About Bhakti Yoga
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We must practice bhakti-yoga to understand and realize the Absolute Truth. We can not realize anything transcendental otherwise.
To appreciate what bhakti is, we must first know that the soul and Supreme Soul exist eternally. Sri Krsnais eternally the one Supreme Soul, and the innumerable individual souls are also eternal.
Two pure souls (that is, the individual soul and the Supreme Soul, Krsna) can only come together through the medium of love and affection. This love and affection is called bhakti-yoga.
What is yoga? Yoga means to link or to connect. Yogis, or transcendentalists, are those who are aspiring after spiritual perfection.
What is Bhakti? Bhakti means devotional service. In a refined understanding, it means spontaneous, ecstatic loving attachment to God.
The Vedas explain that God has a name, and that name is Sri Krsna. Sri Krsna has an all-attractive, all-blissful, eternal transcendental form, and personal qualities for the purpose of experiencing extraordinary loving pastimes.
These pastimes are saturated with exchanges of pure love. To facilitate these exchanges, Sri Krsna divided Himself into two, His Energy and Himself. The original spiritual energy (hladini-shakti) is feminine by form and qualities. She is known by the name of Srimati Radharani. Therefore, God appears in both divine-masculine and divine-feminine forms for the purpose of loving interactions. When Sri Krsna and Srimati Radhika unite in one form, They become Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
Who are our Teachers?
Lord Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu came to Earth as both a practitioner and teacher (Guru), of Bhakti Yoga. Through this process, Lord Caitanya teaches that the spirit soul is immortal, ever-blissful, and that our activities in the spiritual world are also immortal, and ever-blissful as we are engaged in ecstatic loving service to Sri Krsna.
Through the process of bhakti yoga, practitioners learn to break the shackles of Maya (entanglement in illusion) and become cognoscente of their true identity, the identity of their soul, which has an intrinsic nature of ecstatic loving attachment to the service of Sri Krsna.
All transcendental messages are received properly in the chain of disciplic succession. This disciplic succession is called parampara.
This process of parampara, or disciplic succession, means hearing from Krsna, or from authorities who have accepted Krsna, and repeating exactly what they have said.
The Disciplic Succession
- Kṛṣṇa
- Brahmā
- Nārada
- Vyāsa
- Madhva
- Padmanābha
- Nṛhari
- Mādhava
- Akṣobhya
- Jaya Tīrtha
- Jñānasindhu
- Dayānidhi
- Vidyānidhi
- Rājendra
- Jayadharma
- Puruṣottama
- Brahmaṇya Tīrtha
- Vyāsa Tīrtha
- Lakṣmīpati
- Mādhavendra Purī
- Īśvara Purī, (Nityānanda, Advaita)
- Lord Caitanya
- Rūpa, (Svarūpa, Sanātana)
- Raghunātha, Jīva
- Kṛṣṇadāsa
- Narottama
- Viśvanātha
- (Baladeva), Jagannātha
- Bhaktivinoda
- Gaurakiśora
- Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī
- Bhakti Prajnana Kesava Maharaj
- Bhakti Dayita Madhava Goswami Maharaj
- A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda
[Like the limbs of a beautifully broad, expansive banyan tree, the disciplic lineage continues with many noteworthy teachers. However, for the sake of simplification of the list above, some are not included here.]
Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s greatest gift was His teaching that Krnsa can be treated as one’s lover. In this relationship, the Lord becomes so much attached to His devotee that He expresses His inability to reciprocate. Caitanya Mahaprabhu gives a practical demonstration of how to love God in a conjugal relationship.
Taking the part of Srimati Radharani, Caitanya Mahaprabhu tried to love Krsna as Radharani loves Him. Krsna is always amazed by Radharani’s love. “How does Radharani give Me such pleasure?” He would ask. To study Radharani, Krsna lived in Her role and tried to understand Himself. This is the secret of Lord Caitanya’s incarnation. Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu is Krsna, but He has taken the mood and role of Radharani to show us how to love Krsna.