Category: His Legacy
The Bhakti movement in India took place as an effort to inculcate loving devotion and belief in God. The Bhakti movement in India aimed at the principle of monotheism, i.e. existence of one God. It started in the South of India and slowly spread to the north of India. This happened during the later half of the medieval period in the history of India (800-1700 A.D). The real essence of Bhakti is found in the great epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana. The Vedic scriptures also talk about the concept of pure devotion of God.
Vaishnavism is a tradition of Hinduism, distinguished from other schools by its worship of Vishnu or his associated avatars, principally as Rama and Krishna, as the original and supreme God.
The worship of Vishnu was already well developed in the period of the Itihasas. Hopkins says “Vishnuism, in a word, is the only cultivated native sectarian native religion of India.” Vaishnavism is expounded in a part of the Mahabharata known as the Bhagavad Gita, which contains a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna is one of the avatars of Vishnu. In this dialogue, Krishna plays the role of Arjuna’s charioteer.
The name of sampradaya – Brahma-Madhva-Gaudiya-sampradaya – suggests three distinct phases, or links in the disciplic chain. The disciplic succession begins with Lord Brahma, who first spoke the absolute truth into the cosmic creation after receiving it in his heart directly from Lord Krsna. Lord Brahma was the spiritual master of Narada Muni, and Narada passed the teachings on to Vyasadev.
Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur (September 2, 1838 – June 23, 1914), a prominent figure among the Gaudiya Vaishnavas of Bengal, was born Kedarnath Datta in the town of Birnagar, Bengal, India. He was the son of Raja Krsnananda Datta and Jagat Mohini Devi. Bhaktivinoda married and had several children, including Bimal Prasad (later Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura), the founder of the Gaudiya Math and the guru of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Bhaktivinoda was also the father, as well as the initiating guru, of Lalita Prasad Thakur. The two brothers had substantial disagreements on how their father’s spiritual heritage was to carry on, Bimal Prasad more inclined for preaching and the establishment of Varnashrama-dharma, Lalita Prasad more inclined for the esoteric mode of raganuga-worship.
The name of sampradaya – Brahma-Madhva-Gaudiya-sampradaya – suggests three distinct phases, or links in the disciplic chain. The disciplic succession begins with Lord Brahma, who first spoke the absolute truth into the cosmic creation after receiving it in his heart directly from Lord Krsna. Lord Brahma was the spiritual master of Narada Muni, and Narada passed the teachings on to Vyasadev.