"The Advaita doctrine of Shankara cut at the very root of Bhaktivada." Do you agree?

Answer:

Shankara's Advaita, teaching that Brahman alone is real and the individual self identical with it, appears to leave no room for the duality of worshipper and worshipped that devotion requires. Yet the relationship between his doctrine and Bhakti is more complex than simple opposition.

The case that Advaita undermines Bhakti

• If the self is identical with Brahman, there is no other to whom devotion can be offered.
• The world and personal deities belong to maya, the realm of appearance.
• Knowledge (jnana), not devotion, is declared the sole means of liberation.
• Saguna worship of a God with attributes is treated as preparatory and provisional.
• Ramanuja attacked Advaita precisely on the ground that it destroyed devotion.

The case that it accommodates Bhakti

• Shankara distinguished vyavaharika from paramarthika truth, allowing worship at the empirical level.
• He accepted saguna worship as a valid stage for those not ready for pure knowledge.
• He composed devotional hymns, including the Bhaja Govindam and stotras to several deities.
• He promoted panchayatana worship of five deities to unify competing sects.
• He established mathas that continued ritual worship as living institutions.

The later response

• Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita made the soul distinct yet dependent, restoring devotion.
• Madhva's Dvaita asserted outright dualism as the basis of worship.
• Nimbarka, Vallabha and Chaitanya developed further devotional theologies.
• The Bhakti movement flourished in the centuries after Shankara, not before.

Assessment

• Advaita and Bhakti addressed different needs, the philosophical and the devotional.
• Shankara's mathas preserved both metaphysics and ritual worship together.
• The vigour of the theologies that opposed him measures his influence.
• Later Advaitins such as Madhusudana Saraswati reconciled the two explicitly.

One may therefore agree only in part. Advaita's rigorous monism does logically dissolve the duality on which devotion rests, and the great Bhakti theologians defined themselves against it. Yet Shankara himself made room for worship as a preparatory discipline, so it is fairer to say that his doctrine subordinated Bhakti to knowledge than that it cut at its root.