A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej.

36

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS

CHAP. II

The Vedas A step was thus made, and faith and abandonment of
and Koran the pleasures of life were held to abrogate the distinctions
assailed by
Kabir, a of race which had taken so firm a hold on the pride and
disciple of vanity of the rich and powerful. In the next generation,
nand, or about the year 1450, the mysterious weaver Kabir, a
about A. D. disciple of Ramanand, assailed at once the worship of idols,; the authority of the Koran and Shastras, and the exclusive
and the use of a learned language. He addressed Muhammadans as
mother well as Hindus, he urged them to call upon him, the intongue of
the people visible Kabir, and to strive continually after inward purity.
used as an He personified creation or the world as 'Maya ', or as
instrument. woman, prolific of deceit and illusion, and thus denounced
But asce- man's weakness or his proneness to evil. Practically Kabir
tici still admitted outward conformity, and leant towards Rama or
Vishnu as the most perfect type of God. Like his predecessors, he erringly gave shape and attributes to the divinity,
and he further limited the application of his doctrines of
reform, by declaring retirement from the world to be desirable, and the ' Sadh ', or pure or perfect man, the passive
or inoffensive votary, to be the living resemblance of the
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 (Y6g) laid down for
attaining bliss-one of the four subdivisions of 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.