Bhakti & Sampradayas

Bhakti is devotion as a complete yoga — not just an emotion but a disciplined path of love. The Bhagavata tradition lists nine forms: hearing, chanting, remembering, serving the feet, worshipping, bowing, servitude, friendship, and total self-offering. Any one of them, practiced fully, is enough.

Bhakti is transmitted through sampradayas — unbroken lineages of teacher to student. This is not academic knowledge but living transmission: the guru embodies what the text describes. From Ramanuja to Chaitanya to Neem Karoli Baba, the chain continues.

The modern kirtan movement — Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, Deva Premal — has brought bhakti practice to yoga studios worldwide. But bhakti is older and wider than kirtan: it lives in the temples, the pilgrimages, the daily pujas, and the quiet repetition of a divine name.