The Development of Hindu Iconography c10.4

Language: English

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The one important element, however, which has got special bearing on our subject and the name of which is to be found in at least one of the major Upaniṣads, is *Bhakti*, primarily the loving adoration of some persons by others, but secondarily the deep affectionate and mystic devotion for some personal deity who is the object of worship (in the developed sense of the term, *i.e.*, *pūjā*). If we briefly trace the history of the gradual emergence of *Bhakti* in the religious lives of the Indo-Aryans, we cannot but endorse the view just quoted.

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Among the several constituent factors which make up this element in its secondary aspect, the most important ones are 'belief in one personal god as spiritual being, the faith that his power is sufficient to secure that at the last the good will conquer, and lastly a conception of the nexus that binds together God and his worshippers as mainly moral."¹ In the later stratum of the Ṛgveda, we find the struggling appearance of one supreme entity into which all the separately conceived Vedic divinities are merged.² Some faint traces of the belief in one moral god who looks after the consciences and works of men are certainly present in some of the Ṛgvedic characterisations of Varuṇa to whom prayers for forgiveness are offered by the hymnists.³ Keith has observed, "The thought of India started from a religion which had in Varuṇa a god of decidedly moral character and the simple worship of that deity with its consciousness of sin and trust in the divine forgiveness is doubtless one of the first roots of Bhakti."⁴ But this kind of worship dedicated to such a god was arrested in its growth, and the prominence given to the other gods like Indra, Agni, Soma, and others, intimately associated with sacrifice, adversely affected it. Even then in one of the late hymns of the Ṛgveda (X.

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125), the goddess Vāc is made to say, "I give wealth unto him who gives sacrifice;...I am that through which one eats, breathes, sees and hears;...him that I love, I make strong, to be a priest, a seer, a sage." Eliot remarks about this passage, "This reads like an ancient preliminary study for the Bhagavadgītā. Like Kṛṣṇa, the deity claims to be in all and like him to reward her votaries."⁵ In the Upaniṣads, on the other hand, the mental attitude of the thinkers to the one supreme entity, viz., Brahman-Ātman, gets a character which is, in no very uncertain manner, reminiscent of Bhakti. The growth and development of monotheism, a direct result of the pantheistic conception of the earlier Upaniṣads, was the certain background on which Bhakti was to develop among the intellectual section of the composite population of India. The impersonal-personal Brahman was no doubt ill-suited to play the rôle of the one god of devotion and the strictly monistic character of some of the earlier Upaniṣadic passages was logically inimical to the ideas of loving faith; still there are many passages in some of them, which are significant. We are told in one of them that ‘Ātman cannot be gained by the instruction, nor by understanding nor by much learning; he whom Ātman chooses, by him the Ātman can be gained;

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to him the Ātman reveals its own essence (or person).’ Here, even though the idea of faith or love is not distinctly present, yet the positive assertion that Ātman selects its own and it cannot be gained by proficiency in the Vedic lore and other things does forcibly remind us of the free grace of the personal god.¹ This again seems to be clear in the Kaṭhaka passage (II. 20) which speaks of the ability of a person to see the glory of the Ātman if he is graced by the creator, if the word in this verse is taken to mean ‘by the grace of the creator’ *dhātuḥ prasādāt* and not ‘through the tranquillity of the senses’ (*dhātu-prasādāt*) as Śaṅkara explains it. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (III. 20) which contains much that is theistic in nature contains the same passage with an alteration which, though slight, is material.² It is in this Upaniṣad among the major ones, that we find for the first time the mention of the word Bhakti which occurs in the last verse of the work.³ From this time onward references to it become clearer and clearer, and Pāṇini in the several sūtras of his Aṣṭādhyāyī lays down rules for various word-formations in which the etymological sense of the word Bhakti, viz., ‘resorting to and then loving the thing resorted to with faith and devotion’ is the central idea.¹