Talk On Vivek Chudamani

Author(s): Chinmayanand Swami
Publisher: Chinmay Publications Trust

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tations upon the nature of the Eternal Self in us. But Sankara is trying to make use of a popular word to indicate the subtle practice of meditation. In so doing, there are critics who complain that the Prachhan Bowddha (the "veiled Buddhist," as they called Sankara sometimes) is playing upon the credulity of the people and taking away the folk with the familiar name into his own den! There are Dwaitins who criticize this stanza and say that the Acharya is deceiving the true seekers by the word 'Bhakti', mis-interpreted and mis-conceived as pure meditation!
According to Sankara, Bhakti is the path; but he adds a codicil explaining the term Bhakti. According to the author of the Upanishad commentaries, the great champion of Nondualism, Bhakti is not a practice of beggary at the feet of a noble ideal, however noble and transcendental that Truth be; but, he defines 'Devotion' openly as "a constant and consistent self-effort in raising the ego-centre from the welter of its false values to the memory and dignity of the Selfhood".
In thus defining Bhakti, Sankara cannot be criticized, at least by those who understand what he says. Bhakti, as it has come down to us today, represents almost a superstitious conception, stinking in its own decadence, a moral dread, a disgusting intellectual slavery, a crawling mental attitude, a blind dependence upon a Supreme God to take us away from all our own self-created mischiefs-Bhakti has come to mean this in the popular conception today-and we find a self-ruined society being faithfully courted by a profit-seeking priest-class, functioning generally from spiritually polluted centres that have come to be called as 'temples'. Individuals, in these days, who are visiting the temples with the seeming symptoms of devotion, after psycho-analysis, are found to be a set of hapless personalities with neither the courage to face life, nor, the conviction to renounce, neither the mental stamina to live, nor the intellectual vigour to enquire, neither the imagination to believe, nor the daring to disbelieve they are mainly a crowd of men flocking towards the sanctum-half in fear and half in deluded hopes !!