Sunday, March 30, 2025

On Embodied Souls in Business: Hinduism and Christianity

A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions, we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied, the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with separateness from the divine included?  Furthermore, how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and spiritual beings?

Body, soul, and matter are the three fundamental elements in the created realm. Fundamentally, we are free beings but we are subject to attachments in the created realm. Honoring the free will of the soul, Brahman or Krishna creates separateness in Creation; it is not that conscious being or the supreme deity wants us to be in a condition of separation from the divine. Rather, the embodied soul is guided in part out of its inclination to live separately from the divine, and Brahman or Krishna use creative energy to accommodate the inclination and thus human free-will. It follows that not only goodness, but also passion and ignorance are the fundamental elements of the soul’s material (embodied) existence in the material world.

As the Supreme Soul, according to Vridavanath, Krishna leads embodied souls to goodness even though Krishna (and Brahman) transcends goodness. Similarly, liberation (moksha) is achieved when there is no longer any residue from good and bad karma. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the same point: that the divine command that Abraham gets to sacrifice his son Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of murder (and even attempted murder, as Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to put down his knife at the last minute). From the standpoint of the (ethical) good, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. Yet from a theological standpoint, the divine command is to sacrifice rather than murder Isaac. This can only be viewed as absurd to other characters in the story, for they do not have access to the divine command that is given exclusively to Abraham. The ultimate goal in a faith narrative is theological rather than ethical, for such a narrative lies squarely in the sui generis domain of religion, even if that of ethics is related.

In his talk, Vridavanath said that the ultimate goal of the embodied soul/self in the Bhagavad-Gita is to know Krishna, by using the faculty of buddhi, which is the enlightened use of the reasoning faculty of the mind to know the source of the created realm. However, does knowledge exhaust devotion? It seems that the former is better suited to Absolute Truth being impersonal than to it being assumed to be personal, as a Supreme Person. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities-you-perform—do that . . . (as) an offering to Me. Thus you will be freed from the bonds of action (whose) fruits are auspicious (or) inauspicious. Released, (with) the self-yoked by the Yoga of renunciation, you will come to Me."[1] The goal thus surpasses good as well as bad karma, and thus ethics, as the world itself must be renounced in terms of being attached to it for a person to be liberated. This does not mean non-action, according to the Gita; rather, renunciation means non-attachment to consequences of actions. The embodied soul/self is to do one’s duty in actions without being concerned about the results. Krishna also advocates meditation, as well as bhakti-yoga, the path of offering love by infusing each activity with love of Krishna and all creatures.

The inclusion of "whatever you give" includes offering in devotion to Krishna the fruits of one's labor (i.e., monetary compensation) yet without being attached to the consequences of our actions, including whether there will be a monetary bonus. Rather than desiring wealth, being duty-bound to perform one’s job and giving of one’s compensation to charity in devotion to Krishna and compassion to other people is the way to avoid accumulating bad karma from being greedy and ultimately to return to Krishna, and thus be liberated from any future rebirth (samsara).

The approach corresponds to the Christian social-ethic paradigm whose dominance replaced that of the one wherein having wealth is tightly coupled to greed, regardless of how the wealth is used.[1] That other paradigm is epitomized by Jesus’s saying that a rich person getting into the kingdom of God is like a camel getting through the eye of a needle (I have trouble even putting a thread through a needle’s eye). 

In the Gita, a devotee of Krishna can and in fact should fight in battle, and by implication, be a highly paid CEO of a company, but without being attached to the resulting fame and wealth, respectively. As in the “pro-wealth” (i.e., uncoupled) paradigm of Christianity, a devotee of Krishna does not have to renounce accumulating wealth, as long as at least some of it is given away in charity, in order to avoid serving two masters—Krishna and mammon. That Christian paradigm is, however, less strict because the Jesus-devotee does not have to be detached from the consequences of one’s work, including the prospect of getting a bonus. 

I submit, therefore, that the Christian “pro-wealth” paradigm is more suspectable to the onslaught of greed. This may be why Jesus in the Gospels is firm in demanding that the rich man give away all of his wealth to follow Jesus. It can be concluded that the susceptibility to succumb to greed is treated as higher in the “pro-wealth” Christian paradigm that in the Bhagavad-Gita.



1. Gita 9.27-28 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 199.
2. Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth and God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.

Friday, March 28, 2025

On Absolute Truth in Hinduism: Impersonal Energy or a Supreme Person?

At Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025, a man whose Hindu name is Kaustubha spoke on the three phases of ultimate truth: Brahman, Paramatma, and Bhagavan. Is the absolute truth an energy or a person? Is God a non-personal energy or a person. In Vedanta Hinduism, this is a salient question. According to Kaustubha, absolute truth is that which is not dependent on anything else; a truth from which everything else comes. Kaustubha defined Brahman as being impersonal energy, which is that from which everything else manifests. The Upanishads emphasize the realization by a person that one’s true self is identical to the impersonal energy of being itself that is infinite, aware, powerful, and blissful.  Although the Bhagavad-Gita can be interpreted thusly, as per Shankara’s commentary, but also as Krishna being the Supreme Person, which is more ultimate than Brahman. What gives? Who, or what, is on top in terms of ontological ultimacy (i.e., ultimately real)?

Vyasdeva wrote Srimad Bhagavatam, in which divine love is emphasized. He was trying to clarify the Hindu scriptures. For him, devotion includes knowledge of renunciation (i.e., Brahman realization). Also, devotion is not oriented to getting earthly things, such as wealth. Life should be used for enquiring into the nature of absolute truth. Vyasdeva’s answer: “Learned transcendentalists who know the absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan.” These are three features of the one absolute truth, which is the source of all existence. We can know that truth in three ways. They are “qualitatively one and the same. The same substance is realized as impersonal Brahman by the students of the Upanisads, as localized Pramatma by the Hiranyagabhas or the yogi, and as Bhagavan by the devotees.”[1]

Paramatma is a manifestation of Vishnu in the human proverbial heart.  Bhagavan is in a personal form as the Supreme Person. Vyasdeva claims that “Bhagavan, or the Personality of the Godhead, and impersonal Brahman is the glowing effulgence of the Personality of Godhead. . . . (T)hose who are perfect seers of the Absolute truth know well that the above three features of the one Absolute Truth are different perspective views seen from different angles of vision.” Yet Vyasdeva contends in his text that Bhagavan is superior to Paramatma and Brahman. To be sure, he nestles realization of Brahman and Paramatma within the realization of Bhagavan. A person does not have realization of the Supreme Person (Bhagavan) without realizing Paramatma in one’s heart and without Brahman being realized at identical to one’s innermost self (atman).

Kaustubha interpreted Brahman realization as a person realizing that one is made of spiritual energy, and thus is in reality eternal, immutable, and one with the universe. In saying, “I am beyond desire,” a person has an evenness of mind. “I am spirit.” Paramatma realization too can be achieved by a yogi in meditation.  In this realization, a person might say, “I am in constant contact with, and under the shelter of the supreme consciousness, the cosmic intelligence, the soul of the universe.” That Supreme Soul exists within a person because it exists in one’s own heart. This divine Being is controlling the material universe, and is the dear friend of everyone. Brahman realization is included within this realization. In Bhagavan realization, a person might say, “I realize and love the supreme form of Vishnu, which has all-attractive names, forms, qualities and pastimes, and expands ultimately through its various energies and reciprocates with my love.” The material realm consists of three gunas; each one of these modes of energy, illumination, detachment, and destruction, has an influence on a person.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna’s recipe for not being attached to these gunas is devotion to the deity, Krishna.[2] But aren’t forms the opposite of Brahman realization, such that seeing beyond forms is necessary? Krishna answers that Brahman is one of that deity’s energies, so if a person is lovingly devoted to Krishna as the Supreme Person (i.e., Bhagavan), a person has Brahman realization too, so viewing Absolute Truth as personified in a form does not violate the non-dual quality of Brahman as impersonal energy. In fact, Kaustubha implied that devotion to Absolute Truth as Krishna, the Supreme Person (and thus the highest deity in the Hindu polytheistic pantheon), is better in resulting in a person being compassionate to other people than is Brahman realization, wherein a person’s true self (atman) is known to be identical to the infinite impersonal energy that pervades (and is) reality.

In Srimad Bhagavatam, Vyasdeva asserts, “The most advanced devotee sees within everything the soul of all souls, the Supreme Person. Consequently, he sees everything in relation to the Supreme Lord and understands that everything that exists is eternally situated within the Lord.”[3] So, a “devotee who faithfully engages in the worship of the Deity in the temple but does not behave properly toward other devotees or people in general is called a prakrta-bhakta, a materialistic devotee, and is considered to be in the lowest position.”[4] Such devotees, Kaustubha claimed, are not devotees because they do not recognize the divine apart from the Supreme Person.  Hypocrisy comes with this. In contrast, a sincere devotee “shows mercy to ignorant people who are innocent and disregards the enmity of those who are inimical towards them.”[5] Compassion toward all naturally emanates from having loving compassion in devotion to the Supreme Person. That is, regular religious experience that is sincere automatically renders one more compassionate to other finite beings. I submit that such a mechanism is more efficacious than is intention to put a religious teaching into practice by being compassionate to other people because we have various inclinations that can eclipse any intention.

Is it the case, however, that Bhagavan realization, in which the devotee’s love is directed to Krishna as the Supreme Person qua ultimate reality, is better than Brahman realization in resulting in people being compassionate to other people? I contend that Bhagavan realization is indeed superior because the currency of compassion is in a person’s bhakti relation to the deity already. In contrast, knowing Brahman—that a person’s self is really the same as the impersonal being that supports the created realm as a floor of sorts—does not in itself include compassion. Rather, it is by realizing that we are all the same because we are all basically the same “substance” as Brahman that the implication is reached cognitively and through meditation that we should be compassionate to other people. In other words, an experiential, extratextual realization of the identity of individual and infinite being is not itself compassion; rather, the exercise of compassion should follow from the realization. Even if this happens automatically rather than by intention, which is admittedly possible, compassion is not in the realization itself, whereas compassion is in bhakti devotion to Absolute Truth in a personified form. This is the idea.

Such a conclusion is not necessarily generalizable to reach Kaustubha’s claim that Bhagavan realization is superior to Brahman realization, for it has not been shown that Absolute Truth reduces to (or is epitomized by) compassion. For example, Brahman realization may be superior to bhakti yoga in terms of not suffering from being attached to the desire for objects in this world. Furthermore, Kaustubha’s hierarchy of realizations flies in the face of his preachment on religious toleration. A person who values compassion most may prefer Bhagavan realization, whereas another person who is primarily concerned with not suffering may prefer identifying intellectually and experientially with Brahman. Even if the latter is considered to be one of Krishna’s energies (and thus that the Supreme Person is more real than even Brahman), encapsulating the divine in a human form is, as David Hume points out, highly anthropomorphic (i.e., positing human characteristics onto non-human things or animals). As Nietzsche might say, it is human, all too human, to view Absolute Truth in our own terms. It is much more difficult, Hume maintains, to grasp divine simplicity without hanging recognizable forms on the transcendent. Furthermore, that Brahman is one of Krishna’s energies may defy the nature of Brahman itself as that which even the creation of the gods comes, as Brahman is out of which everything that exists comes, is sustained, and ends. It may be asked nonetheless if a better means of showing compassion as caritas seu benevolentia universalis to everyone isn’t worth some anthropomorphism if that is necessary to get compassion “up front” in the process of realization itself such that compassion may more automatically flow out, with other people, fellow devotees or not, as the referents.



1. A.C. Bhaktivedenta, Purport to Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2.11.
2. See the Bhagavad-gita, 14.21-27.
3. Vyasdeva, Srimad Bhagavatam (11.2.45-47).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Monday, March 24, 2025

Transcendence in Action in the Bhagavad-gita

Chaitanya Charan spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 about action and transcendence in the Bhagavad-gita. Arjuna faces adversity even though he is a good. That life is suffering is a Noble Truth in Buddhism. Why noble? Even suffering can be ennobling. That life can be unfair is a given in the Gita. Getting less than we think we deserve can be from our bad karma in a previous life. So, we can’t really know what we actually deserve, so it is important to accept results. They aren’t in our control anyway, whereas our present karma is. So, the advice is to be committed to doing your best in acting, but with detachment on whatever results from the action. I contend that detachment from pride and especially arrogance goes automatically with the transcendence of detachment from not only the results of one’s actions, but also from the created realm itself, which by analogy looks smaller and smaller as the planet Earth does from a spacecraft on the way to the Moon.

Acceptance and commitment to acting lead to transcendence, spirituality goes from being an anchor to being an airplane. In terms of bhukti devotion, Krishna is the higher reality. As a person grows spiritually, the deity becomes more important and the world’s importance becomes less. Transcendence is a matter of being more oriented to “another reality” than to the world, and thus such a person might seem to be not fully “here” in conversations with other people. Differing somewhat from Charan’s interpretation of the Gita, I contend that the higher “reality” in the Gita can be understood to be a deity itself, as in bhukti devotionalism, or, as Shankara claims in his commentary on the Gita, reaching the higher reality can be thought of as an ongoing realization that a person can have that one’s self (atman) is really the very same as brahman, which is conscious, limitless, powerful, and blissful being. In bhukti (i.e., devotion to a deity), according to Charan, a deity as a higher reality that is to be the primary focus even while the person is committed to actions in the world.  Charan pointed out that bhukti devotion does not mean that a person should not be fixed on a goal, for a goal is held before acting whereas results are afterward.

In the Gita, according to Charan, Arjuna is initially perplexed. If he does not fight, disaster on the battlefield would be likely because the other side, which has unjustly cast out Arjuna and his brothers from a share in rulership, would win. If Arjuna does fight, he might kill his teachers and even one of his grandfathers. The Gita is essentially a call to action; the philosophical basis for acting is not the point in the Gita. Act, but with detachment from whatever results. Act with wisdom; act with a higher consciousness, which, means transcending attachment to things of the world to a higher realization.

Whether in being oriented to Charan’s bhukti higher reality personified as Krishna or Shankara’s impersonal brahman, that the process of transcending the world shifts a person’s orientation such that the world looks smaller and the higher reality looks larger is decisive in Charan’s view of spirituality gained from having studied and meditated on the Gita text. He did not mention, however, the compatible idea that a natural or automatic sense of humility is an important inherent byproduct of shifting (and then holding) one’s primary focus to a reference-point that is by definition, according to the Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius, beyond the limits of human thoughts, perception, and emotions. Even in the realization that one’s atman is identical to brahman, a person’s ego cannot be front and center if the reference point (i.e., brahman) is not sourced in and thus limited to the world in which we live (i.e., the created realm, whether it is created by brahman or Krishna). Being limitless is a quality of brahman

Human beings are so steeped in pride (i.e., the presumptions of ego, as if deserving to be on stilts during a flood) that the byproduct of having a qualitatively unique kind of orientation (i.e., in terms of religious transcendence) is crucial not only to being able to be at peace, but also for interpersonal relations to be so as well. A focus on Jesus or the kingdom of God can serve the same purpose for a Christian even without taking into account the leitmotif of humility in the Gospels. In fact, that humility is a byproduct of maintaining a transcendental orientation even while performing actions in the world and relating to other people is especially valuable precisely because intending to be humble can be such a weak motive in human nature. I suppose that relying more on a natural byproduct of a distinct kind of orientation than on an intention to have the byproduct itself as a quality may be Taoist in nature. In other words, it may be more natural to human nature to assume an orientation to a transcendent referent point or entity than it is to try to be humble, given the gravitas of the human ego.  This is not to say that valuing humility highly as a virtue is not another means by which a person can be naturally humble.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Integrating Our Humanity and Divinity

Dayal Gauranga spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga conference in 2025 on how spirituality can complement psychology in the healing of past traumas. He explicitly related religion/spirituality and psychology; my question is whether he succeeded, and if so, what put him past the finishing line. I contend that even though at times his use of spirituality lapsed into psychology (i.e., conflating the two domains by psychologizing spirituality), at the end of his talk he related spirituality to truth, which is not within the purview of psychology. By truth, I mean religious truth, rather than, for example, 2+2=4.  I contend, moreover, that disentangling religion from other domains by plucking out weeds from other gardens so to be able to uncover and thereby recognize the native fauna in the religious garden, as well as pulling the religious weeds that have been allowed to spread other gardens is much needed, especially in a secular context. It is with this in mind that I turn to analyzing Gauranga’s spiritual-psychological theory of healing oneself of traumatic wounds.

Gauranga began his lecture by discussing two patterns that inhibit spiritual development. One is struggling with everyday human experience because of childhood conditioning, ego, and unresolved wounds.  The second is engaging in spiritual bypassing by using spiritual practice to avoid pain rather than transform it. Transforming hurt into a sense of wholeness requires a person to integrate one’s spiritual dimension with one’s embodied (i.e.,, materialist) daily experience.

The process of overcoming the obstacles begins with identifying unresolved psychological pain, even if it is due to a wound from long ago in childhood. Gauranga’s main point is that spirituality can be used in the healing process; it is not only psychological. What, then, is spirituality? One view is that it is the understanding of, connecting to, and living as our authentic self, which is not material. I believe he had Advaita Vedanta in mind here. A person is not one’ bank balance, one’s insecurities, one’s job title, etc. Rather than leave these things behind, the task is to integrate them with one’s spiritual dimension. In Vedanta meditation, the key lies in getting in touch with one’s self not as ego and definitely not as the id, but, instead, as a one’s seat of consciousness. I contend that the seat goes beyond being conscious of things, including one’s own personality and desires. By a person getting in touch with one’s seat from which one is conscious of even oneself as an embodied creature, Gauranga claims that it is possible to turn inward in compassion to heal the wounded parts of oneself, such that the person can be restored to wholeness, which includes being spiritually connected to other people. Gauranga cleverly brought up the notion of a cybernetic system, such as a thermostat in a house that regulates heating and cooling, that responds to external stimuli and returns to a homeostatic state of equilibrium. If the temperature in a house gets too high, the thermostat is triggered to bring the temperature back down to the temperature-setting. Human beings have such a system internally; we can return from unalignment to spiritual wholeness.

It seems to me that by drawing on the theory of Gregory Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, our species can, if it has the will, enable the planet’s carbon dioxide thermostat to function to being the atmosphere and oceans back to equilibrium. Whether that includes our species may depend on how long until, or even if, we will it collectively, as a species, and back up our will with political power. Bateson theorizes the maximizing, schizogenic forces, such as our species is described by Agent Smith in the film, The Matrix, can piece ecologizing forces that are oriented to equilibrium. Perhaps in terms of psychology, the human psyche has both types of forces instinctually. Gauranga’s point can be interpreted as adding that the ecologizing forces that are part of a person’s mind can involve spiritual wholeness, which the schizogenic self-maximizing force of the mind as ego can, unfortunately, knock off kilter, and thus off from equilibrium.

Gauranga applies his notion of spiritual wholeness both to a person and to one’s interpersonal relations. In both respect, compassion plays a key role. It is precisely in being compassionate to one’s wounds from past trauma that one self-heals. I contend that this does no obviate the need for psychoanalysis by a trained psychologist. In fact the defense mechanisms that can even come to be imbedded in one’s personality can become so engrained that therapy is needed for a person to be able to recognize them. A person could then apply compassion to those internal distorted mechanisms too. Once psychologically and spiritually healed, and thus rendered mentally and spiritually whole, a person is freer internally to be compassionate in one’s interpersonal relationships and external spiritual connections.  

In short, we can discover and reconnect to our inherent sense of self, and thus compassionately relate to the parts of us that have been wounded by past traumas. In other words, a person can integrate one’s body, psyche, and spirit and thus be whole. Krishna’s first and final advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita is to surrender and fear not. From a standpoint of less fear, a person can approach one’s spiritual connections in the world with broader compassion, as in Augustine’s notion of benevolentia universalis.

Recognition of one’s own spirituality and materiality/biology includes reconnecting with one’s body in the present moment, rather than in recalling past trauma. Spirituality does not lie in forgetting that we are embodied, which includes the brain. Then can come recognition of the mentally and spiritually wounded parts of oneself and the related psychologically protective defense mechanisms, relating to those parts of oneself with compassion and curiosity. By this means, a person can release and repair those burdens so to be able to return to the deeper self and free up one’s connection to the sacred. That is, a person’s spirituality can be a means by which recurrent pain from past trauma can be healed. Having sketched Gauranga’s theory of healing, I now turn to the question of whether his theory adequately distinguishes spirituality, and thus religion, from psychology. From the standpoint of the religious “garden,” I want to pluck out weeds from other gardens to be able to find what is distinctly and uniquely religious in the theory.

Inherent spiritual being, which is one’s own self below all the crap, is not reachable by a cognitive process, which, Gauranga claimed, is psychology. This may be a reductionistic claim, however, as psychology involves emotion. The pain from past traumas is itself emotional rather than cognitive. Presumably psychotherapy includes a patient feeling unpleasant emotions rather than merely thinking about or analyzing them. Reducing psychology to cognition is thus problematic. Gauranga’s claim that psychology is limited to the mind is more fitting, if the mind is understood to include the biology of the brain. Cartesian mind-body duality can by the twenty-first century be shown the door thanks to natural science. Gauranga asserted that a person’s authentic self (atman) goes beyond the reach of a person’s mind. Certainly atman lies beyond the stench of ego, but Gauranga was saying something else: using the mind to cognitively know one’s self at its very foundation or ground falls short. To be sure, because the mind (i.e., concentration) is used in meditation, which is oriented in Vedanta Hinduism to realizing one’s ultimate self as identical to brahman, distinguishing psychology from spirituality is not so clear. However, experiencing “pure” consciousness as being itself as a person’s real self can be said to transcend the mind because thoughts are arrested as the person is just aware of one’s being. To be aware does not mean that the mind is aware of anything other than awareness itself. Having focused on a repetitive mantra, prayer, scriptural passage, or divine attribute in a bhukti (i.e., lovingly devotional) way, the human mind can suddenly just stop, and just be aware. A person is then simply part of awareness, which as universalized is brahman. The person is not thinking about lunch, Krishna, Jesus, or even oneself, for thinking itself has stopped. Even the passage of time is not noticed. In this respect, spiritual experience does not reduce to, or even include, psychology because both thoughts and emotions have stopped.

Gauranga is on less firm ground in asserting that compassion towards a person’s own psychological wounds is spiritual in nature. Compassion is a virtue in philosophical ethics. Furthermore, David Hume asserts that sympathy, which can give rise to compassion, is involved in making a moral judgment regarding other people’s motives and acts. Lastly, Freud posits the psychological existence of not only the the id and ego, but also the superego, the latter of which is in a mind saying what the person (or another person) should think, feel or do. Freud’s concept of the superego, which is psychological in classification, is very close to compassion. To wit, I should be compassionate, and you should be compassionate.

Therefore, compassion itself cannot be claimed to be distinctly spiritual even if it is a byproduct of the realization experientially and cognitively that one’s real self is identical to brahman, which is infinite being that is conscious, powerful, and, according to Ramanuja, blissful as well. To be sure, compassion is no stranger to religion, as the personifications as Krishna and Jesus illustrate. Compassion is part of what Gauranga called “spiritual connection.” I’m sure he would agree that such connection is not the same as what is described in social psychology textbooks. In this respect, it is crucial that he brought in the notion of (a) higher being as being foundational to spiritual connection. Whether as one’s real self as being realized as identical to the transcendent, inherently unmanifest brahman, or as a deity such as Krishna, including a transcendent extratextual referent distinguishes spirituality as qualitatively different from psychology, and even as unique, as sui generis.

Interestingly, religions in which religious belief is important have a harder job in claiming that spirituality is distinct from Gauranga’s cognition-delimited notion of psychology. Spirituality can be distinct even from a more expansive definition of psychology. A “straw-man” is not needed for religion to survive the modern onslaught of psychology. Neither must psychology set up a merely “straw” definition of spirituality to resist its encroachments! The saying of politicians that everything is political also gets at the maximizing (schizogenic) nature of human domains. In claiming sovereignty or rights to wholeness, religion too can be understood to schizogenic rather than ecologizing. From the standpoint of other domains, the hyper-extended right of sovereignty that religion claims stops at its borders. This does not invalidate the distinctly religious meaning, which would represent an overreach onto the territory of religion by schizogenic forces in another domain.

The key, I submit, to Gauranga’s claim that spirituality is distinct from psychology lies in the type of referent that anchors a person’s spirituality. In asserting that “any real healing includes the spiritual self as a healing agent” as distinct from the psychological self (i.e., the mind), Gauranga added that “reconnecting to the truth of what we are is spiritual” rather than psychological in nature. Truth. In including that word, Gauranga successfully supported his claim that spirituality is distinct from psychology, for the latter domain does not include making truth claims, just as history too cannot. Faith narratives are not historical accounts, whether in authorial intent or written content, for drawing on historical events (and adapting others rather than merely adopting them) is not the same as writing a historical account.

In being oriented to one’s true self (atman), and as being identical to brahman, or to loving Krishna or Jesus compassionately, especially in extratextual experience that goes beyond thinking over specifical scriptural passages, a person’s yearning for distinctly religious truth is not within the realm of psychology. Crucially, religious truth is based beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotion), according to the sixth-century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. In chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-gita, the vision that Krishna provides for Arjuna of Krishna transcends Arjuna’s cognitions of Krishna’s divine attributes. As Gauranga noted in concluding his talk, Krishna’s last advice to Arjuna is not to be afraid. The vision in the Gita overwhelms and perplexes Arjuna’s mind.

Therefore, the incorporation of truth, as in a person’s true self, or as a transcendent being (i.e., a deity) that is believed to be the Supreme Person and thus ultimately real renders spiritual connection distinctly religious and not just the quality of garden-variety compassion. Even revelation must travel into our realm as through a smoky stained-glass window, according to Augustine. Rather than arriving untouched through inert human nature as pristine, Augustine’s view can be put in terms of the recognition that what we know, perceive, and feel regarding religious truth inevitably must pass through our biochemical processes, which include even our use of reason (i.e., ratiocination). Simply put, even though religious truth is eternal, not material, and infallible, no person alive as embodied qualifies (i.e., not counting souls in heaven or liberated individual selves) for these divine attributes. Even so, a human instinctual (even genetic) urge to yearn for a reference-point that is transcendent may exist even though the referent transcends instinct. Rather than bypassing the psychological work that must be done to heal trauma, acting on such an urge by meditation, bhukti, ritual, or prayer can provide a transcendent sense of grounding that can fortify distinctly psychological therapy and self-healing. Spirituality and psychology can work together without falling into each other, or one conquering the other. 

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Interpreting Scriptures: On Referential Realities beyond the Text

In Christianity, Paul wrote that if the resurrection of Christ Jesus didn’t really take place, then faith is for naught, but he also wrote that faith without love is for naught. The assumption that if Jesus was killed and raised historically speaking, why be a Christian, has had much greater currency than the assumption that if a person is not kind and compassion in heart and deed to people who have been insulting or have damaged the person, that person is not really a Christian. In short, the value of the religious meaning in the New Testament has typically been assumed to depend on the extratextual (i.e., beyond the text of the Bible) existence of Jesus. Using Vedanta hermeneutics (i.e., method of interpreting a text) in Hinduism, I argue that the assumption is incorrect. This is not to make a historical claim one way or the other regarding Jesus or Krishna; rather, I want to claim that the religious meaning in a scriptural text does not depend on making the assumption that the reality described therein exists beyond the text. Although hermeneutically based, this argument may sway attention back to religious meaning itself as primary, including in regard to engaging in pious actions.

In Hinduism, Mimamsa and Vedanta commentators “’restain’ extra-textual reference within the overarching frame of the text, which is not replaced by knowledge, even if the object of knowledge remains ‘outside the text.’”[1] To be sure, the Brahma-sutras “could lend itself to the idea that the Upanisads communicate various authors’ intentions and point to a reality beyond the text.”[2] This is problematic because “external reference to impermanent realities threatened ultimately to undercut the posited eternity and permanence of the sacred text itself. The system had to be nonreferential, meaningful in itself, and expressive in that meaning, in order to be protected from a changing and unpredictable world.”[3]

What about positing of imperishable, and thus permanent realities as existing outside the text? Doing so would not undercut the posited eternity and permanence of a sacred text itself, but it would mean that such a text is referential and thus not meaningful as a system within itself. Also, is not such a positing of something existent outside of the text necessary for the extra-textual component of the hermeneutic (or else the meditation is just on abstract knowledge)?  Both the Mimamsa and Vedanta schools presuppose that “text and performance—meditational or sacrificial—imply, reflect, and instigate one another.”[4] Perhaps it can be said that the meaning in the text is primary in the textual hermeneutic, whereas the extra-textuality reality is primary in the extratextual portion of the Vedanta hermeneutic. Hans Frei, who wrote in his Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative that neither form nor historical criticism should eclipse the religious meaning of a religious text. In other words, Frei holds that asking about “the historical Jesus” and whether different authors, each having their own agenda, contributed to a text gets in the way of giving the meaning of a religious story enough air to breath in a reader’s heart and mind.

 I wonder if questions concerning reality beyond a text and being referred to textually should also be bracketed so not to eclipse the meaning that is in the text. And yet, the Vedanta project “is permanently about the reading and use of texts, and about brahman as an extratextual reality communicated through texts, without either the text or the reality being thereby rendered superfluous.”[v] Perhaps the question is whether a text alone (bracketing extratextual praxis) can only allow for the nominalist rather than a realist assumption as regards the reality being described or discussed textually.

It may be that making the realist assumption—that the reality described in a text really exists outside the text—makes sense, for why would an author claim writing a text that a reality has meaning if that reality doesn’t really exist outside of the text. On the other hand, making a nominalist assumption keeps the focus on the text itself, whose religious meaning is primary in a hermeneutic. Put another way, even if brahman or Krishna do not exist beyond the meaning in a text, the textual religious meaning can still have value. As Victor Frankl discovered, the human need for meaning can be felt in even very dire circumstances. Distinctly theological or religious meaning can sooth a troubled heart or mind even if God doesn’t exist beyond the text. The textual meaning is real in that it is hardly illusory and can have an effect on people without having to approach a text as a realist rather than as a nominalist. This is not to say that the realist assumption is never the correct assumption to make; rather, it is to say that the validity and usefulness of religious meaning in a scriptural text does not depend on making that assumption. If so, and because we mere mortals cannot be certain whether an extratextual reality exists as it extends beyond the limits of our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, religious meaning gleamed from a religious text ought to be primary in interpreting one and the basis upon which a religious practitioner acts, whether in worship or interpersonally in daily life.

In Christianity, for example, being compassionate to people whom the Christian doesn’t like or who don’t like the Christian should not depend on whether the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus occurred historically and even metaphysically. Even as a textual illustration, the Passion Narrative has meaning and thus value, which can be put into practice regardless of historical and metaphysical questions. Selfless love as to a detractor or even a hated or hateful enemy as a means to entering a different spiritual condition (e.g., the kingdom of God) has its own meaningfulness and value both in itself and as put into practice. Both Paul and Augustine wrote that God is such love. In Vedanta Hinduism, brahman itself can be grasped as identical to an person's self (atman) in experientially meditation, which, though extra-textual, is based on concentrating on the meaning of a scriptural passage. 



1. Francis X. Clooney, “Binding the Text: Vedanta as Philosophy and Commentary,” in Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia, ed., Jeffrey R. Timm (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), p. 56.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 58.
5. Ibid., p. 61.

On Hindu Metaphysics

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, Anuttama spoke on metaphysics as a spiritual reality. He argued that the nature of that reality is a personality—that of the Hindu god Krishna. I contend that Vaishnavism also contains an alternative depiction of reality, which is impersonal rather than a deity. The difference may come down to whether compassion or being that is conscious, infinite, and blissful is primary.

Anuttama claimed that there are four primary views of reality, his favorite being the fourth. Firstly, there is the view that the universe has a material cause (rather than being created by a deity). This view can accommodate humanitarianism, though also hedonism. Another view holds that there is a deity, but then it can be asked, why is there so much suffering in the world? Thirdly is the view that the world is just an illusion, and we should realize this. The film, The Matrix, is based on this view. Also consistent with this view is the belief, “I am a deity and the universe,” and it is just an illusion that we are mortal, limited creatures.

The fourth view is that of Vaishnavism. There is a supreme reality, and that is the Supreme Person, which is the deity Krishna, and we are immortal. There is no death and ultimately no rebirth. Also, a person can have a relationship with that highest reality, and a person counts in that relationship. The idea is that there is a deity and a person can have a relationship with it, and the divine personality is with the person at every moment. There is reaction (karma), but hell does not exist. Suffering comes from the choice to have pleasure apart from that relationship. Also, suffering serves a purpose: to help us realize the importance of the relationship. The purpose of life is to reawaken that relationship.

Being oriented to a relationship with Krishna can make our relationships with other people less selfish, which means that even interpersonal interactions can be more spiritual than materialistic. Even in business, a proprietor can be less exploitative of labor and even customers by looking at the long-term rather than to make a quick profit. In short, we can spiritualize this world by recognizing how compassionate Krishna is, and in being oriented to that, we can infuse compassion in our relationships with other people.

Turning now to analysis of Anuttama’s theology, Shankara’s (8th century, CE) Advaita Vedantism can be evoked by way of a contrast ironically to delve more deeply into Anuttama’s Vaishnavism. Whereas bhukti yoga, in being devotional, is based on there being a Supreme Person (i.e., Krishna) as the ultimate reality, Advaita (non-dualist) Vedanta posits the impersonal brahman as the ultimate reality, while Krishna (Vishnu) is a manifestation (i.e., an appearance created by brahman) rather than being itself real. "According to the Upanisads, brahman is the highest reality and reference point for all meaning, and ultimately for salvation as well."[1] Even in reaching liberation from the cycle of rebirths (and heaven), knowing brahman not only cognitively but also as realized experientially as a person focuses one’s consciousness on one’s being, understood to be one’s true self (atman) and also identical with brahman, which is being that is conscious and infinite (and Ramanuja adds “bliss”).

Even Vaishnavism has been characterized in a way that makes brahman seem more real than is Krishna. For example, Britannica describes Vaishnavism as the belief that “absolute reality (brahman) is manifested in Vishnu, who in turn is incarnated in Rama, Krishna, and other avatars.”[2] The verb, manifests, is what implies that Vishnu, and thus Krishna, come out of that reality rather than instantiate it. Putting brahman in parentheses is to state that it is absolute reality.

Anuttama would undoubtedly reject Britannica’s description of the relationship between Krishna and absolute reality (as brahman).  Anuttama would doubtlessly type the word, “Krishna,” in parentheses or even erase the word brahman to convey the idea that a deity, or Supreme Person,” is that which is absolutely real. Similarly, Ramanuja interprets chapter 7 of the Bhagavad-gita as affirming that Krishna is ontologically higher than brahman, whereas Shankara reverses the arrows in his commentary because in non-dualist philosophy (i.e, Advaita Vedanta), only brahman is real whereas both creation and deities are merely manifestations in the realm of appearance.

Furthermore, because Anuttama states that Krishna is known to be compassionate, and this is how a person’s relationship with the deity can rub off on interpersonal relations, the metaphysics of Vaishnavism may actually be that it is compassion itself that is ultimately real. In bhukti devotion to Krishna, a person may really be loving compassion itself, which manifests as a deity (i.e., personified). If so, then the disagreement between Vaishnavism theology and Advaita Vedanta philosophy boils down to the precipitate of either compassion or being (which is infinite, conscious, and powerful).[3] Which is more real than the other, and is the winner the ultimate or absolute reality such that no third candidate could possibly usurp the esteemed title?

Brahman is not just infinite being, for Shankara holds that it is conscious and powerful.[4] Can it be that being that is aware is compassion (or compassionate)? Creating the world could then be understood as an act of compassion; certainly, brahman cannot have a desire out of some lack. Rather, the power of unlimited being becomes kinetic in manifesting itself in creating. Differing from the Advaita philosophy, Ramanuja adds bliss as a quality of brahman. Can being itself that is infinite, aware, powerful, and blissful be innately compassion(ate)? We are closer, I think, by adding Ramanuja’s bhukti theology (i.e, that brahman is bliss, which not by accident is conducive to personifying ultimate reality as a deity) to reaching an identity relation between brahman and compassion (similar to how Shankara emphasizes the identity of atman and brahman).

A person who has bliss is more likely to be compassionate than is an unhappy miser. Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol illustrates this point. When Scrooge is blissful on Christmas morning after being visited by three ghosts, he is suddenly compassionate to his employee and his nephew, whose Tiny Tim would die otherwise. By virtue of being blissful, Scrooge has become an avatar or personification of compassion in the story. Jesus in the Gospels is also a personification of compassion, whose root there is love (i.e., agape seu benevolentia universalis). Perhaps in his philosophical theology, Shankara meant to say, Don’t get too carried away with the personification; it’s what’s inside—the essence—that counts. Christians could take a lesson in this respect.

Therefore, by using Ramanuja as a bridge of sorts, Krishna as being essentially compassion itself can be understood be blissful brahman exercising its unmanifest power. This is not to say, however, that being itself is compassion. Rather, in attempting a reconciliation of the metaphysics of bhukti Vaishnavism and Advaita Vedanta, compassion can be reckoned to be implied as a quality of brahman. It is infinite, conscious, powerful, blissful, and compassionate, but this is not to say that the essence of brahman is compassion.

That the Advaita Vedanta philosophy claims that brahman has a few specific positive qualities is crucial to being able to construe brahman as compassion. To put this another way, the essence or “substance” of brahman must be compassion for the reconciliation to be complete. To contend that being itself, which is everywhere that exists, absent the qualities of consciousness, power, and bliss, is essentially compassion is a much more difficult claim to argue; the positive qualities that being has in Advaita Vedanta make the job easier. Also, to want existence to be compassion is not to say that existence is compassion. Thirdly, to claim that brahman compassionately creates the world is not to say that brahman is (in essence) compassion. Even saying that being blissful, brahman is naturally compassionate does not get us to an identity relation between brahman and compassion, but we’re getting closer. The argument needs to be that being that has the Advaitan positive qualities (as well as the negative qualities, such as imperishable) is compassion. I’m not there yet. Perhaps the key is recognizing that the realization of brahman is not only by studying a text such as the Upanisads, but also in an extratextual [i.e., experiential] process of realization, such as by meditation on positive and negative qualities of brahman. It is not so “that brahman can be thought about in general, under a composite form constructed by harmonizing all Upanisadic texts. Rather, it [i.e., the nature of brahman] presumes an irreducible, ongoing act of reading, remembering, and combining texts, in which the extratextual and full nature of brahman modifies how we read texts with their many distinctions.”[5] Translated into Christian terms, the extratextual element can be thought of as praying on a biblical passage rather than just studying it.

For example, in meditating on certain qualities of brahman, a person might feel compassion generally but intensely, meaning not directed to a particular deity or person. Not having directionality, the compassion would be experienced as compassion itself. Because the experiential context is the experience of the identity-relation of one’s own true self (atman) and brahman, the meditator might conclude that compassion naturally falls out from the experiential realization of identity of individual and infinite being, or is integral to it, and thus is the very essence of brahman, or at least quality thereof.

Assuming the relation of identity between brahman and compassion can be established, the two Hindu schools of thought might then want to argue over whether knowing or loving compassion (as brahman) is better, and more particularly, which is more conducive to a person being compassionate. Is being a brahman-knower or a bhukti devotee a better way to instantiate compassion in the very being of an individual self (atman)? Furthermore, perhaps it is in a person being compassionate to the extent that one can know or love one’s own essence/self as compassion that brahman, which is unmanifest, manifests its conscious bliss as power, all this being otherwise known to us as compassion. Maybe the beingness of conscious, empowered bliss is essentially compassion.



1. Francis X. Clooney, “Binding the Text: Vedanta as Philosophy and Commentary,” in Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia, ed., Jeffrey R. Timm (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), p. 47.
2. Britannica entry for “Vaishnavism”. Britannica.com (accessed March 21, 2025).
3. That these are primary qualities of brahman can be found at Francis X. Clooney, “Binding the Text,” p. 54.
4. That the vacuum of outer space can hold energy is one way of conceptualizing the latent power of being itself. Einstein’s famous formula relating energy to mass postulates that energy in space can spontaneously become mass, and possibility revert back to energy. That out of brahman, creation manifests, is sustained, and ends is consistence with the science. To my knowledge, no science backs up the idea that brahman, qua being, is conscious. Besides, positing awareness and a will, such that the creation of the world (and deities) is an act of will of impersonal reality is anthropomorphic; Hume would have a fit.
5. Francis X. Clooney, “Binding the Text,” p. 54.

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Transcendence in Hindu Bhakti

Edwin Byrant, a scholar of Hinduism who spoke at the Bhakti Yoga conference based at Harvard in March 2025, discussed the transcendence that is in bhukti devotion to a Hindu deity, such as Krishna. Such transcendence can end a person’s transactional approach in trying to please a deity in exchange from beneficial grace from the deity’s love. Both the steps and definitions of bhakti reveal the salience of transcendence in loving devotion to a deity.

The steps of Bhakti Yoga begin with a person recognizing one’s own suffering. We want to put an end to our own suffering. The first step is to recognize that there is a higher power: a power higher than oneself. There is order in the cosmos, so there must be a higher power that is ordering the universe. We are naturally self-centric, but we should be able to recognize that we are not the cause of the order of the universe. Therefore, the recognition of a higher power—an intelligence that is omnipotent—includes an acknowledgement that none of us is that higher power. The next stage is surrendering to it. Then, a person can look to the higher power manifesting in one’s life. Ultimately, love is the gift that comes from the outside. When it is given, then the transactional element is ended; the person forgets oneself in loving a deity. The focus is on trying to attract the deity’s grace. As such grace is transcendent, and thus beyond our power and knowledge, and thus our efforts to please, we can only attempt to attract a deity’s attention and get lost in the loving itself.

Transcendence can be gleamed too from definitions of Bhakti. The Sanskrit word, bhakti, is a verbal noun (i.e., something you do): an action that connects. In the Bhakti Sutras, several definitions are given. They boil down to seva, which loosely translates as service. It is to try to please. It is not selfish.  So, bhakti includes engaging in acts to please the other. To purify the selfishness and please the beloved. Minds can only manifest thoughts, and this is not sufficient to know how to please an entity that is transcendent. Part of surrendering is acknowledging our limitations.  So, we look to religious experts, such as gurus, and religious texts, such as the Puranas and the Bhagavad-Gita, on which a guru should be based, for even gurus are human, all too human.

By its very nature, transcendence goes beyond the limits of human cognition and perception, so even a succinct, well-organized explanation or account of transcendence itself or that which is posited as transcendent should be recognized as limited. For example, it may not be clear how surrender to a higher power implies or even is compatible with devotional love, at least from the perspective of the world in which we live. Such utter dependence as a creature such as Man can recognize in one’s relation to the Creator, which is the basis even of existence itself, may involve or admit a distinctly theological love that is qualitatively different than interpersonal love, which is based in social psychology. This is not to claim that the former kind of love cannot relate to the latter—only that the former cannot be derived from the latter. We may be so used to projecting the love we feel in our own realm onto the love that a deity has and that we may direct to a deity that we could scarcely recognize or even conceptualize of distinctly theological love. It would follow that any definition of bhakti can only be provisional, and yet any given definition is improvable. Transcending transactionalism, for example, is just part of the process in coming to terms with what Hindu bhakti really is, as sui generis rather than projected devotional love.


Comparative Devotionalism: Hinduism and Christianity

I suspect that many people would feel very uncomfortable watching a religious person express devotional love to that person’s chosen deity in a very emotional and effusive manner. The sheer emotional intensity amid the dancing and chanting in a Hare Krishna temple can be daunting to a visitor. The phenomenon of what in Hinduism is called bhukti is hardly rare, and this begs the question of whether there is a human instinctual urge to feel and express even lifelong loving devotion to an entity that is not based in the created realm and thus cannot be realized and instantiated as another human being can be and is. Whether there is a phenomenon that is human, thus beyond the manifestations in various religions can go a long way in answering the question of whether an innate instinctual urge exists, even if it is more pressing in some people than in others. Some people, for instance, work their whole life in business, while other business practitioners reach a certain point in years when they “check out,” and head to a divinity school or seminary. Still other people assume religious vocations as young adults and spend the rest of their life ministering to people and officiating at religious rituals. Some people spend their entire life without feeling devotional love directed to a deity, while other people, such as the Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna, are utterly consumed by the inward fire of religious devotion. Was Ramakrishna’s devotion different in kind from a Christian’s intense love of Jesus, or is there what can be termed a human bhakti phenomenon, and if so, is it capable of breaking down religious barriers that can excite animosity and even hatred?

Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in March, 2025, discussed comparative Bhakti by looking at Hindu and Christian parallels. Bhakti yoga is the practice of loving devotion. There is a coherent thread back to the Vedas, and devotion to Krishna is salient in several of the chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita. In chapter 7 alone, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Here (now), O son-of-Pritha, how, [with] the mind attached to Me, engaged in Yoga, [with] Me as refuge, you may know Me fully, without doubt.”[1] Taking refuge is other than epistemological (i.e., knowing), as dependence is involved. Furthermore, Krishna says that people who act meritoriously and for “whom evil has come to an end” are those who “worship” Krishna rather than the other deities.[2] Because the early-medieval Hindu theologian and philosopher Shankara claims that even in the Gita, achieving the realization that one’s self (atman) is identical to brahman, which is being itself and is conscious or aware, it is important to stress that Bhakti devotion to a deity involves more than just knowing the deity’s higher nature; loving devotion, such as is evinced in worshipping a deity, is the essence of bhakti.

Although it is problematic to apply the Hindu term bhakti to other religions, such as Christianity, just as applying the word “God” to brahman is also problematic, devotion to a deity is in other religions besides Hinduism, and by looking at the similarities, the phenomenon of religious devotion can be better understood because the artifacts of particular religions can be distinguished from the trans-religious phenomenon itself. This, by the way, is an excellent reason for studying comparative religion or theology, though such an orientation comes with the opportunity cost of the foregone benefits of specializing in one religion.

One such bhukti parallel pertains to Jesus washing the disciples’ feet[3] and Krishna washing Sudama’s feet.[4] Both Lord Jesus and Lord Krishna commend service by leading by example. Also, both highlight the closeness of God and the intimacy that is possible in loving devotion.  Finally, both passages imply the personal care and attention that the Son of God and Lord Krishna give to humans, who should thus be humble (and grateful) in return, for such care and attention is voluntary.

Another parallel of devotion to God pertains to Judaism and Christianity, and this similarity will lead us to back to making Hindu-Christian comparisons. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength” and Matthew 22:37-40 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Although the latter extends love to interpersonal relations, both passages are very direct in issuing the imperative that devotional love is to be directed to God. Of the thought of Gregory of Nyssa (4th century), Navarette wrote, “The perfection of human nature consists in being united with God by a kind of devotion which leads the soul to love Him above all things.”  Furthermore, Francis of Assisi’s prayer includes “to be loved as to love.”

It may that in the Hindu Gita, love itself is not so explicitly mentioned by Krishna, whereas taking refuge in and worshiping Krishna are more explicitly demanded, yet this does not mean that devotional love is not much desired by Krishna in the Gita as by the Christian God. Rather, it may be the case that Christianity builds on the passage in Deuteronomy to be known as the religion of love, hence both Paul and Augustine wrote that God is love. Devotion is to be directed to pure (agape) love itself. Is this the epitome of bhukti, or is the Hindu articulation really all that different from being devoted to love personified (or as an entity, rather than impersonal), especially considering the example of Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century?  After all, as a Hindu devotee of Kali the goddess of death, Ramakrishna was so authentically and lovingly devoted to her that a brahmin priest let Ramakrishna speak extemporaneously during a ritual. His devotion to Kali was certainly no less than that of Thérèse of Lisieux and that of Gertrud of Helfta to the Christian Lord Jesus. Both women were cloistered Christian nuns; at the very least they had few distractions, so they could devote themselves entirely to being devoted in love to Jesus.

Taking refuge in Krishna is not so far off, and, as stated above, it is more emotional than knowing Krishna’s higher nature epistemologically. It may be that the intimacy itself (e.g., high trust) that is inherent in taking refuge in a deity is none other than love, as in the old expression, where there’s smoke, there’s fire; or, taking refuge could be in terms of ontological dependence that is a micro reflection of the fact that creation is dependent on Krishna’s creative force. Perhaps in teasing out the relationship between love and radical dependence, taking refuge in Krishna can be compared with the bridal imagery that has been so often appropriated by Christian mystics—nuns being known as brides of Christ. Certainly historically, there has been much interpersonal and societally-structured dependence in the marriage relationship between a husband and a wife; presumably love has existed in at least some of those relationships in spite of the dependence of (especially pregnant) wives on their respective “bread winners.”

Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE) wrote on the Song of Songs of the Old Testament, treating the religious poem as an allegory of the relationship between the soul and God. According to Navarette, for Origin “the bride symbolizes the soul, while the bridegroom represents Christ”, and the objective is to “cultivate an intimate relationship with the Divine.”  In his presentation, Navarette also cited Bernard of Clairvaux, who, in his book, On Loving God, advances the idea that, according to Navarette, “besides reverence, there is the intimacy such that a bride has with her bridegroom.”  For Bonaventure too, “to attain God includes the imagery of a bride and bridegroom.” Similarly, Ramakrishna thought of himself as married to Kali, and to be married to the goddess of death is no small commitment. Moreover, how could any loving devotion of a creature such as Man not involve radical dependence, for neither in Hinduism nor in Christianity does a divinity need to create a world out of some kind of lack in the divine itself.

Even though Christianity’s core is that God itself is (selfless) love, love devoted to Krishna is certainly salient in the devotionalism. Even so, devotional love being directed to love itself (agape) does seem to be a good candidate to be known as the epitome of bhakti. This is not to say that Christian devotionalism is superior to Hindu bhakti; rather, it is to raise the thought, what if Krishna’s higher nature were exclusively love itself? Would that change how devotion to Krishna is to be interpreted in the Gita and practiced by bhukti practitioners?

In his presentation, Navarette discussed the work the scholar, Francis Clooney, who pioneered the field of comparative theology. Navarette cited Clooney’s contention that “even partial common ground can strengthen our own religious convictions.” Perhaps Krishna’s description of devotion to Him can be useful to a Christian who is trying to love Jesus better. Moreover, in Hindu God, Christian God, Clooney, according to Navarette, predicts that the “fixed boundaries separating religions become all the less plausible . . . because the theological insights arising in comparative study will push those boundaries.” For example, Clooney claims that a Christian could accept the virtues of Narayana, who is the protector of all who has supreme mercy.[5] Sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t it? Preaching God’s mercy instead of drumming divine wrath into everyone’s heads in the Gospel stories, Jesus can be seen as a reformer in Judaism. To be sure, unrepentant sinners, such as “Christian” clergy who rape children, deserve divine wrath, but this should not prevent other people from realizing that divine mercy opens up the possibility of love, which presumably includes that which a religious devotee directs to a deity. Given the ontological chasm between deities and the created realm, which includes us, mercy opening up a space for love can create the sort of intimacy that collapses distance, and this can apply not only vertically, but also as benevolentia universalis.



1. Gita 7.1 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 171.
2. Gita 7.28 in Ibid., p. 177.
3. John 13:1-17 (in The New Testament).
4. Bhagavata Purana, tenth canto 80:20-26.
5. Vedanta Desika, Rahasya Traya Saram (14th century).

Monday, March 17, 2025

Interreligious Learning

Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in 2025, defined comparative theology as “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.” Because the capitalized word, “God,” is used and usually identified with the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Navarette undoubtedly used the term as a general placeholder for divinity, whether in the form of a deity or impersonal, as in brahman in Hinduism. This begs the questions: what is divinity and could a definition apply to every religion? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully informed by what Navarette calls “interreligious learning” in theology, which in turn is not exclusively applicable to Christianity. Rather than presuming that I have answers, I want to explore how such learning can be fruitful in advancing knowledge of religion as an arguably sui generis domain.  

Navarette, like Geertz, advocates “putting (one’s own religion’s) doctrines and belief systems aside” when exploring what we “can learn about God together”. Geertz uses word, epoché, which means “bracketed,” as applying to what a person should do methodologically concerning one’s own religion, while studying what Eliade called “the otherness of the other.” The stance of an Apologetic in supposing that one’s own religion “is better, more complete, or superior to others” is antipodal, and thus not conducive to such a project as involves the study of comparative theology. This is not to deny that religions make such claims of exclusivity or superiority as regards themselves relative to other religions; rather, Navarette’s point is that insisting in the course of study that such claims be recognized as valid upon other religions is not consistent with interreligious study itself.

A “worse-case scenario” would be for a scholar or practitioner of religion to interlard one’s own religious beliefs into the interreligious-learning process in order to stop interreligious learning from occurring at all; worse still, of course, would be such a person castigating or even killing people who are engaged in the project for “insulting the religion” from the outside or “being a heretic” from within.

Just weeks before Navarette spoke at the online conference, I had been accused by an evangelical Christian student at Yale’s divinity school of being a heretic even though we were discussing Christian theology in what I assumed was an academic discussion at lunch. That my interlocutor assumed that the content of my ratiocination (i.e., reasoning) consisted of my personal religious beliefs stunned me. I was citing scholars, after all, whether or not their theories coincided with my own religios beliefs. Following the logic of reasoning is distinct from having one's own religious beliefs as an anchor. That even my academic knowledge was suddenly being questioned and doubted, and even at times dismissed, stunned me, for I had not encountered anything but great respect for my ideas by students of religion at Harvard.

To be sure, “faith seeking understanding” is an intellectually and theologically valid enterprise even at a secular university, but even such an orientation, which, by the way, I had in part when I was a student at Yale because I was considering the ministry, should not be hyperextended to the extent that the boundary between preaching and studying is pierced or even dissolved. Because Harvard’s divinity school is not dominated by the study of a particular religion, that boundary is safe there even as students do not (and should not) always bracket their own religious beliefs and assumptions in studying religion. This is not to say that Princeton Theological Seminary and Yale’s de facto seminary should not focus on Christianity, for there is value in an organization having a distinct niche. Much would be lost were either school to mimic the conduciveness to comparative study that is at both the Chicago and Harvard divinity schools, neither of which is unipolar. My point is merely to point to a risk attendant to studying religion by studying one religion, mostly or exclusively, where many of the students and faculty are apologists, and are thus susceptible to blurring the line.

My own study of religion began with the assumption that I needed to understand more than one religion to grasp the phenomenon of religion, so I began with South Asian religions, after which I studied Christian theology (and philosophy of religion). I must admit that both my studies and my scholarly output in the academic field of religion have been delimited not so much by the judgments of evangelical Christians who do not recognize any boundary between personal belief and academic knowledge, as by something much more troubling. That some practitioners of one religion in particular, who interlope their respective personal religious beliefs onto the academic knowledge of scholars of whatever stripe—not even recognizing the existence of knowledge as anything but personal religious beliefs—would attempt to kill me even for “insulting the religion” has kept me from doing much with that religion academically. Even non-religious ideologies, such as the “woke” ideology in North America, can have a censoring effect on scholars, by means of intentionally using verbal or written hostility as a dogmatic enforcer having the force of law—a law unto themselves.

The value in there being a boundary between personal religiosity and the study of academic knowledge on religion, wherein the latter is protected from encroachments (or being overwhelmed) by the former, applies to scholars themselves in studying religion. The investigator’s attitude while studying is indeed part of the methodology that is fitting to interreligious learning. The methodology in turn should not be conflated with the subject-matter being studied. The output of interreligious dialogue and learning would be incomplete—and with a subtle bias—if the parts of religions that claim superiority over other religions are simply ignored and thus excluded. That a religion’s claims of superiority should not be allowed to get in the way of the dialogue of interreligious dialogue, whether oral or written, is not to say that that those claims should be excluded from being studied.

In other words, toleration is implicit in the project of interreligious learning, but this does not mean that only the tolerant belief-claims of religions can or should be admitted and subject to analysis. A useful example of such analysis is asking whether Jesus’ statement, “No one gets to the Father except through me,” in the New Testament of Christianity is a claim that is limited to that religion, as the claim’s anchor is the Father, or does the claim mean that everyone who does not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior goes to hell (even though hell is an Abrahamic religious concept and is not in every religion)? Ignoring the passage altogether because it might make some people engaged in interreligious learning uncomfortable conflates methodology and the subject-matter being studied, and renders the results of interreligious study partial (and biased). 

As a scholar of religion, I should not exclude the stances of the evangelical Christian at Yale from the content of Christianity as a religion just because he bothered me, but this does not mean that such an attitude should be allowed to eclipse the process of interreligious knowledge. As for the possibility that a religionist of another religion might kill me were I to include a critique of that religion in my analysis of religion, a scholar should indeed be realistic rather than foolish. Even this text is incomplete as a result of prudence, for I have not even named the religion. Reaching completeness of knowledge is a fool’s goal, as we are human, all too human, but even so, we can and should work to obviate the obstacles as much as we can.

The Hindu Festival of Holi: Polytheism in Practice

On March 14, 2025, “(m)illions of people in South Asia celebrated Holi, the Hindu festival of colors . . . by smearing each other with brightly colored powder, dancing to festive music and feasting on traditional sweets prepared for the occasion.”[1] Lest the various eats and drinks be dismissed for analytical purposes as trivial, a particular kind of drink or food that is traditional can have religious significance by reflecting Hinduism as a polytheistic rather than a monotheist religion. Whereas monotheism allows for only one deity, etymologically mono theos, a polytheist religion has more than one deity, even if one is deemed to be superior over the others.

Holi, a national holiday in India and a two-day holiday in Nepal, where Hinduism is the national religion, celebrates “the end of winter and the triumph of good over evil.”[2] In this regard, Holi shares themes with the Christian festival of Easter, which also occurs during the spring. Yet whereas Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ from physical, corporeal death, and used to be associated with an ancient Roman fertility festival—and has retained that theme as the Easter Bunny and Easter egg hunts—“Holi has its origins in Hindu mythology and lore and celebrates the divine love between the Hindu god Krishna and his consort Radha, and signifies a time of rebirth and rejuvenation.”[3] The association with the end of winter and “rebirth and rejuvenation” applies to both Easter and Holi, as well as the pagan festival of the Spring Equinox, which also takes place in the spring (i.e., it is not the beginning of meteorological spring).

In Hindu theology, Krishna is an embodied avatar (i.e., incarnation) of Vishnu, who with Brahma and Shiva are the three main gods in Hinduism. This does not mean that Krishna is less significant, however, as that deity has a prominent place in the Hindu scriptural text, the Bhagavad-Gita. In that text, Krishna claim to be superior to all of the other Hindu deities. This does not mean that Hinduism is monotheist. This point is reflected by the fact that bhang, a drink prepared with cannabis and consumed with milk or water, is a “tradition that marks Holi.”[4] Even though Krishna and his consort figure prominently in the festival, the “drink is connected to Hinduism, particularly to Lord Shiva”.[5] That the association with that deity, which is commensurate with Vishnu, of which Krishna is but the tenth incarnation, is tolerated (the cannabis likely being helpful in this regard) in a festival based on Krishna signifies that Hindus are just fine with their religion being polytheist. Even though the attitude evinced by statements like, You shouldn’t have a drink that is associated with another god during a festival of Krishna!, is consistent with polytheism because the existence of another god is implicitly affirmed, toleration is a much healthier attitude in a polytheist religion such as Hinduism. Worse than either attitude is making a category mistake in claiming that Hinduism is monotheist.



1. “Millions of  People Celebrate Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colors,” The Associated Press, March 14, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

[5] Ibid.