20 Questions About Bhakti

by Sonya Lea

In January of this year, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in India. Ten years earlier, my Zen master told me I needed to go to India. But I had resisted, mostly due to my fear of being overwhelmed by the place, the people, the sensations. But as my fiftieth birthday approached, I decided the second half of life needn’t be lived in fear. So my husband and I set forth on a month-long journey to India that included the ancient Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges, the world’s largest religious festival – the Kumbh Mela, a tiger safari, a tour of Rajasthan, and an ayurvedic spa in Kerala. We were immersed in an experience beyond our ordinary minds, a journey so very consuming, that our practice became keeping our eyes wide open, and dissolving our beliefs about ‘how things should be.’ When I returned to Seattle, I wanted to stay inside the intensity of the way of life, and so I began a hundred-day practice of bhakti, the way of devotion.

India is a country of contradictions, a sometimes chaotic place where people manage to infuse every task, every day and every relationship with bhakti, a word that can be translated as devotion, although it means much more than that. Bhakti comes from the Sanskrit bhaj, to belong to, to be a part of. To express bhakti requires a fully engaged relationship with the Divine, one beyond ritual and tradition.

Bhakti is the essence of life in India. From the dawn bicycle ride to the temple and back each day before work, to the flower-stacked altars in homes, shops and even parking lots, to the mala beads worn smooth through fervent wear, devotion is as much a part of the day as the coffee break is in America. Bhakti emphasizes practice, a kind of participation with love. Bhakti brings one liberation through action. Bhakti is worship that has flooded the banks of the river of love — devotion as madhura bhava, the lover and beloved, a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the divine. It is Radha and her love for Krishna. For me, it is Johnny Cash singing “Would You Lay With Me? (In A Field of Stone)” to his beloved June Carter.

I had heard that one hundred days of attention toward any practice would change one. I would start with a daily sitting meditation practice and then see where bhakti led me. I thought I would find answers but instead the practice offered me a wealth of questions.

1. Ever since the Bhagavad-Gita spoke of bhakti as a service to God, religious texts have referred to the devotee’s transcendental state as brahma-bhuta, somewhat like a consistent state of joy or bliss. If I practice bhakti, will I increase my capacity to live in this state of bliss?
2. Bhakti is about relationship, those between beloved-lover, friend-friend, parent-child, and master-servant. Bhakti practice can be in devotion to a spiritual teacher as guru-bhakti, to a personal form of God or Goddess, or to divinity without form (nirguna.) The idea is to illuminate the devotional energy within you, to see what arises, and to come into relationship with the Divine. If I don’t believe in God, can I use a form that represents the Divine for me, such as a relationship, nature, art, reality?
3. I chose Kali as my object of devotion. In truth, Kali chose me years ago, when I lived in a cancer center for a month while my husband recovered from a rare disease and debilitating treatment. In India, Kali and her devotees are everywhere. I realized I could embrace her openly. How will my life be impacted by inviting in the fierce Mother Goddess? Could this experience bring the kind of death and destruction that Kali is famous for offering to Her devotees?
4. I spend part of each day bringing Her an offering – flowers, songs, stories, candles. She says nothing. My life heats up, in a necessary, honest way. I’m clear about beginning a new novel. I speak my truth, even when difficult, to my kindreds. I stay silent and alone when it hurts. Still, I wonder about my offerings to these spirit teachers: If bhakti is about devotion, does it matter whether there is an object of that love?
5. I decide that my husband is going to become the benefactor of my bhakti practice. I do the little things quietly. I do the grocery shopping. I fold the laundry. I clean the urine spots around the toilet. Usually hated tasks that I let my husband know about, loudly. If I’m doing this as a bhakti practice, isn’t this less about my husband though, and more about wrestling with where I refuse to offer actions with love?
6. Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.” Was Einstein cleaning the toilet?
7. What happens when we make a devotional offering of something we detest? I decide to find out by offering doing the taxes as bhakti. This results in offerings of fine chocolate to my belly. Stat.
8. Eventually I notice that when I devote myself to my husband’s desires, I feel submissive yet happy. Does this make me a bad feminist? Or a good kinkster?
9. If happiness depends at least partly upon our decisions (and scientists say 40% of happiness is based on voluntary choices that result in fulfillment or pleasure; the rest is genetic and based on conditions) then can I create happiness for myself by making choices that make other people happy? Is my devotional practice a great big boomerang of happiness?
10. In week four, I decide to offer all my cooking to a bhakti of my body’s desires. I enlist my friend Kathryn to help me discover what my body finds truly nourishing. I set out to prepare and eat delicious, nutritious food with gusto and pleasure. Is this body bhakti revelatory? Or is it merely self-indulgent?
11. Is it really possible to be anything other than self-centered? Try.
12. I notice how much gratitude my husband has for all these quiet practices. His precious thankfulness makes me want to do something every day, just to experience his pleasure, and the effects of it in my life. Does that make me manipulative?
13. On day fifty-six I read Krishnamurti. “You spend several hours a day in what you call the love, the contemplation of God. Is that devotion? …And the man who worships his work, his leader, his ideology, is also consumed by that which he is occupied…A man is devoted to his wife for various gratifying reasons; and is gratification devotion? To identify oneself with one’s country is very intoxicating; and is identification devotion?” I realize how identified I am with being the spiritual one, a holdover from the good girl archetype who slyly insinuates herself into my wild life as a way to keep me ‘safe.’ I want to release the concept of being the devoted one, to see what happens when my bhakti becomes messy and spontaneous. I wonder if I will continue practicing at all in this freedom, and whether that even matters. I am not interested in being accepted by a Zen master or a lover or my audience. I’m after the liberation that the truth brings.
14. Within Hinduism the powerful bhakti movement began in the middle ages, with the great mystical poets known as the saint-singers. They did not consider Brahmanic rituals necessary for salvation, and thus made self-realization accessible to all. Yet, despite masses of devotional literature, music and art, why hasn’t bhakti liberated India’s lower castes?
15. Anti-caste bhakti movements, including those of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalit Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar remain popular, yet the caste system has shifted very, very slowly. Some say the bhakti movement developed its own hierarchies that kept people submissive. Does great fervor translate to real revolution? Inside either societies or myself?
16. My practice moves from sitting in the room to walking alone in the wilderness. I begin to realize that the lost relationships in my life have been dissolved on my behalf, because they needed to transform, not because anything or anyone was imperfect. Was Krishnamurti right? Is there love when sentimentality and emotion and devotion cease? Is devotion really a form of self-expansion?
17. On day sixty-three, I sit with Kali and simply stare. I argue with my husband about the chores. I am reluctant to declare this path a ‘failure’ and abandon it entirely, however, the process is more of a stripping away than I imagined. India as a whole had this effect on me too. Has this bhakti path been an illusion? Has the illusion been harmful to my husband and community? Am I worshipping an illusion, and in doing so, clinging to my own gratification?
18. Blind devotion doesn’t lead to God. There is no devotion without self-knowing. When I worship another, am I worshipping myself? Am I devoting to an image of my own thoughts?
19. Billions of people are following bhakti yoga: sravana (listening to scriptural stories), kirtana (praising/ecstatic group singing), smarana (remembering/fixing the mind on God), pad a-sevana (rendering service), arcane (worshipping an image), vandana (paying homage), dasya (servitude), sakhya (friendship), and at ma-nivedana (complete surrender of the self). Is devotion actually a description of the search? And, as such, is bhakti leading me farther from simply loving what is? Or have I reached the final stage of bhakti, the surrender of the self?
20. Day ninety. I sense that there isn’t any need for me to make offerings to Kali. Unless I find myself doing so. I see that my husband requires no tending in order for his gratitude to emerge – he is natural in his loving. My practice has resulted in more open-ended questions than answers. I feel I must live into them rather than force awareness. I’m not sure if India would like this way of bhakti, yet this is the teaching that has arrived. The questions pour forth: Is devotion an escape from reality? Has reality any symbol? Can a symbol ever represent the truth? Can we love without a desire to be in devotional pleasure or divine dissatisfaction?

Sonya Lea is writing a novel set in India and New York City. She has written for The Southern Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tricycle, and for films and television. Her essays have won an Artist Trust award, and her work can be found at her blog Working Wild.