Teachings
Modes of Devotion (Part 6)
5. Archana, or Offering Worship to God in Holy Images
According to Vedanta, God does not create the universe and living beings out of something different from Him. When a potter creates a pot from clay, the clay and pot are different from him. He is the instrumental cause and clay, the material cause of the pot. On the other hand, God projects the universe and living beings out of Himself, just as a spider creates its web out of a secretion from its own body (Mundaka Upanishad, 1.1.7). God is both the material cause and instrumental cause of the universe and living beings. He not only projects them from Himself, but also "enters into them" (Taittiriya Upanishad, 2.6), which means that God pervades them as Consciousness. Thus in Hinduism adoration of God in symbols and images is not looked down upon as adoration of inanimate things, but as adoration of Divinity itself. Holy images are manifestations of God. A devotee is able to relate himself to them, offer worship to them, and be spiritually uplifted in the process. Sri Ramakrishna called them chinmayi pratima (images of Spirit, or Consciousness). Image worship gives a sense of reality to a devotee's spiritual practices. He remembers that devotion and not ritual is the essence of worship.
Sri Krishna promises in the Bhagavad Gita (9.26) that He accepts offerings of any kind, however small and simple, as long as they are made with devotion: "Whosoever offers me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or water-I accept that as a pious offering of the pure in heart." Sri Ramakrishna was a worshiper in the Dakshineswar Kali temple, but he was a worshiper with a difference. To him the deity in the temple was not a stone image, but his own Divine Mother, the embodiment of Consciousness.
Swami Ramakrishnananda, a monastic disciple of Sri Ramakrishna who founded the Ramakrishna movement in southern India, was unsurpassed in his devotion to Sri Ramakrishna. He performed Sri Ramakrishna's worship with elaborate rituals. To him Sri Ramakrishna's picture was not different from Sri Ramakrishna himself. He served his guru in his picture just as he had served him when he was alive.
A common form of archana in Hindu temples and personal shrines is offering of flowers to the Deity while chanting the 108 or 1008 names of God.
6. Vandana, or Offering obeisance to God
Vandana consists in bowing down to God in His images in a devotional attitude. This simple act of prostration can be made a meaningful spiritual exercise by looking upon it as an act of self-renewal. When a devotee prostrates before God, he imagines that he offers his body, mind, and soul to God, Who abides in his heart as the Light of all lights. (Bhagavad Gita, 13.17) He immerses himself as it were in that Light and cultivates a luminous self-image, imagining that he is a spark of that divine Light. Vandana enables a devotee to subordinate his ego to God and feel that God is everything and that he himself is nothing without Him. Says Sri Ramakrishna, "The universe and its created beings, and the twenty-four cosmic principles, all exist because God exists. Nothing remains if God is eliminated. The number increases if you put many zeros after the figure one; but the zeros don't have any value if the one is not there." Vandana enables a devotee to cultivate a natural humility without a touch of ego in his interaction with others.
(To be continued)