When Love Rose From Below

Most spiritual paths have a top and a bottom. The learned keep the knowledge, the priests lead the rite, and the ordinary person is left to stand aside and listen in a language he does not understand. Bhakti grew up as an answer to this division. It rose from below – not from temple books, but from the songs of people who had neither the Latin of ritual nor the right to learning. And it turned out that love for God asks for no pedigree.

Song against learning

The first to raise this wave were, in the south of India, the Alvars and the Nayanars – poet-devotees who went from village to village with a song. They sang not in the priests’ Sanskrit but in their native Tamil, plain to the peasant and the cowherd. And they sang not of the fine points of ritual but of a simple, burning love for God. Their voice reached the tradition as the first sign that the road to God is open from below: not through a knowledge held by the few, but through a heart that everyone has.

In this there was a quiet revolution. Where learning said “first understand, then draw near,” Bhakti answered “first love, and the understanding will come of itself – or perhaps it will not even be needed.” You need not be a brahmin to long for the Beloved. You need not command the scriptures to weep for God. This simplicity was its very strength: the song went where the learned treatise could not reach – into the craftsman’s house, to the riverbank, into the heart of a woman to whom the doors of learned assemblies were closed.

Mirabai was a Rajput princess, but her love for Krishna cast aside both the throne and the honor of her line. Before God her station meant nothing – only love meant something, and in it the princess and the beggar woman were equal. Tukaram, for his part, kept a shop, went bankrupt, lost his loved ones – and composed verses right by the river, amid cares and need. His abhangas were known across the whole country, not because he was learned but because there was real love in them, without a drop of falseness. Holiness, he said, you buy with neither money nor fasting – it is born only from within.

A road open to everyone

From this historical root grew a spirit that holds in Bhakti to this day. The path is closed to no one. You need no learned preparation, no special birth, no initiation into mysteries. You need one thing: a heart able to long – and everyone has one.

This same wave rose again and again, in each century its own way. In the nineteenth century it flared up in Ramakrishna, priest of Mother Kali, who went into ecstasy at a single utterance of Her name, and in the quiet love of Sarada Devi, who turned no one away. In the twentieth century Anandamayi Ma lived in a constant bliss of unity, having studied under no teacher. And Neem Karoli Baba reduced the whole path to three words a child would understand: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God. Complex philosophy was not needed here – and in this lies its faithfulness to the root from which the tradition grew.

It is worth noting what this simplicity was not. It was not a refusal of depth. A peasant’s song of longing for God could carry the same abyss as volumes of learned reasoning – and at times a greater one, because there was no protective layer of words in it, only living feeling. Bhakti did not simplify God. It removed the go-betweens between the human and God – and it turned out that without go-betweens love is only keener.

So the history of this path itself carries its message. The road to God rose from below, with a song, going around learning and privilege – and it stayed that way. The one who walks ahead goes to the living keepers of this love, to where it is still passed mouth to mouth, heart to heart, as the wandering saints passed it. Because the main thing in Bhakti is not written in books and not explained in treatises. It is conveyed by a living voice singing the Name – and it waits for a heart that will answer.