Tamil Kṛṣṇa bhakti is not a path of disembodied spiritual union; it is an imaginative, holistic, and embodied bhakti.
A mūrti is not an idol. It’s a living “vessel” of manifestation, incarnation, and personification. It follows the same logic that if you want to drink water, you require a glass.
Smaraṇa directly translates as “remembrance.” For many schools of bhakti, especially those informed by literature like Bhagavad-Gītā and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, (or the “Bhāgavat School”) remembering the Godhead at the time of death is the ultimate fruit of a successful human life.
To understand the word tarka or its importance, we must first retrace our steps to find the fundamental problem that we are trying to address through spiritual practice.
Within Hinduism, a traditional teaching regarding the bewildering diversity of divine forms is that the formless Supreme Being adopts many different guises as an act of compassion.
Devotion is the fuel for sādhana (spiritual practice), the sweet longing that inspires sitting for meditation, for ritual, for learning and teaching.
We all seek wholeness, to connect the wounded part of us with something completely beyond ourselves, and that is made possible through devotion.
Images and text from Ekabhumi Charles Ellik. Previously published by Sounds True in The Bhakti Coloring Book (2018) and The Shakti Coloring Book (2015)