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HISTORY OF THE SIKHS
;{2
equalizing
effect of
religious
penance;
but causes
.'urther
diversity
by adopting
Siva as the
type of God.
CHAP. II
attainment of complete beatitude; but Gorakh taught
that intense mental abstraction would etherialize the
body of the most lowly, and gradually unite his spirit
with the all-pervading soul of the world. He chose
Siva as the deity who would thus bless the austere
perseverance of his votaries of whatever caste; and, not
content with the ordinary frontal marks of sects and
persuasions, he distinguished his disciples by boring
their ears, whence they are familiarly known as the
'Kanphata', or ear-torn Jogis.^
The Vedas
and Koran
assailed
by Kabir,
a
disciple
of
Rama-
nand, about
A.D. 1450;
and the
mother
tongue of
the people
A
step was thus made, and faith and abandonment
of the pleasures of life were held to abrogate the distinctions of race which had taken so firm a hold on the
pride and vanity of the rich and powerful. In the next
generation, or about the year 1450, the mysterious
weaver Kabir, a disciple of Ramanand, assailed at once
the worship of idols, the authority of the Koran and
Shastras, and the exclusive use of a learned language.
He addressed Muhammadans as well as Hindus, he
urged them to call upon him, the invisible Kabir, and
to strive continually after inward purity. He personified creation or the world as 'Maya', or as woman,
1 Cf. Wilson
(As. Res., xvii. 183, &c.) and the Dahistan
(Troyer's translation, i. 123, &c.). In the latter, Muhsin Fani
shows some points of conformity between the Jogis and the
Muhammadans. With regard to Yog, in a scientific point of view,
it may be observed that it corresponds with the state of abstraction or self-consciousness which raised the soul above mortality or chance, and enabled it to apprehend the 'true' and to
grasp Plato's 'idea', or archical form of the world, and that
neither Indians nor Greeks considered man capable, in his present imperfect condition, of attaining to such a degree of 'union
with God' or 'knowledge of the true'. (Cf. Ritter, Ancient Philosophy, Morrison's translation, ii. 207, 334-6, and Wilson, As.
Res., xvii. 185.) Were it necessary to pursue the correspondence
further, it would be found that Plato's whole system is almost
identical, in its rudimental characteristics, with the schemes of
Kapil and Patanjal jointly thus, God and matter are in both
eternal: Mahat, or intelligence, or the informing spirit of the
world, is the same with nous or logos, and so on. With both
God, that is 'Poorsh' in the one and the Supreme God in the
other, would seem to be separate from the world as appreciable
by man. It may further be observed that the Sankhya system
is divided into two schools independent of that of Patanjal, the
first of which regards 'Poorsh' simply as life, depending- for
activity upon 'adrisht', chance or fate, while the second holds
the term to denote an active and provident ruler and gives to
vitality a distinct existence. The school of Patanjal differs from
this latter, principally in its terminology and in the mode (Yog)
one of the four subdivisions of
laid down for attaining bliss
which mode, viz. that of stopping the breath, is allowed to be the
doctrine of Gorakh, but is declared to have been followed of old
by Markand, in a manner more agreeable to the Vedas, than the
practice of the recent Reformer.
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