Bhakti, the Gita and Assessing the Two Systems

Overview

Recall questions on Shankara and Ramanuja on bhakti and liberation, their readings of the Bhagavad Gita, their influence on later devotion, the cases for and against Advaita and Vishishtadvaita, and Bowes, Hopkins and Smart.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What place does Shankara give to bhakti?

   Model answer

   A real but subordinate one. Devotion to a personal deity is valid, valuable and appropriate for most people: it steadies and purifies the mind, cultivates dispassion, and prepares a person for enquiry. But it operates at the level where a worshipper and a worshipped are two, and Shankara holds that liberating knowledge is precisely the recognition that they are not. So bhakti is a genuine path up to a point, and is left behind at the point where the distinction it depends on is seen through.

2. 2

   Why does Shankara rank bhakti below liberating knowledge, and how does that ranking follow from his metaphysics?

   Model answer

   Because in a strictly non-dual system a relationship requires two terms, and there are not finally two. Any practice that presupposes a devotee facing a Lord therefore belongs to the provisional level of truth, however sincere and however useful. Shankara can be warm about saguna worship, and hymns of devotion are attributed to him, without contradiction, since the point is not that devotion is false but that it is not final.

3. 3

   What place does Ramanuja give to bhakti?

   Model answer

   The central one. Since the Lord is really personal and the soul is really distinct, loving devotion is not a stage on the way to something better; it is the appropriate relation of soul to God and the means by which liberation is received. Ramanuja describes bhakti as a continuous, meditative loving remembrance, demanding enough that he also teaches prapatti, total self-surrender to the Lord's grace, for those who cannot maintain it. Knowledge is not discarded here, but it is knowledge of a Lord to be loved rather than knowledge dissolving the lover.

4. 4

   What happens to the soul in liberation according to Ramanuja, and why is his account easy to misstate?

   Model answer

   The freed soul attains likeness to the Lord in knowledge and bliss, sharing his nature to a remarkable degree, but it never becomes the Lord and never loses its own distinct existence; the Lord's power over creation is not shared. This is easy to misstate in both directions. It is wrong to say the soul merges, which is Shankara's picture rather than Ramanuja's. It is also too simple to treat the final state as sheer intimacy, since Ramanuja describes it substantially in terms of the soul's attainment of an equality of nature and its unimpeded service; Shrivaishnava devotional practice then fills that out as eternal loving service to the Lord and his consort.

5. 5

   How do Shankara and Ramanuja read the Bhagavad Gita differently?

   Model answer

   Both wrote commentaries on it and both claim it teaches their system. Shankara reads its central teaching as knowledge of the self's identity with Brahman, treating the passages on action and devotion as addressed to those not yet ready for that, so that the Gita's practical counsel prepares for its metaphysical climax. Ramanuja reads the same text as culminating in devotion and surrender to a personal Lord who is the goal of all the paths it describes, and takes its statements of Krishna's supremacy and of grace at face value rather than as concessions.

6. 6

   Which parts of the Gita do Shankara and Ramanuja each rely on?

   Model answer

   Shankara's reading leans on its teaching that the true self is unborn and imperishable and cannot be harmed, on its account of the sage established in wisdom, and on its treatment of the eternal imperishable reality beyond the manifest. Ramanuja's leans on Krishna's declarations of his own supremacy and of his descent to restore dharma, on the promise of grace and of protection to the devotee, on the vision granted to Arjuna, and above all on the text's closing counsel to abandon other reliance and take refuge in the Lord. That both can build a full system from the same short work is precisely why the Gita has been so influential.

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