Chapter 34: One Airport -- Bhakti and Jnana
Does the path of devotion lead to the same place as the path of inquiry?
The bhakta says: I love God. The jnani says: I am That. The bhakta weeps. The jnani is still. The bhakta pours himself out in song. The jnani turns the question back upon the questioner until the questioner dissolves. These look, from the outside, like two entirely different activities, aimed at two entirely different destinations.
Ananta answers with a clarity that leaves no room for argument:
"You can come to this point by sincerely letting go of who you are and asking sincerely: Who am I? You will not reach some other station. Devotion and love for God, you reach station A. In asking yourself who you are sincerely, you reach station B. It is not like that. You will land on the same airport where truth, love, beauty, true knowledge, all that is fine."
One airport. Not two terminals. The same place.
A Necessary Clarification
Before we go further, this chapter needs to say clearly what it is and what it is not.
It is not a perennialist argument that all religions are secretly the same. It is not claiming that every spiritual path, regardless of tradition, arrives at an identical destination. Such claims flatten the real differences between traditions and disrespect the specificity of each lineage's understanding.
What Ananta is teaching, and what this chapter explores, is something much more precise. Within the Hindu tradition, there has been a centuries-old debate between the path of devotion, bhakti, and the path of knowledge, jnana. Are they two roads to the same city, or two roads to two different cities? Ananta's answer, rooted in the Advaita-bhakti synthesis that runs from Tulsidas through Kabir through the sants of Maharashtra and beyond, is that they are two names for one movement. And the evidence for this is not abstract theology. It is the lived testimony of the sages themselves.
The Jnani Who Wept
Ramana Maharshi is the supreme jnani of the modern era. No one who has studied his teaching can doubt this. His method was pure self-inquiry: "Who am I?" Turn the question inward. Trace every thought back to its source. What remains when all that is not the Self has been set aside? That remaining is the Self. That remaining is what you always were.
This is the distilled essence of Advaita Vedanta. No ritual. No mantra. No devotional practice. Just the relentless turning of awareness back upon itself.
And yet.
During his early years at Virupaksha cave on Arunachala mountain, devotees asked Ramana for a devotional song they could sing while begging for food. He composed 108 verses, the Aksharamanamalai, the Marital Garland of Letters. And as he wrote, tears of ecstasy streamed down his face, sometimes blinding him. The hymn tells of the love and union between the human soul and God. It is not philosophy. It is love poetry.
He later composed the Five Hymns to Arunachala, his magnum opus in devotional verse. And he said, himself, that it was the spiritual power of Arunachala that had brought about his Self-realisation. Not self-inquiry alone. The mountain. The presence. The love.
At the moment of his death, on April 14, 1950, devotees gathered around his body and began chanting "Arunachala Siva, Arunachala Siva." His face lit up with radiant joy. Tears began to flow from his eyes and continued for a long time. He opened his luminous eyes for a brief while with a smile, and a tear of bliss trickled down from the corner of his eyes. And at 8:47 PM, the breathing stopped.
The greatest jnani of the modern era. Weeping with love. At the sound of a name.
If bhakti and jnana were truly separate paths, this would be inexplicable. The Self-realised sage, the one who has seen through all form and all name, would not weep at the mention of a mountain. But Ramana wept. Not because his realisation was incomplete. Because his realisation was so total that love was not an addition to it. Love was identical with it. To know the Self completely is to love completely. The knowledge and the love are not two things joined together. They are two names for the same thing.
Hanuman's Three Registers
The Vaishnava tradition enshrines this unity in one of its most beloved stories.
When Rama asks Hanuman, "How do you look upon me?", Hanuman gives a three-part answer:
"When I believe I am the body, then I am your faithful servant."
"When I know I am the soul, I know myself to be a spark of your eternal Light."
"When I know I am the Self, you and I are one."
Three registers. Not three stages, where the earlier ones are discarded when the later ones arrive. Three registers that Hanuman holds simultaneously. He serves Ram as the body. He knows himself as a spark of Ram as the soul. And he knows himself as identical with Ram as the Atma. All three at once. The servant and the spark and the One.
The Ramcharitmanas offers an even simpler formulation: "When I forget who I am, I serve you. When I remember who I am, I am you."
Notice: Hanuman does not choose. He does not say, "I have transcended the servant stage and now I live only in the oneness stage." He holds all three. The highest register of non-dual knowledge does not cancel the devotional service. It includes it. It breathes through it. Hanuman sweeps the floor of Ram's court and, in sweeping, is the Self. He is the supreme bhakta and the supreme jnani, and there is no contradiction.
This is the "one airport" teaching in a single verse. Devotion and knowledge are not two paths but concurrent registers of the same realisation.
Tulsidas: The Reconciler
Tulsidas understood this more deeply than almost anyone.
In the Uttar Kand of the Ramcharitmanas, there is a debate between two figures: Kakbhushundi, who represents bhakti, and Lomasa, who represents jnana and monism. They argue, as bhaktas and jnanis have argued for centuries. And the resolution is not that one wins and the other loses. It is that both recognise the truth of the other's position.
Kakbhushundi, the bhakta, accepts a curse, accepts suffering, but refuses to give up his devotion to Ram. Even knowing the non-dual truth, he will not surrender the love. He does not need to surrender the love. The love and the truth are the same water in different vessels.
And Tulsidas, in his own voice, offers this practical wisdom: "There is no point in arguing which path is the best. We should instead see which path suits us the most."
This is not relativism. Tulsidas is not saying all paths are equally valid in the abstract. He is saying something much more grounded: you will walk the path your heart inclines toward. And if you walk it with sincerity, it will take you to the same place. Because sincerity, whether it takes the form of devotion or inquiry, always leads to the dissolution of the false. And what remains after the false has dissolved is the same truth, regardless of which method dissolved it.
His central teaching, his most revolutionary contribution, was the insistence that Nirguna and Saguna are not two things. He gives the example of water, snow, and hail: the substance is the same in all three, but the formless water solidifies to become hail or a mountain of snow. There is one substance. There are many forms. The bhakta loves the form. The jnani sees through the form to the substance. But the form and the substance were never in conflict. Ice is water. Water is ice. To love Ram is to know Brahman. To know Brahman is to discover that Brahman has a face, and the face is Ram.
Kabir: Both at Once
Kabir held both paths in a single breath, and he did it without any theoretical framework at all. He simply lived it.
His bhakti register:
"Subtle is the path of love! Therein there is no asking and no not-asking. There one loses one's self at His feet. There one is immersed in the joy of the seeking: plunged in the deeps of love as the fish in the water."
His jnana register:
"Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat. You will find me in the tiniest house of time. He is the breath inside the breath."
And again:
"The Lord is in me, the Lord is in you, as life is in every seed. Put false pride away and seek the Lord within."
And again:
"The river that flows in you also flows in me."
For Kabir, there was no need to choose. To truly love God is to know that God is not separate from you. And to truly know that God is not separate from you is the deepest form of love. The two paths do not merge at some distant summit. They were always the same path, walked with different emphases, described in different grammars, but covering the same ground.
No Distance
Ananta takes this further. He does not merely say the two paths converge at the end. He says there is no distance to begin with.
"Is there distance between us and God at the doorway of revelation? There is no distance. This is the simplicity of it."
No distance. Not a small distance. Not a distance that shrinks as you practice. No distance. At the doorway of revelation, the one who stands at the door and the one who waits on the other side discover that the door was never closed. The bhakta discovers, at the end of total surrender, that the one who was surrendering was never separate from the one being surrendered to. The jnani discovers, at the end of total inquiry, that the Self which remains when all else is stripped away is not cold, not empty, not a philosophical abstraction, but is the very substance of love.
This is why the greatest jnanis have all been lovers. Ramana wept at Arunachala. Nisargadatta, the beedi shopkeeper of Bombay who taught the most uncompromising non-duality, spoke of his guru with tearful devotion. Shankara, the supreme philosopher of Advaita, composed devotional hymns to Shiva and to the Divine Mother. The knowledge did not extinguish the love. It revealed the love as the substance of the knowledge.
And this is why the greatest bhaktas have all been knowers. Hanuman knew he was one with Ram. Meera declared she had merged with Krishna. Tukaram said, "Thou and I are one light." The love did not obscure the truth. It dissolved every barrier to the truth.
The Same Silence
At the bottom of both paths, there is a silence. The bhakta reaches it when the heart has poured out everything and there is nothing left to pour. The jnani reaches it when the question "Who am I?" has consumed every possible answer and no question remains. The silence is the same. The emptiness is the same. The fullness is the same.
And in that silence, the distinction between bhakti and jnana is revealed as a distinction that existed only in the mind that was doing the distinguishing. When the mind is gone, the two paths are gone. What remains is neither path. It is the ground both paths were walking on.
Ananta says: "Prayer is work, a cooperative work of ourselves and God. The letting go part we have to do; His work in our hearts He has to do."
The letting go is the same whether you let go through love or through inquiry. The one who let go vanishes in both cases. And what is left, in both cases, is God's work in the heart. Which was happening all along. Which needed only your getting out of the way.
One airport. One ground. One truth that does not care what name you gave the path that brought you there.
The next chapter asks what happens when even the distinction between the traveller and the ground dissolves entirely. When the triad of knower, known, and knowing collapses into something that cannot be spoken, only lived.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Whatever may be your spiritual path, it brings us to this point in this way. So all the fighting should stop. 'I am a Gnyani, I'm a Bhakta, I am a Yogi, this, that.' Not too strongly held onto. Because we are doing nothing original in the process. All of this the sages have told."
"Is there distance between us and God at the doorway of revelation? There is no distance. So I felt this is exceedingly good news that I was bursting to share with all of you, that this is the simplicity of this. The whole complexity of the spiritual process can be just simplified in this way."
"The endpoint for a bhakta or a jnani is not different. Both are attempting to come in the discipleship of the Atma within, of the Satguru within, and to come to the discovery of the truth, to come to the discovery of God. Whether you call it God-realization or self-realization, ultimately it is the same thing. Like the sage said, 'I went looking for myself but I found God, but when I went looking for God I found myself.'"
-- You Cannot Be Proud and Love at the Same Time - 25th March 2024
"Either we drop this process of 'taking to be,' we remain open and empty, or we constantly live in the faith that God is here. Then we come to the same point either way. If I tell you that just live in the faith that God is always with you, or live like nothing means anything, if you follow these words, then you will come to the true living spirit, living being in your heart."