Some thoughts on Bryant's Bhakti Yoga

[endymions_bower]

Bryant recognizes that there are multiple Gods worshiped by different bhakti sects, and that there is a reciprocity such that, e.g., not only is what is said about Kṛṣṇa by his bhaktas said (mutatis mutandis) about Śiva by Śiva's bhaktas—i.e., that he is the supreme being and contains all things, and even created the other Gods for his purposes, etc.—but also that what is said about Śiva, e.g., by Kṛṣṇa's bhaktas is structurally identical—objectification and subordination, on the one hand, but also, at other times, veneration—to what is said about Kṛṣṇa by Śiva's bhaktas. But he thinks that this very multiplicity is necessarily not polytheism, because he has a straw man of polytheism in mind. Ironically, however, the way in which he describes polytheism is that there would be multiple Gods "ontologically equal". And yet, what is the reciprocity between these sects but ontological equality? He has suppressed the ontological dimension of this reciprocal field, however, effectively downgrading it to the level of mere historical contingency, or psychological disposition (despite seemingly recognizing that there is a "divine relationship" in bhakti which is irreducible to psychology). Or, alternately, he reifies a supreme being over all of these objects of bhakti, using conceptual materials doubtless supplied to him by the texts, but put to an unfortunate use by him, because it subordinates everyone's actual Īśvara to this Other, thus putting the actual moment of devotion in bhakti under erasure, because now no deity is at the center, so to speak, but rather they are all at the periphery. This is the polar opposite of what I have termed "polycentric" polytheism. It is, instead, a kind of acentric monotheism that is I think very intellectually satisfying to a certain Western sensibility.