The Narada Bhakti Sutra · Part 1: The Nature of Bhakti

Sutras 1 · 2 · 3

Narada sits with his veena in hand, and he begins where every serious shastra begins. The very first word is “now,” and that “now” holds a great deal within it. It is spoken to a listener who has already come some distance, who has already done the work that comes before this work, and whose mind is steady enough now to be handed something. Then Narada lays his hand straight on the root of bhakti. Bhakti is no ordinary attachment. It is the form of supreme love toward God, the highest love there is, the love that asks for nothing back. And this love is deathless in essence, the kind that does not die and that makes the one who attains it immortal as well.

Sutras 4 · 5 · 6

Now Narada tells what happens inside a person once this love is won. Whoever attains it becomes perfected, becomes immortal, and grows content to the very core. After that no desire rises in the mind, no grief, no hatred, no clinging to sense-objects; and, startlingly, even enthusiasm does not remain. Read that last one twice, because it is the one nobody expects. Here the boil of religious fervor settles too, and only a quiet bhakti stays. Knowing it, a person turns intoxicated, falls still, and begins to delight within their own self.

Sutras 7 · 8 · 9

Now Narada touches this love from another direction. This bhakti is not a form of desire, since its very nature is that of nirodha, a stilling. And what he means by nirodha he opens up at once, before anyone can carry the word off in the wrong direction. Nirodha is the renunciation of the affairs of both the world and the Veda, the worldly running-about and the Vedic ritual alike. Along with it comes such singleness toward that one that no other refuge is left standing, and an indifference toward everything that would turn a person away from it.

Sutras 10 · 11 · 12

Narada makes the meaning of singleness even clearer. To abandon every other refuge and to rest on that one support alone, this is singleness. Yet there is a balance to it, and Narada holds it carefully. While living among the world and the Veda, act only in the ways that agree with that one, and stay indifferent to whatever opposes it. And here he adds a practical caution, the kind that occurs to someone who has watched a great many seekers. Even after the resolve has grown firm, the observance of shastra should continue.

Sutras 13 · 14

Narada also gives the reason for not abandoning shastra. Otherwise the danger of a fall remains, because when a devotee who has risen high within is seen breaking some outward propriety, the sight breeds wrong conclusions in the minds of everyone watching. Then the next sutra rests on this same practical note. Ordinary worldly conduct is just as fit to be given up, though with one allowance held back. Acts like eating that are necessary to keep the body going will carry on as long as the body lasts; they stand outside the reach of this renunciation.

Sutras 15 · 16 · 17 · 18

With the nature of bhakti stated, a question rises: how is that bhakti to be recognized, what are its marks? Here Narada does not settle on a single answer, and the refusal is deliberate. First he sets down the views of the teachers who spoke on this subject before him, each of them naming the place where he had found it himself. He says the marks of bhakti are many, because different thinkers have seen it in different ways. Vyasa, the son of Parashara, recognizes it in the love that lives inside worship and the rites of worship, in the hands that do the offering. The rishi Garga sees it in the love of hearing and telling the stories of God. And Shandilya’s sight goes deeper; for him, bhakti is the love that moves in step with the bliss of the atman (the self), never once striking against it.

Sutras 19 · 20

After hearing all these views with a bowed head, Narada sets down his own word, and his mark rises highest of all. For him, bhakti is this: that your whole conduct, every act, every breath be offered to that one Lord; and if for even a single moment He is forgotten, an anguish should rise within that is hard to bind in words. The forgetting and the anguish arrive in the same instant. This is Narada’s own definition, this is the heart of the whole text. Then he sets his own seal on it: it is so, exactly so.

Sutras 21 · 22 · 23

Where would one find a living example of this supreme anguish? Here too Narada does not stay silent. He points toward the gopis of Vraj. The state they fell into when they forgot Krishna even for a moment, that is the embodied form of the supreme anguish Narada described. But there is a fine point here that Narada does not let slip, and everything hangs from it. Even in that love of the gopis, the knowledge of God’s greatness, of His majesty, never once went dim. This is important to grasp, because without that knowledge of His greatness, the very same love, burning at the very same heat, can sink into ordinary attachment. This is the difference between love stripped of the knowledge of greatness and the love of bhakti.

Sutra 24

That difference grows clearer when we ask where the happiness rises from. In attachment, one seeks only one’s own happiness; there the beloved’s happiness does not become one’s own. In bhakti it runs the other way, for there the beloved’s happiness is itself the devotee’s happiness, and the devotee draws on no other supply of it.