Bhakti Yoga

The shortest of the four yoga books, and in some ways the most surprising. Bhakti Yoga is Vivekananda's account of devotional practice — the way of love — as a complete spiritual path. The surprise is that a thinker as analytical as Vivekananda would devote his attention to bhakti at all; the demonstration is that bhakti, examined carefully, turns out to be stricter and more demanding than the more austere paths it is usually contrasted with.

Vivekananda begins from the question of what devotion actually is, distinguishing it from sentimentality, fanaticism, and ordinary religious affection. He moves carefully through the practical prerequisites — the role of the guru, the qualifications of the aspirant, the significance of ritual substitutes and images — and into the more advanced terrain of Para-Bhakti, the love that has lost interest in everything but its object. Throughout, he is alert to the way devotion can become its own pathology: the convert's pride, the communal exclusivism, the substitution of feeling for understanding.

The closing chapters — on the worship of substitutes, on the chosen ideal, on the method and means — describe, with considerable tenderness, a discipline of attention that is closer to the practice of any serious artist than to what most people mean by religion. The book is small, dense, and rewards slow reading. A reader who comes to it through curiosity about Hindu devotional life may find, by the end, that something larger is being addressed.