At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference
in 2025, a Hindu religious artist whose Hindu name is Srimati Syamarani, spoke
on the art of spiritual life. A person is like the hand of Krishna. The hand
puts food in Krishna’s body, so the entire body is nourished. The hand serving
the body is a duty. So too is following the type of bhukti that is
following rules and regulations out of duty. At some point, it will no longer
be felt as a duty. In Kantian terms, this means not acting ethically by being
compelled by reason—the necessity of the moral law that reason presents to us;
rather, going beyond moral duty is to approximate the holy will, but not
because it is the nature of finite rational beings to be good; rather,
it is out of love of the moral law, including its necessitating us to act
ethically. In bhukti devotion, however, it is not love of the form of
moral law (i.e., it being an imperative, or command, of reason) that obviates the
sense of duty to serve Krishna and other people, as in being a hand of Krishna
serves Krishna’s body; rather, it is love directed to Krishna (and ensuing compassion
to people) that transcends ethical obligation per se. This is not to say that bhukti
practice can go beyond feeling obligated due to a feeling, whereas it is by
the use of reason that Kantian gets beyond duty, for it is the feeling of
respect that empirically motivates a person to treat people as not only means
to one’s own goals, but also as ends in themselves. As rational beings, we
partake in reasoning, albeit in a finite way, and reason itself has absolute
value because it is by reason that value is assigned to things. Even so, it
cannot be said that a devotee of Krishna in Hinduism can go beyond acting out
of duty due to an emotion (i.e.., love or compassion) whereas for Kant it is
just by reasoning that a person can go beyond acting because one is duty-bound.
The full essay is at "Acting Morally: Bhukti Yoga and Kant Beyond Duty."
