The Narada Bhakti Sutra · Part 2: The Glory of Devotion

In the previous part, Narada had already stated the nature of bhakti. Now a question rises: how is that bhakti to be recognized, what are its marks? Here Narada does not settle on a single answer. First he sets down the views of the teachers who spoke on this subject before him. 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. 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 striking against it.

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. 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.

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 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. Even in that love of the gopis, the knowledge of God’s greatness, of His majesty, never went dim. This is important to grasp, because without that knowledge of His greatness, the very same love can sink into ordinary attachment. This is the difference between love stripped of the knowledge of greatness and the love of bhakti.

That difference grows clearer when we ask where 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. On this very test Narada sets down his boldest word: this bhakti is greater than karma, greater than knowledge, greater than yoga. In that tradition of the shastras, where karma and knowledge had long been held supreme, to say this was no small thing.

But why does Narada say this? He sets down the reason too in a single word. Karma gives fruit, knowledge gives fruit, yoga gives fruit; these are all means, roads to reach something else. Bhakti stands apart from them, because it is itself the fruit. Once it is gained, nothing else remains to be gained. And there is one more reason, one that goes deep within. On the path of knowledge a subtle pride can settle in, the feeling of “I have understood”. In bhakti there is humility, “I am nothing at all”. And it is this humility that is dear to God; pride does not please Him.

Here an old dispute also comes to the surface, and Narada does not hide it. Some teachers say the means to bhakti is knowledge alone, for how could bhakti arise without knowledge. Others go further and say the two rest on each other, knowledge leading to bhakti and bhakti to knowledge, the two moving together. But the view of the Brahmakumaras, the sons of Brahma led by Sanaka, which Narada makes his final resting place, is that bhakti is itself of the form of fruit, a means to nothing. There is no question of gaining it through anything else; it alone is worth gaining.

Narada settles this point with a plain, simple illustration. Merely hearing a palace described does not make a king glad, and merely telling the tale of a meal does not still anyone’s hunger. The contentment held in a royal house and in food lives only in the experiencing of them, in the tasting, never in the account. In just the same way, only hearing bhakti described is not its taste. And so, Narada says, those who long for liberation should not get tangled in bare words; they should take up that bhakti itself, and live it to see.