Bhakti
भक्ति (bhakti)
Devotion: the love directed toward God as a path to liberation, alongside the path of knowledge and that of action. *Bhakti* is not a sentiment added to religious practice; it is a total surrender, where the devotee makes the Divine the sole object of their thought, actions, and worship. The *Gita* devotes an entire chapter to it (the "Yoga of Adoration") and presents it as the most accessible path: where knowledge of the Invisible demands an effort few can sustain, love offered to a personal God opens liberation to all, even the humblest.
Ceux, au contraire, qui ont accompli en moi le renoncement des œuvres, ceux dont je suis l’unique objet et qui, par une Union exclusive, me contemplent et me servent : Je les soustrais bientôt à cette mer des alternatives de la mort, parce que leur pensée est avec moi.
The word stems from the root bhaj-, “to share, to partake in, to take part.” Loving God, in this context, is not admiring Him from afar: it is to partake in Him, to enter into His sharing. Bhakti presupposes a personal God one can address—Krishna speaking in the first person in the Gītā—and no longer merely the impersonal Absolute of the sages.
The “Yoga of Devotion” (Chapter XII) precisely establishes this distinction. The text contrasts two groups: those who cling “to the Indivisible that cannot be seen or felt,” and those who make God their sole object. Of the first path, Burnouf has Krishna say: “their toil is greater; for corporeal things make it difficult to grasp the ways of the Invisible” (XII.5). Devotion is not a lesser path; according to the Gītā, it is the surest, for it takes man as he is—embodied and loving.
What bhakti demands is unreserved surrender—“Surrender your mind to Me, rest your reason in Me” (XII.8). And its privilege is to exclude no one: “he who worships Me does not perish,” even the “most guilty” (IX.30-31).
Bhakti ≠ jñāna. Knowledge undoes ignorance through lucidity; devotion undoes it through love and surrender. And bhakti ≠ sentimental devotion: it is not a superficial affective warmth but a renunciation of the fruits of action turned entirely toward the Divine—an exacting demand, as rigorous as that of knowledge, but of a different fabric.