Our Guiding Principles. Find Us Here. A Word From You. Teacher Training. Which class are you interested in? How did you hear about Cambio's teacher training?

Their findings, therefore, can only be partial and incomplete. The jnyana path looks from a broader perspective and comprehends within its scope both yoga and devotion.

It demands a high degree of real devotion, in the sense that the aspirant has to have a high degree of earnestness and sincerity to get to the Truth. This is real devotion, to Truth; and it is infinitely superior to devotion to anything else, which can only be less than the Truth. Like Like. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

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