When the Gita Mahatmaya talks about Gita recitation countering various sinful reactions is that karma kanda or is it bhakti?

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Transcript

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So giving pious credits of in the Gita Mahatmya is that Karmakanda or is that Bhakti? See, there is one thing that the primary point is the intent in the Bhagavatam 4th canto it is said that Hrithu Maharaj when he was a king, he performed many of the Karmakanda rituals because as a king he had to set an example for people and everybody could not practice Bhakti.
So he had to set an example of Karmakanda and he performed Karmakanda but while doing that he remembered Vishnu and he was praying to Vishnu. He was seeing the demigods not as independent agents, he was seeing them as servants of Vishnu. So the activity might be Karmakanda but the intent might be devotional.
So as devotees we don’t have to become very rigid in differentiating this is Karmakanda, I will not do it. You could do Karmakanda activities also as a devotional activity. And sometimes, the whole point is sometimes people may be edified, people may be instructed by a devotee not doing Karmakanda activity.
This should not be done. But sometimes a devotee not doing Karmakanda activity can lead to so much anti-preaching. Suppose in a family somebody has passed away and there everybody is at that time doing some Karmakanda activity and after that there is some prasad offered over there and a devotee says I don’t take any prasad.
Now at that time people’s feelings may be terribly hurt over there. So Bhaktivinoda Thakur in Chaitanya Shikshamrut says that a devotee can participate in three kinds of festivals. A devotee is hard within practicing Vaishnava festivals.
But it is apart from that there can be general religious festivals and there can be general social festivals. These are the social festivals can be say American Independence Day or whatever Indian Independence Day. Devotees have to go over there sing the national anthem.
You can do that. It is not that we are thinking this is the ultimate goal of life. So like that Bhaktivinoda Thakur says that even if sometimes for the sake of people in general a devotee has to participate in general religious festivals.
It’s not wrong for a devotee to do that. In fact there is a whole in Sajjan Toshyani which is a magazine which he was running. At that time there was an iconoclastic Hindu leader Swami Dayanand Saraswati who had strongly criticized the puja of Kali.
And Bhaktivinoda Thakur wrote a whole essay defending the puja of Kali. And he doesn’t say it is transcendental. He says this is actually the Vedic culture is so inclusive that even for people who are in Tamil Nadu there is a facility for elevating it.
He says this Swamiji he unfortunately doesn’t understand the broadness of the Vedas. So he doesn’t say this is Tamil, I think it should be given up. He tries to clarify the misconception.
This is meant for a particular level of people. So we don’t have to see Karmakanda as always a competitor with Bhakti. There can be times when it is a competitor but there are times when the two can go together also.
And sometimes by doing some activities other than seeing as Karmakanda we might be able to we may do it with a devotional intention and by that we avoid a lot of unnecessary agitation of people and people can come closer to Krishna. So we have to be a little more careful in not rigidly discriminating this is Karmakanda, this is Bhakti. If the intent of Bhakti is there then if totally mundane things can be spiritualizable then why can’t something which is actually Dharmic but upper Adharma that can also be spiritualized.