IB World Religions 4.1.4. Moksha and the Yogas: Bhakti, Jnana and Karma Notes

4.1.4. Moksha and the Yogas: Bhakti, Jnana and Karma

Moksha and mukti

1. Moksha (liberation) is what Hindus name as the final goal of religious life, the release of the atman from the round of birth, death and rebirth. The word comes from a root meaning to loosen or let go, and Hindus use mukti in the same sense.
2. Its opposite is bandha (bondage), the condition of a self still tied to rebirth. Hindus generally trace that bondage to avidya (ignorance), the mistaken identification of the atman with the body, the mind and what they own.
3. Schools describe what is reached in their own vocabulary. Followers of Advaita Vedanta speak of the atman being known as identical with Brahman, while followers of Ramanuja and Madhva speak of a self that keeps its individuality and lives in unending closeness to God.
4. Hindus do not agree that release must wait for death. Jivanmukti is liberation while still living, and a jivanmukta is a person held to be free while still in a body.
5. The ways Hindus take towards it are called yogas. The three set out in the Bhagavad Gita, devotion, knowledge and action, are the grouping most commonly taught.

Yoga as a path

1. Yoga here means a disciplined path to moksha. The word comes from a root meaning to yoke or join, and in this sense it names a whole way of life rather than a set of exercises.
2. The classic statement of the three paths is the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna answers the warrior Arjuna by setting out Bhakti yoga (devotion), Jnana yoga (knowledge) and Karma yoga (action).
3. Teachers usually present these as suited to different temperaments rather than ranked. A person of strong feeling is pointed towards devotion, a reflective person towards knowledge, an active person towards work.
4. The traditional word for that matching is adhikara, meaning a person's fitness for a particular discipline. It assumes people start from different places, not that some paths are second rate.
5. Later tradition often adds Raja yoga, the meditative discipline of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, so that the count becomes four. Hindus in practice rarely keep to one path alone.

Bhakti yoga and devotion

1. Bhakti yoga is the path of loving devotion to a personal God, and it is by a wide margin the most widely practised of the three. Its object is a God with form and character, described in the tradition as saguna.
2. Devotion is usually directed to an ishta-devata, the deity a person or family has chosen as their own. That may be Vishnu in one of his forms, Shiva, one of the goddesses, or Ganesha, and the choice does not deny the others.
3. The Gita's best known verse on the path has Krishna say that he accepts a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water offered with devotion. Hindus read it as making the offerer's attitude, rather than the cost of the gift, the thing that counts.
4. The daily shape of bhakti is puja at a home shrine or temple, bhajans and kirtan (devotional singing), japa (repeating a divine name, often with a mala) and pilgrimage.
5. The path spread through poets writing in local languages rather than Sanskrit. The Tamil Alvars and Nayanars were followed much later by Kabir, Mirabai, Tulsidas and Chaitanya.
6. Those poets pressed the point that devotion needs no priestly office and no Sanskrit. Bhakti movements have therefore often been open to people of every varna and to women.
7. Some devotional schools go further and stress prapatti, total self-surrender, holding that God's grace rather than the devotee's own effort does the decisive work.

Jnana yoga and knowledge

1. Jnana yoga is the path of knowledge, aimed at the direct realisation that the atman is not the body, not the mind and not the roles a person plays.
2. The knowledge meant is not information. Jnana in this sense is a seeing that changes the knower, and teachers distinguish it sharply from having read about the subject.
3. Advaita teachers set out a threefold method: shravana (hearing the texts from a teacher), manana (reasoning the teaching through) and nididhyasana (sustained meditation on it until it holds).
4. The classic technique is neti neti, "not this, not this", from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The practitioner sets aside each thing the self might be confused with until nothing remains to be set aside.
5. Shankara, the great exponent of Advaita Vedanta, argued that bondage consists in ignorance, so that knowledge is its direct and only cure. On this reading rituals and good works can prepare a person but cannot themselves liberate.
6. The path is demanding and is usually associated with a guru and with sannyasa (renunciation). Devotional schools accept knowledge as real but subordinate it, holding that knowing about God is not the same as loving God.

Karma yoga and action

1. Karma yoga is the path of action, in which duties are performed as duties without attachment to what they produce. It is the Gita's answer to a man who wants to escape a difficult obligation.
2. Krishna's most quoted line on it tells Arjuna that he has a right to action alone and never to its fruits. The technical name for this is nishkama karma, action free of desire for results.
3. The argument behind it is that nobody can stop acting. Since even sitting still is a choice with consequences, the tradition holds that action must be purified rather than abandoned.
4. The path is tied to sva-dharma, the duty belonging to a person's own place in life, which the Gita says is better done imperfectly than another's done well.
5. The Gita's resolution is to act and then release the result, offering it to God. Hindus call this karma phala tyaga, the renunciation of the fruit rather than of the deed.
6. Modern teachers have read it in new ways. Mahatma Gandhi treated the Gita's battlefield as an image of moral struggle, and Swami Vivekananda taught that service to the poor is worship, a reading visible in the seva organised by temples and ashrams today.

The paths together

1. Hindus rarely treat the three as separate careers. A householder may sing at a shrine in the morning, work through the day as duty and read Vedanta in the evening.
2. Commentators have nevertheless disagreed about which path the Gita finally teaches. Shankara reads the text as pointing to knowledge, while Ramanuja reads the same text as pointing to devotion.
3. The paths differ over where the decisive work happens. Devotional schools look to the grace of God, knowledge schools to insight, and the path of action to steady discipline in ordinary duties.
4. What they share is the diagnosis. Each holds that a self is bound by attachment and by ignorance of what it really is, and each aims at moksha rather than at a better rebirth.
5. Practice varies by region, sect and family in every case. Hindus themselves usually describe the yogas as different doors into one house rather than as rival systems.