Gita 09.23 – The Gita’s multi-level monotheism is the balance between Abrahamic monotheism and Greco-Roman polytheism
Bhagavad Gita 9.23 yepy anya devata bhakta jan te shraddhayan vithaha te pimam eva kaunteya shintya vidhi purvakam yepy anya devata bhakta Those who are worshipping other gods, jan te shraddhayan vithaha, they worship them with faith. te pimam eva kaunteya, they are also worshipping me.
jan te vidhi purvakam There are many significant points in this verse, which need to be carefully understood to appreciate what Krishna is stating over here. Those who worship other gods, if they are also worshipping me, but they are doing it in an unauthorized way. So, in the Western or Middle Eastern monotheisms, that is Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is the idea of the one true God whose glory is established by demolishing and desecrating all other gods who are considered to be false.
Thou shalt have no other God before apart from me, before me, thou shalt not bow. That means, they say that other gods are false gods. If you want to be truly devoted to me, you should worship only me.
This conception leads to violence against those religions that are perceived as polytheistic. So, that includes the Greco-Roman religions that preceded Christianity and the Sanatana Dharma, which is exceeded in the Eastern part of the world for far more time than Christianity. So, there, the idea is that if you worship any false God, then you are no longer worshipping the true God.
But here Krishna is giving a balance. He is stating that those who worship the other gods are also worshipping him. They are also worshipping me.
Some people stress only this one half that they are also worshipping me. And by this, they conclude that there is nothing at all wrong or inappropriate about demigod worship. And there are some who ajanta vidhi purvakam, avidhi purvakam, it s unauthorized.
They focus only on this part and they totally condemn demigod worship. So, both are extremes which focus on only a part of scripture and don t understand the whole picture. So, at one level, Krishna is saying that even those who worship devtas worship him.
So, that just as the drop of water which falls from the ocean, from the sky, goes gradually to the ocean. Similarly, the offering of obeisances to the various devtas goes to Achyuta. So, they say that whichever god you want to worship, you can worship.
Now, firstly, Krishna is not here endorsing the idea that all gods are one or even that all gods are manifestations of the one absolute truth. Now, none of these conceptions are supported because we see here that Krishna uses the clearly dualist terminology anya devata and maam. That means there are other gods and there is me.
So, Krishna is not saying that those other gods are me only. So, the henotheistic idea, henotheism is the belief system that there is one absolute truth who manifests in as many gods. And henotheism is the idea that we can worship whichever god we want or even whichever form we want, such as a tree, if that is what helps us to calm down, to focus and to move onwards.
So, this idea makes the concept of divinity something like a flag, wherein whichever piece of cloth, whichever colour, composition invokes national sentiment that can be made by the nation into a flag. And with the change of political power or change of national mindset, the flag can also be changed. So, the divinity is not like that.
Krishna is the eternal absolute truth. And how then is it that worshipping devatas is worshipping him? It is indirect because ultimately he has set up the system of demigod worship for the gradual elevation of people. Actually, Prabhupada, when he was in Bengal at that time, once he was asked that who is better, a Christian worshipping god or a person in India worshipping a demigod? Prabhupada replied that the demigod worshipper is better because they are in the house of the Vedas.
Now, of course, this is not necessarily a universal statement because we will have to see what mode, what level of consciousness the person worshipping the demigod is and similarly, what mode and what level of consciousness the Christian is. But broadly speaking, a person who is in the house of the Vedas, that person will have lesser cultural and conceptual barriers to cross, to say, to come over from demigod worship to Krishna worship as compared to coming to the understanding of worshipping the deity and a personal conception of God who manifests as divinity, as embodied divinity in this world. This conception will be very difficult to accept for those in the Abrahamic traditions.
So, the scriptures have come from Krishna and the scriptures are meant to take people gradually towards Krishna. So, in that sense, the scriptures are teaching worship of the devtas, that is also indirectly worship of Krishna because they are following the scriptures ultimately coming from Krishna when they are worshipping the devtas. Then why is it avidhi purvakam? If it is given in vidhi, if it is given in scripture, then why is it avidhi purvakam? It is something like karmakanda.
Karmakanda is given in scripture and in that sense, it is a part of vidhi. Vidhi is the ordained directions given in scripture. But it is not in accordance with the highest conclusion of scriptures, which we will see Krishna will tell at the end of the Bhagavad Gita when he says sarva-dharman parityajya mam ekam saranam vraja, give up all varieties of religion and just surrender to me.
So, here both the ideas that worshipping other gods is unfaithful to the supreme God Krishna as is taught in the Abrahamic traditions, that is not exactly supported because Krishna says they are also worshipping me, but they are doing it indirectly and inappropriately. But at the same time, considering that worshipping the gods is perfectly all right, that is also not correct because as was mentioned in the 7th chapter and it was mentioned here also before 9.20 to 22, that worship of Krishna gives eternal results where the worship of devtas gives temporary results. So, therefore, this is a very important verse which presents a balance between the conception of monotheism that is there in the Abrahamic traditions and the conception of polytheism that is often imputed on the Sanatana Dharma tradition.
This is, we could say, multi-level monotheism wherein the one supreme absolute truth can be worshipped in different ways through its different manifestations in a process of gradual elevation.