The Nine Forms of Bhakti

Seven days. That was all the physician's arithmetic left King Parikshit after the curse fell on him: a sage's son, insulted when the king in hunger and exhaustion had draped a dead snake round his meditating father's neck, had pronounced that the fanged king of serpents, Takshaka, would come for him before the week was out. A lesser man would have spent those seven days in flight, in fortification, in one last desperate grasp at pleasure. Parikshit did something almost incomprehensible to the courtiers who had followed him to the bank of the Ganga: he sat down, put aside his food and his throne together, and waited to be taught. Sages gathered. And into that gathering walked a sixteen-year-old boy, naked, luminous, uninterested in modesty because he had never once, since birth, been interested in the body at all. This was Shukadeva, the son of Vyasa, and for the next seven days he did not console the dying king with comfortable words. He simply told him a story, the story of Bhagavan in all his forms and all his devotees, from the first page to the last, until the king's fear had nowhere left to stand. That week of listening is called shravana, and it is the first of the nine limbs of bhakti that this entry of the Bhaktamal exists to honor.

This particular chhappay of Nabhadas is unlike almost any other in the garland. Elsewhere he gives each devotee a life, a place, a lineage. Here he gives none of that, because his subject is not a person but a teaching, and a very specific one: the ninefold description of bhakti that a five-year-old boy once offered his own father as an answer to a question meant to humiliate him. Hiranyakashipu, the demon-king who had conquered the three worlds and wanted his son to boast of some worldly art learned from his tutors, asked Prahlada what was the best thing he had studied. Prahlada, who had learned nothing from his father's hired teachers and everything from the sage Narada while still in his mother's womb, answered instead with a full accounting of how a soul reaches God: shravanam, kirtanam, smaranam, pada-sevanam, arcanam, vandanam, dasyam, sakhyam, atma-nivedanam. Hearing, singing, remembering, serving the feet, worshiping, bowing, serving as a servant, befriending, surrendering the self entirely. Nabhadas could not let a verse of this weight pass by unmarked, so he built it its own place in the garland, naming a living exemplar for each of the nine, and framing the whole as a prayer: O dust of their feet, have mercy on us, you who are the very leaders of ninefold bhakti; these names are the life-breath of the shelterless, the saviors of those who have no other refuge.

Shravana belongs to Parikshit because he is not merely a man who happened to hear scripture before dying; he is the proof that hearing, done completely, is itself a path to liberation, no chanting or ritual required, only the willingness to receive. Kirtana belongs to Shukadeva, and there is a strange justice in that pairing, because Shukadeva was born already finished with the world. Tradition tells that he lived in his mother's womb for a dozen years and more, refusing to emerge, because he knew that the moment he was born he would be called Vyasa's son and bound by a father's love; only when Krishna himself is said to have coaxed him out did he finally appear, and then he walked straight into the forest without turning back at his weeping father's cries. A being so free of attachment might have kept the Bhagavata Purana to himself. Instead he gave the whole of it away, aloud, to a stranger with a week to live, which is why kirtana, the singing and telling of God's glory to others, is his particular glory.

Smarana, unbroken remembrance, belongs to Prahlada, and his story is the fiercest of the nine. His father tried poison in his food; Prahlada ate it and smiled, his mind elsewhere. He tried elephants trained to gore; the elephants would not touch him. He tried hurling him from a mountain cliff, drowning him, burning him alive in his aunt Holika's lap though she alone should have been fireproof; each time the boy walked out unmarked because he had simply never stopped remembering Hari, not while eating, not while playing, not while being tortured. At last the tyrant, raging, demanded to know if this god his son worshiped could be found in the very pillar beside his throne. Prahlada said he could. Hiranyakashipu kicked the pillar apart, and at twilight, on the threshold between one room and another, neither day nor night, neither inside the palace nor out of it, a being neither man nor beast tore through the stone: Narasimha, who lifted the demon onto his own lap, neither earth nor sky, and opened him with claws that were neither weapon nor empty hand. Every boundary the tyrant thought would protect him became the very seam through which death entered, and the only person in that hall who was not afraid was the boy who had never, for one instant, let go of remembering.

Pada-sevana, service at the feet, belongs to Kamala, the goddess more commonly called Lakshmi, and her story asks for no violence and no ordeal at all, only stillness. She is fortune itself, the power that could sit enthroned above every other being in creation, and she chooses instead to remain at Vishnu's feet, tending them, pressing away whatever dust the day has left there. It is the quietest of the nine bhaktis and, some would say, the hardest to romanticize, because there is no dragon in it, no persecution, nothing but a goddess declining to make her devotion about herself. The tika calls her the queenly, ever-devoted one, and it is worth sitting with the fact that Nabhadas placed her, without apology, at the very center of this ladder of devotions, between the singing sage and the sacrificing king.

Arcana, worship, belongs to Prithu, whose devotion did not look like temple ritual at all. When the earth, in grief and self-protection, hid her grain and medicine and took the shape of a cow to flee him, Prithu did not simply subdue her; he made her his teacher, then his mother, calming her, naming a calf to draw out her milk, and receiving from her, for the sake of every hungry creature under his rule, all the grains and herbs that sustain human life. His worship was not incense and bells in a private shrine; it was the labor of governing well, treating his own kingship as an offering laid at the Lord's feet, which is why the tradition holds him up as the king who turned public duty itself into arcana.

Vandana, homage, belongs to Akrura, and his story carries a bitter irony inside it. He was sent by the tyrant Kamsa with one task: drive the chariot to Vrindavan, and bring back the boys Krishna and Balarama so they could be killed in a rigged wrestling match at Mathura. Akrura went, and something happened to him on the road that Kamsa never anticipated. Reaching Krishna's footprints in the dust of Vraj, he flung himself from the chariot and rolled in that dust like a man reunited with his own soul. On the journey back, he asked leave to bathe in the Yamuna, and there, submerged in the river, he saw the four-armed form of Vishnu resting beneath the water even while Krishna, unmistakably a boy, sat waiting on the riverbank above. He looked again and the vision held. In that instant Akrura understood that he was not delivering two children to their executioner; he was carrying the sustainer of the universe in his own chariot, and out of that terror and wonder together came the long hymn of praise, offered on a mission of murder, that tradition remembers as one of the most beautiful vandanas ever spoken.

Dasya, servanthood, belongs to Hanuman, and no image captures it more completely than the moment after Rama's coronation when Sita, in gratitude, gave him a necklace of pearls. Hanuman took it, examined each pearl, and discarded them one by one, because he could not find Rama and Sita inside any of them, and a gift that did not contain his Lord was worthless to him. When the court, amused and a little scandalized, asked whether Rama and Sita were to be found inside Hanuman himself, he tore his own chest open with his nails, and there, inscribed on his heart, were Rama and Sita, enthroned. He asked for no liberation beyond that. He wanted only to remain a servant, always available, always useful, and it is that refusal of every reward except the chance to keep serving that makes him the eternal image of dasya.

Sakhya, friendship, belongs to Arjuna, and his devotion looks almost nothing like the others, because it was never built on distance or awe. He had eaten with Krishna, teased him, confided in him, argued with him as one only argues with an equal. So when he collapsed on the field at Kurukshetra, bow falling from his hands, unable to fight cousins and teachers he loved, it was not a priest or a prophet who answered him but his own charioteer and dearest friend, who did not soften the truth to spare his feelings and did not withhold it out of formality either. The teaching that became the Bhagavad Gita was possible only because Krishna could speak to Arjuna as a friend speaks to a friend: with total honesty, because there was nothing left to protect between them.

Atma-nivedana, complete surrender of the self, belongs to Bali, and his story is the one that asks the most and gives back, strangely, even more. When the dwarf Vamana came asking for only three paces of land, Bali, already warned by his own guru Shukracharya that this diminutive brahmin was Vishnu in disguise and that the gift would cost him everything, gave his word anyway. Vamana grew until he filled the sky, covering the earth with one stride and the heavens with the second, and then turned to ask where the third pace should fall, since nothing remained. Bali, rather than break the promise a king had given, bowed his own head and offered it as the ground for that final step. He lost his entire kingdom in that gesture and gained something the Puranas treat as far rarer: Vishnu, moved by a devotion that asked for nothing back, granted him a palace in the netherworld of Sutala and then chose, of his own will, to stand permanently at Bali's gate as his doorkeeper. The one who surrendered everything ended up with God guarding his door.

What Nabhadas seems to be saying, by refusing to rank these nine or crown one of them the truest form of bhakti, is that there is no single shape a devoted life has to take. A dying king can reach God simply by listening well in his last week. A renounced boy can reach him by singing. A tormented child can reach him by refusing to stop remembering, even under torture. A goddess can reach him by choosing humility over her own throne. A king can reach him through the unglamorous work of feeding his people. A reluctant messenger can reach him through an unplanned hymn sung on the way to a crime he never wanted to commit. A servant can reach him by tearing open his own chest rather than accept an empty gift. A friend can reach him by telling the truth on a battlefield. A defeated emperor can reach him by refusing to break his word even as he loses his kingdom. Nine lives, nine temperaments, nine doors, and the same house behind all of them. That is why Nabhadas ends the verse not with a lesson but with a plea, asking for nothing more than the dust that has touched these nine pairs of feet, calling it the very life-breath of anyone who feels they have nowhere left to turn. It is a strange kind of comfort, offered five hundred years ago and still standing: whichever of these nine your own nature is built for, that one is enough.