User:Wikidas/Bhagavatism


 * Even the earliest traces of Bhagavatism as a popular cult of Visnu-Narayana-Krsna-Vasudeva.

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Rudra, for example is seen resenting the treatment accorded him. The supreme Adorable One pacifies him by saying that homage paid to one was equivalent to that given to  another, for they were both one and the same. When Bhagavat or Vasudeva rises to be the supreme God in the fourth century  B.C., Brahma and Shiva are declared to be his creations and are  relegated to subordinate positions to carry out the will of the  new god. Similarly when Brahmanism later absorbed the cult of Bhagavat, Vishnu, the sun god who was popular at the period,  became the supreme God. Thus did the generality of mankind find that they could not live without personal gods and kindly  gods did not desert them to their fate.

The religion of devotion. Krishna Vasudeva, a member of the warrior caste, founded Bhagavatism, the religion of bhakti,  devotion or love, about the 4th century B.C. Bhagavatism arose  under the influence of Sankhya and Yoga. Sankhya being an atheistic system, Bhagavatism allied itself with Yoga. Concentration of thought, which is Yoga's fundamental concern, was  converted into devotion to a personal God. This personal God, whom he termed the Adorable One, was the objective of man's  devotion and love. This doctrine is later propounded in the Bhagavad Gita, or the Song Celestial, originally composed in the  2nd century B.C. and surviving in its later redacted form. In transcendent beauty and elegance of form, this philosophical  poem is among the sublimest that have been vouchsafed to man. It teaches an eclectic philosophy weaving ideas from Sankhya and Yoga around the central doctrine of devotion or love to God.

Whole-hearted love of God and duty selflessly performed in the name of God, dedicating one's actions to the glory of God, win  deliverance for man — such is the message of the Gita. Rituals, concentration of thought, and disciplinary ascetic practices are  aids to the life of devotion or love for God. Love for God leads man to know him better and teaches him to do his deeds,  leaving their outcome to God. Those who know Krishna are freed from the binding nature of actions. Those who piously seek and find refuge in him are absolved of their sins. Faith, love, and resignation in him sustain man in this life and open  for him, 1ifter his death, a life of felicity in loving fellowship  with God.