The text begins by disqualifying the obvious
The Narada Purana opens its treatment of devotion not with a prescription for ritual but with a question about desire. Before the flowers, before the lamp, before the correct pronunciation of any mantra, it wants to know what you are actually doing when you fold your hands. Most people, if they answer honestly, are doing something conditional. They are offering something in the hope of receiving something. The Purana calls this a transaction, and it does not call a transaction bhakti.This is the first contradiction. The worship most of us learned, the Tuesday fast, the specific flower for a specific deity, the number of circumambulations around a particular shrine, is a system of exchange. You give the deity your time, your money, your restraint. The deity, in theory, gives back. The Narada Purana's definition of bhakti refuses this logic entirely. Devotion, in its framing, is not a petition. It is a condition of the self that has nothing to do with what comes back.
