What the Narada Bhakti Sutras say about desire

The Narada Bhakti Sutras are a short text, a little over eighty aphorisms on divine love. A surprising amount of it concerns desire, and mostly the work of telling love and wanting apart, because Narada knows how easily one passes for the other. The sutras below are the ones that deal with that directly. They end somewhere most readers do not expect.

Supreme Love Is Not Mere Desire

Narada's distinction is structural rather than a matter of degree. Wanting reaches out to take something; love, as he defines it, is made of letting go.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 7

Love Without Awareness of Greatness Is Mere Passion

Feeling strongly about God is not yet devotion. Without reverence, Narada says, the intensity is only appetite pointed at a different object.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 23

Free From Desire, the Devotee Desires Nothing

His test is negative. After this love there is nothing further you crave, grieve over, hate or strive for — he describes the state by what has dropped away rather than what has been added.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 5

The Devotee Renounces the World's Pleasures

Turning from lesser pleasures is presented as a symptom, not a discipline. Having tasted something sweeter, the appetite for the rest simply thins.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 35

These Inner Enemies Begin as Ripples and Become Floods

Narada is not sentimental about how desire grows. Small disturbances, repeated and encouraged by the company you keep, become a sea you cannot cross.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 45

Renouncing the Fruits of Action

Give up the results, not the work. The entry describes this as karma yoga woven into the path of love: the action is still performed, and its fruit is handed over rather than merely released.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 48

Releasing the Sense of 'Mine'

The bondage is located in the word mine rather than in the things themselves. The devotee goes on using possessions and relationships, but holds them as borrowed.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 57

Renouncing Even the Desire for Liberation

This is where it lands. Wanting liberation is still wanting something for yourself, so Narada asks the devotee to drop that too and want only the Beloved.

Narada Bhakti Sutras, Sutra 63

Read quickly, the text sounds like a demand to want nothing. Read slowly, it is doing something narrower: moving the whole apparatus of wanting onto one object until there is nothing left over to spend elsewhere. Whether that counts as freedom from desire or as its perfection is a question Narada shows no interest in settling.