Bhakti or Bhakti

Rust: Would you have us follow Buddha or worship Gods.

Siddhartha Gautama

His teaching lasted for several decades and he perished at a very old age, somewhere in his eighties. Following his death, only a small group of followers continued in his footsteps. Calling themselves bhikkus , or "disciples," they wandered the countryside in yellow robes (in order to indicate their bhakti , or "devotion" to the master). For almost two hundred years, these followers of Buddha were a small, relatively inconsequential group among an infinite variety of Hindu sects. But when the great Mauryan emperor, Asoka, converted to Buddhism in the third century BCE, the young, inconsequential religion spread like wildfire throughout India and beyond.

A Hindu teaching:

There are six popular traditions which embrace bhakti as a process of worship to a particular deity:

• Vishnu, belonging to the classic Trinity and His concrete manifestations in the forms of Rama, Krishna and other avatars.

• Maheshvara or Shiva, the third God of the classic Trinity.

• Devi, the Mother Goddess, in her three forms of Durga or Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati.

• Ganesha, the elephant-faced deity who is said to remove obstacles on the path of devotion.

• Suryadev, the Sun-God.

• Subrahmanya, the six-faced deity known also as Murugan or Kumaran to the Tamil world.