Reform Checked by Defence of the Old Faiths (1870-1913)

CHAPTER III

REFORM CHECKED BY DEFENCE OF THE OLD FAITHS

1870-1913

WE have seen in the historical outline that about 1870 a great change began to make itself manifest in the Hindu spirit. The educated Indian suddenly grew up, and shewed that he had a mind of his own. Religiously, the change manifested itself in a disposition to proclaim Hinduism one of the greatest religions. The same temper appeared among Buddhists, Jains, Muslims and Parsees; but the movement shewed itself, first of all, among Hindus. It also took many forms. We propose to divide the many movements and organizations incarnating this spirit into two groups, according as they defend only a part or the whole of the ancient faith. This chapter will deal with those that defend only a part. Every movement in this group opposes Hindu idolatry; but several of them worship their gurus, a practice which leads to idolatry. The attitude to caste in all cases is very ambiguous.

I. THE ĀRYA SAMĀJ

1. This powerful body, which during the last twenty years has expanded rapidly in the Panjab and the United Provinces, is so completely the creation of its founder that a brief sketch of his life is the indispensable introduction to a study of the movement.

For the first thirty-three years of his life we have a very clear and informing witness, a fragment of an autobiography, dictated by him, and published in the Theosophist, in October and December, 1879, and November, 1880.¹ This sketch seems to be on the whole trustworthy. It certainly enables us to trace in some degree the growth of his mind during the period which it covers.

In the small town of Ṭaṅkārā,² belonging to the native state of Morvi, Kathiawar, Western India, there lived early last century a wealthy Brāhman, named Ambā Śaṅkara. He held the position of Jamadar of the town, which his fathers had held before him, and was a banker besides. He was a devout Hindu, an ardent and faithful worshipper of Śiva. To this man was born, in 1824, a son, whom he named Mūla Śaṅkara. The father was above all things anxious that the boy should prove a religious man and should accept his father’s religion. Accordingly he was careful to give him a Hindu education. By the time he was fourteen the boy had learnt by heart large pieces of the Vedas and had made some progress in Sanskrit grammar.

At this time the first crisis in his life occurred. As the incident is one of the most vivid episodes in the Autobiography,³ we give it in his own words:

When the great day of gloom and fasting — called Śivarātrī — had arrived, this day falling on the 13th of Vadya of Magh, my father, regardless of the protest that my strength might fail, commanded me to fast, adding that I had to be initiated on that night into the sacred legend, and participate in that night’s long vigil in the temple of Śiva. Accordingly, I followed him along with other young men, who accompanied their parents. This vigil is divided into four parts, called praharas, consisting of three hours each. Having completed my task, namely, having sat up for the first two praharas till the hour of mid-night, I remarked that the Pujaris, or temple servants, and some of the lay devotees, after having left the inner temple, had fallen asleep outside. Having been taught for years that by sleeping on that particular night, the worshipper lost all the good effect of his devotion, I tried to refrain from drowsiness by bathing my eyes now and then with cold water. But my father was less fortunate. Unable to resist fatigue, he was the first to fall asleep, leaving me to watch alone.

Thoughts upon thoughts crowded upon me, and one question arose after the other in my disturbed mind. Is it possible, — I asked myself, — that this semblance of man, the idol of a personal God that I see bestriding his bull before me, and who, according to all religious accounts, walks about, eats, sleeps and drinks; who can hold a trident in his hand, beat upon his damaru drum, and pronounce curses upon men, — is it possible that he can be the Mahādeva, the Great Deity, the same that is invoked as the Lord of Kailash, the Supreme Being and the Divine hero of all the stories we read of him in his Puranas? Unable to resist such thoughts any longer, I awoke my father, abruptly asking him to enlighten me, to tell me whether this hideous emblem of Śiva in the temple was identical with the Mahādeva, of the scriptures, or something else. “Why do you ask it?” said my father. “Because,” I answered, “I feel it impossible to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent, living God, with this idol, which allows the mice to run upon its body, and thus suffers its image to be polluted without the slightest protest.” Then my father tried to explain to me that this stone representation of the Mahādeva of Kailash, having been consecrated with the Veda mantras (verses) in the most solemn way by the holy Brāhmins, became, in consequence, the God himself, and is worshipped as such, adding that, as Śiva cannot be perceived personally in this Kali-Yuga — the age of mental darkness, — we hence have the idol in which the Mahādeva of Kailash is worshipped by his votaries; this kind of worship is pleasing to the great Deity as much as if, instead of the emblem, he were there himself. But the explanation fell short of satisfying me. I could not, young as I was, help suspecting misinterpretation and sophistry in all this. Feeling faint with hunger and fatigue, I begged to be allowed to go home.

My father consented to it, and sent me away with a Sepoy, only reiterating once more his command that I should not eat. But when, once home, I had told my mother of my hunger, she fed me with sweetmeats, and I fell into a profound sleep.

Every one will feel the beat of conviction in this fine passage; and the results of it are visible in the crusade of the Ārya Samāj against idolatry to this day. But every one who knows India will also agree that what happened is scarcely comprehensible in a Hindu boy of fourteen years of age, unless he had already heard idolatry condemned. Brooding over the problem, I wrote to my friend, Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson of Rajkot, Kathiawar, and asked whether Sthānakavāsī influence could be traced in or about the boy’s birth-place at that time. The Sthānakavāsīs are a group of Jains who gave up idolatry and broke away from the main Śvetāmbara sect in the fifteenth century.¹ Mrs. Stevenson writes:

Taṅkārā is fourteen miles south of Morvi, and about twenty-three miles north of Rajkot. In the thirties, the father of the present Thakur Saheb of Morvi was ruling. He was very devoted to a certain Sthānakavāsī monk, and the Prime Minister also was a Sthānakavāsī; so that the sect was then very powerful and influential in the Morvi state. All monks and nuns, travelling from the town of Morvi to Rajkot (another Sthānakavāsī stronghold), passed through Taṅkārā, where Ambā Śaṅkara and his son lived.

This clearly gives the environment which prepared the boy for his experience in the temple.

Four years later the sudden death of a sister convulsed him with grief, and made him realize to the full the horror of death. He thereupon resolved that he would allow nothing to restrain him from winning moksha, that is, emancipation from transmigration, the Hindu idea of salvation. Consequently, he returned to his studies with redoubled energy, and made up his mind to allow no such entanglement as marriage to impede him in his quest. In 1846, when he was twenty-one or twenty-two, his parents determined to get him married; but he fled from home. Thus ends the first section of his life.

2. In his wanderings he met a number of ascetics, who received him into their order. His father came out to seek for him and caught him, but he escaped once more. He then met with a sannyāsī named Brahmānand, and by him was convinced of the truth of the Vedānta doctrine of the identity of his own soul and God. This he gave up at a later date. For two years he wandered about, seeking good teachers.

In 1848 he proceeded to Chānoda Kanyāli on the banks of the river Nerbudda, and met several groups of scholarly ascetics, some of them followers of the Yoga system, others of the Vedānta. He was most anxious to become an initiated sannyāsī, that is, a Hindu monk who has renounced the world completely. He gives up caste, home, marriage, property, the use of money and of fire, and is expected to live a wandering life. If he were once received into one of the recognized orders of sannyāsīs, his parents could no longer bring pressure upon him to marry. At length he begged an ascetic known as Paramānanda, belonging to the Sarasvatī order of Śaṅkara’s Daṇḍīs, to receive him. At first he refused, but, after much persuasion, he initiated him, giving him the name Dayānanda. Since he had thereby become a member of the Sarasvatī order, he was henceforward known as Dayānanda Sarasvatī. Until the day of his death he would tell no one his real name.

From this time onwards for eight years he wandered about from place to place, trying to find trustworthy teachers of Yoga. His Autobiography does not tell us why he was so eager to learn Yoga methods; but he probably regarded them as the proper means for reaching the emancipation which he was so desirous to reach.

Either at the time of his initiation as a sannyāsī, or at some point during these years, he lost faith in the teaching of Śaṅkara, and came to believe that God is personal, that the human soul is distinct from God, and that the world is real. He does not tell us who the teachers were who led him to these opinions. They are probably the outcome of the modern influences he came under, and of his original belief in Śiva. In any case he continued to worship Śiva, and believed in the personality of God.

His books on Yoga contained anatomical accounts of the human body. Reading in these volumes long and intricate descriptions of nerve-circles and nerve-centres which he could not understand, he was suddenly filled with suspicion. As it happened, a dead body was floating down the river on the banks of which he was walking. He drew the corpse to the shore, cut it open, satisfied himself that the books were false, and in consequence consigned them to the river along with the corpse. From this time his faith in many works on Yoga gradually dwindled.

The Autobiography stops short at the beginning of 1857, and we are without information of his activities until 1860. Thus there is no echo of the Indian Mutiny whatsoever in his life.

He had been greatly disappointed in his search for competent teachers.¹ In 1860, however, he came across a blind Brāhman in the city of Mathurā (Muttra), and became his disciple for two and a half years. His master, whose name was Virajānanda, was a great authority on Pāṇini’s Grammar. He believed implicitly in the authority of the ancient books, but condemned all modern Sanskrit religious works as worthless lies. He would not accept Dayānanda as a disciple until the latter had sunk all his modern books in the river Jumna. Blind and learned though he was, he was a very irritable man, and would now and then give his disciple corporal chastisement. One day he struck him on the hand with a stick with such violence that he carried the mark of it all his life. This man influenced Dayānanda more than any other. He read with him Pāṇini’s Grammar and Patañjali’s Commentary on it. We are also told that he studied the Vedānta-sūtras and many other books, but what these other books were, we do not know. Whether it was from Virajānanda that he learned the extraordinary method of expounding the Vedas which he used in writing his Commentaries in later years, we do not know. But his teacher certainly sketched his mission for him. When he was leaving, Virajānanda said to him:

The Vedas have long ceased to be taught in Bhāratvarsha, go and teach them; teach the true Shastras, and dispel, by their light, the darkness which the false creeds have given birth to. Remember that, while works by common men are utterly misleading as to the nature and attributes of the one true God, and slander the great Rishis and Munis, those by the ancient teachers are free from such a blemish. This is the test which will enable you to differentiate the true, ancient teaching from the writings of ordinary men.¹

It was in May, 1863, that he took leave of his master and began his wanderings once more. He now regarded himself as a learned man, and usually conversed in Sanskrit rather than in the vernacular Hindī. Although he had many a conversation and discussion during those years, he still thought of himself as a religious student and not as a teacher. When he started out, he was still a devotee of Śiva, wearing the necklace of rudrāksha berries, and the three lines of white ash on the forehead, which distinguish the pious Śaiva. But in the course of his wanderings his mind altered, and he laid these things aside once for all. Henceforward he worshipped God, and recognized Śiva as only one of the many names of the Supreme. This change seems to have come in the year 1866, which was clearly a time of crisis for him. During that year he came in contact with various missionaries, and had long conversations with them. The same year finds him not only preaching against idolatry at Hardwar, but telling the pilgrims there that sacred spots and ceremonial bathing are of no religious value whatsoever, and denouncing the great Vaiṣṇava book, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, as immoral.

3. A further change came in the year 1868. Virajānanda and he seem both to have felt that it was now his duty to begin the public exposition of his ideas. From this time, then, Dayānanda’s public life may be said to have begun. His biographer speaks of him as trying several methods of work, and finding them each more or less a failure.

His first plan was to talk to the paṇḍits in Sanskrit, in the hope that, if he convinced them of the truth of his ideas, they would spread the light all over the land. But these old-fashioned conservatives, no matter how often convicted of error, were of the same opinion still. So he gave the course up in despair.

He next decided to adopt one of the methods which he had seen in use in Christian missions, namely education. He found some well-to-do men to finance several schools for him. The curriculum was to be confined to early Sanskrit literature. He hoped that pupils trained in this way would become missionaries of his ideas. The schools were opened, and continued for some time; but, though the paṇḍits were quite willing to receive his pay and become schoolmasters, they did not teach the new ideas; and the work came to nothing.

Consequently, he determined to appeal to the people themselves, both by lectures and by books. He published a number of books, and went from town to town, delivering lectures, in Sanskrit, on the right interpretation of the Vedas and the teaching which he believed they gave. This method was more successful. He found it quite possible to draw huge audiences wherever he went, and to get the ear, not only of ordinary men, but of the wealthy. He had many conversations with individuals, but consistently refused to speak to women. Wherever it was possible, he met the paṇḍits in discussion. He was specially anxious to prove in every place, in public discussion with the most learned men, that idolatry has not the sanction of the Vedas. His followers declare he was always victorious in these discussions. All those who met him in discussion declared him to be violent, loud-tongued and overbearing. He still lived like a sannyāsī, wearing only a minimum of clothing. He was a large, powerful man with striking features, and rather a remarkable voice.

Image: DAYĀNANDA SARASVATĪ As a sannyāsī

Image: DAYĀNANDA SARASVATĪ After his visit to Calcutta

In the end of 1872 he went down to Calcutta, and spent four months there, lecturing, speaking and discussing. He had been above all things anxious to meet Keshab Chandra Sen; and it is clear that Keshab and the Samāj exercised a very wonderful influence over him. Two changes in his method date from this time. He began to wear regular clothes; and a picture which still survives shows that he must have copied the Brāhma leaders, whose dress was a modification of missionary costume. Secondly, he realized, from the great influence exercised by Keshab and the other Brāhma leaders through their addresses in Bengali, that he ought to give up using Sanskrit in his public lectures and speak in Hindī instead.

4. His fame and influence continued to spread and become deeper, as he taught far and wide throughout North India. At Allahabad in 1874 he completed his Satyārth Prakāsh, with which we shall have to deal later. In the end of 1874 we find him in Bombay, in close touch both with the Hindu community and the young Prārthanā Samāj.¹ He seems to have had more than usual success in the city; for he returned early in 1875, and there launched his great scheme, the foun-dation of the Ārya Samāj. The members of the Prārthanā Samāj had hoped to be able to unite with him, but the differences were too deep. It is clear, however, that the main features of his society were borrowed directly from the Brāhma and Prārthanā Samājes, as he saw them working in Calcutta, Bombay and elsewhere. The common name covers common features. This may be taken as the end of the third, and the beginning of the last, stage of his life.

On the first of January, 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in a magnificent Durbar held by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, at Delhi. Dayānanda was present as the guest of one of the native princes, and met some Hindus from Lahore, who gave him a pressing invitation to visit the Panjab. Shortly after he visited Ludhiana and Lahore. So great was his success in this latter city, that the Ārya Samāj founded there very speedily eclipsed the society founded in Bombay; and Lahore became the headquarters of the movement.

For six years longer Dayānanda lived and worked, touring throughout North India, and steadily extending the Samāj. There are just two matters to be noted during these years. The first is his connection with the Theosophical Society which had been founded in New York in 1875. In 1878 the founders, Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky, wrote to Dayānanda and suggested a union of the two movements, on the ground that their aim was the same; and Dayānanda accepted the proposal. The Theosophist leaders came to India in January, 1879; and the strange union continued until 1881, when it was broken off, both parties feeling bitter and aggrieved.¹

The other matter is a living part of his general policy. He consistently sought to recall the Hindus to what he conceived to be the ancient faith, and as consistently stirred them up to vehement opposition to Christianity and Muḥammadan-ism. In the first edition of the Satyārth Prakāsh,¹ published in 1874, he approved of beef-eating under certain conditions, but in the second edition it is condemned. In 1882 he formed the Gaurakshinī Sabhā,² or Cow-protecting Association, and about the same time published his book, Gokarunānidhi,³ on the same subject. The purpose was to rouse Hindu feeling against Christians and Muḥammadans on account of the killing of cows and oxen, and to present a monster petition to Government,⁴ begging that the practice might be prohibited. Dayānanda died before the movement had spread very far; but later it attained great proportions, as we shall see.⁵ In this connection Sir Valentine Chirol has suggested⁶ that Dayānanda was a political schemer. This we believe to be a complete mistake, although, as we shall show, his unhealthy teaching has produced very unhealthy political fruit.⁷

He passed away on the 30th of October, 1883, at the age of fifty-nine.

5. The following sketch of his position and aims by Dr. Griswold of Lahore is so vivid and convincing that we cannot do better than transcribe it:

Paṇḍit Dayānand Sarasvatī became finally emancipated from the authority of Brahmanism in some such way as Luther became emancipated from the authority of the Church of Rome. Luther appealed from the Roman Church and the authority of tradition to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. Paṇḍit Dayānand Sarasvatī appealed from the Brahmanical Church and the authority of Smriti to the earliest and most Sacred of Indian Scriptures. The watchword of Luther was ‘Back to the Bible’: the watchword of Paṇḍit Dayānand was ‘Back to the Vedas.’ With this religious watchword another watchword was implicitly, if not explicitly, combined, namely ‘India for the Indians.’ Combining these two, we have the principle, both religious and political, that the religion of India as well as the Sovereignty of India ought to belong to the Indian people; in other words, Indian religion for the Indians, and Indian Sovereignty for the Indians. In order to accomplish the first end, Indian religion was to be reformed and purified by a return to the Vedas, and foreign religions as Islam and Christianity were to be extirpated. Thus the program included reform for indigenous religion and extirpation for foreign religion. With regard to the second end, the founder of the Arya Samaj seems to have taught that a return to the pure teachings of the Vedas would gradually fit the people of India for self-rule and that independence would ultimately come to them. I am not charging Paṇḍit Dayānand Sarasvatī with disloyalty. Every sincere well-wisher of India hopes that the time will come when the Indian people through the spread of education and the removal of bad social customs and above all through the prevalence of true religion will be fitted for Self-government. It is evident from all this that Paṇḍit Dayānand Sarasvatī was a man of large views. He was a dreamer of splendid dreams. He had a vision of India purged of her superstitions, filled with the fruits of Science, worshipping one God, fitted for self-rule, having a place in the sisterhood of nations, and restored to her ancient glory. All this was to be accomplished by throwing overboard the accumulated superstitions of the centuries and returning to the pure and inspired teachings of the Vedas. Thus the founder of the Ārya Samāj was a kind of Indian Elijah or John the Baptist, who felt himself called to turn the hearts of the degenerate children of modern India to their fathers of the glorious Vedic age, to reconcile the present with the past. The character of his mission helps to account for the violence of his methods of controversy. Elijah was not specially gentle in his dealings with the prophets of Baal; nor was Luther very tender toward the Roman Church. In like manner Paṇḍit Dayānand Sarasvatī stood with his back to the wall, facing on the one hand the attacks of the Brahmanical hierarchy and on the other the assaults of the foreign religions, Islam and Christianity. Under these circumstances we can hardly wonder that he struck back as hard as he could. Luther dealt heavy blows at the Roman Church as Paṇḍit Dayānand did at the Brahmanical Church. Suppose now that while Luther was fighting with Rome, an extensive and powerful Mohammedan propaganda, which threatened to devour all the fruits of the Reformation, was found all over Europe. What would Luther have done under these circumstances, but smite the apostate Roman Church at home and the Mohammedan propaganda from abroad with impartial zeal and violence and with no great effort to be fair and appreciative. This illustrates exactly Paṇḍit Dayānand’s attitude toward the degenerate Brahmanical Church, on the one hand, and the foreign faiths Christianity and Islam on the other. In his opinion, the one needed to be purged and pruned; the others, to be extirpated. The sections in the Satyārth Prakāsh which deal with the criticism of Islam and Christianity are evidently intended to be the literature of such extirpation, i.e., to be the means of rooting out all such foreign superstitions from the hearts of the sons of India. For extreme unfairness, for inability to state the position of opponents without caricature, and for general crudeness, these sections can hardly be matched in the whole literature of religious controversy.¹

6. Dayānanda’s chief convictions may be summed up as follows :

a. There is one God only. He alone is to be worshipped; and he must be worshipped spiritually, not by images.

b. The four Vedas are God’s knowledge. They contain all religious truth, and also all science, at least in germ. They are the eternal utterance of God. There is nothing temporary or local in them. Everything which seems a reference to particular times and places only seems such through misconception. There is no polytheism in the Vedas. The many divine names which occur in them are all epithets of the one true God. These statements apply only to the collections of hymns. The Brāhmaṇas have less authority. Many other Hindu books are of value, because they were written by rishis and other inspired men, but they are not authoritative in the same sense as the Vedas ; and they are not to be followed where they contradict the Vedas.

c. The Vedas teach transmigration and karma. d. Forgiveness is for ever impossible. e. Salvation is emancipation from transmigration.

The following are Dayānanda’s chief works :

(1) Satyārth Prakāsh, a Hindī work, setting forth his teaching on marriage, the bearing of children, education, the ascetic orders, government, God, the Vedas, the world, man, salvation and food, and a long and interesting description of the various creeds of India with Dayānanda’s criticism of them.

(2) Veda Bhāshya, a Vedic Commentary in Sanskrit. It is incomplete, yet covers the whole of the Yajurveda and the major part of the Ṛigveda.

(3) Ṛigvedādi Bhāshya Bhūmikā, an Introduction to his Vedic Commentary, partly in Sanskrit, partly in Hindī, a controversial work in which he condemns all existing commentaries as false, and expounds his own principles.

7. The most amazing of Dayānanda’s ideas is his conception of the Vedas. In order to understand how he came to hold it, we must recognize what the traditional Hindu doctrine about them is. Since the Veda is the eternal utterance of God, there can be no temporal references in it. As Max Müller says :

If any historical or geographical names occur in the Vedas, they are all explained away, because, if taken in their natural sense, they would impart to the Vedas an historical or temporal taint.^1

This violent method of exegesis, whereby hundreds of allusions to places and events in these most human documents are distorted and misexplained, already finds clear expression as the only right principle of Vedic interpretation in the earliest treatises on the subject that have come down to us, some of which come from dates five or six centuries before Christ.

Dayānanda held fast by the old dogma, that the Vedas are God’s eternal utterance. Several other Hindu ideas, notably the doctrines of transmigration and karma and of the sanctity of the cow, remained firmly seated in his mind.

But in his long, stormy career of wandering and disputing with all sorts and conditions of men, the facts of life, as they stared him in the face in North India under the British Government, had driven certain very modern and un-Hindu ideas into his mind with great force. The most important of these was the group of related convictions, that there is but one God, that all the gods (devas) of the Hindu pantheon have no existence, that idolatry is irrational and degrading, and that the sacrifice of animals and the offering of food as practised in Hindu temples are silly superstitions. Next in importance was his perception of the practical value of Western science and invention as made plain in the railway, the telegraph and modern weapons of war. Amongst his other fresh convictions may be mentioned the folly and danger of caste as practised in modern times, and of child-marriage.

Now these two groups of ideas, Hindu and modern, seem to have been both firmly implanted in his mind. He had had no modern education. He did not know sufficient English to read English books; so that he had no grasp of modern methods of thought and criticism. Nor had he had a thorough Hindu training. He had read with his blind teacher the best that Hindu literature contained on grammar and philosophy, but he had had no complete Vedic education. The time he spent with Virajānand was insufficient for the purpose. Hence, believing the Veda to be God’s knowledge, he necessarily concluded that it corresponded with his own convictions as to truth, i.e. that it taught monotheism, transmigration and modern science, and that it did not recognize the gods of Hinduism nor sacrifice ; and, being a Hindu born and bred, and filled with Hindu methods of thought, he proceeded, like the earliest Hindu scholars, by violent methods of interpretation to expel from the Vedas what he held to be false and to import into them what he held to be true. Max Müller writes :

To him not only was everything contained in the Vedas perfect truth, but he went a step further, and by the most incredible interpretations succeeded in persuading himself and others that everything worth knowing, even the most recent inventions of modern science, were alluded to in the Vedas. Steam-engines, railways, and steam-boats, all were shown to have been known, at least in their germs, to the poets of the Vedas.¹

Naturally he took full advantage of the principle stated by the ancient scholars, which we have just referred to, as justification of his methods.

Yet, though he claims to have restored the ancient interpretation, in reality he departs from it in two large and most important matters. The ancient scholars recognize the gods in the Vedas and all the details of their worship, while he removes all the gods, and leaves only the One. To the ancient teachers the Brāhmaṇas with their appendices, the Āraṇyakas and the Upanishads, are as truly the eternal word of God as the Hymns are ; but Dayānanda makes the claim only for the Saṁhitās, i.e. the collections of Hymns, and recognizes the presence of a human element in the Brāhmaṇas. He thus stands absolutely alone as an interpreter of the Veda. No Hindu, ancient or modern, ever taught what he teaches ; and we need scarcely say that every Western scholar repudiates both his methods and his results.

It is thus quite possible to follow the process of thought by which the Svāmī reached his doctrines. Yet, when one turns to the hymns themselves and to his interpretation of them, it becomes exceedingly difficult to believe in his straightforwardness and sincerity. One can hardly imagine any mind believing what he says. In order to give the ordinary reader some indication of his methods, we here transcribe the first five stanzas of the first hymn of the Ṛigveda, as translated by Hopkins.¹ It is a hymn of praise to the god Agni, i.e. Fire, regarded as the great priest, because sacrifices were wafted to the gods on the flames and smoke of the altar-fire.

To Agni

I worship Agni ; house-priest, he, And priest divine of sacrifice, Th’ oblation priest, who giveth wealth.

Agni, by seers of old adored, To be adored by those to-day — May he the gods bring here to us.

Through Agni can one wealth acquire, Prosperity from day to day, And fame of heroes excellent.

O, Agni ! whatsoe’er the rite That thou surround’st on every side, That sacrifice attains the gods.

May Agni, who oblation gives — The wisest, true, most famous priest — This god with (all) the gods approach !

The meaning expressed in the above translation is precisely what is given by all Hindu scholars, ancient and modern; and all Western scholars agree. There are five words in the translation printed in italics. In the original the word in each case is deva, god, either in the singular or the plural. In the first stanza it is translated as an adjective, elsewhere as a substantive.

Dayānanda, like certain early Christian exegetes, is an advocate of the method of dual interpretation. Agni is not a god, but is at once a name of the one God, and the name of the material element, fire. Taken as a name of God, it means “giver and illuminator of all things.” Taken as the material element, it means “fire which gives victory in battle by means of skilfully contrived weapons.” This last is an allusion to modern firearms. In the first stanza he takes the word deva as an epithet of the one God and as meaning “Giver.” In the second he translates it “excellent sense-organs” or “excellent qualities of knowledge,” or “excellent seasons,” or “excellent pleasures.” Of the fourth and fifth stanzas he gives two translations, the one taking Agni as “God,” the other taking it as “fire.” In the fourth stanza, if God is addressed, devāh means “learned men”; if fire is addressed, devāh means “excellent things.” In the fifth stanza, if we take Agni to mean God, the last line runs, “May this self-luminous One approach with learned men”; if we take Agni to mean fire, the meaning is, “May this illuminator approach with excellent qualities.” This needs no comment. As translated by Hindu and by Western scholars, the poem is a polytheistic hymn, but clear, comprehensible, human. Dayānanda’s translation reduces the lines to nonsense.

It ought to be stated here that Paṇḍit S. N. Agnihotṛi,¹ the founder of the Deva Samāj, published in 1891 a pamphlet called Paṇḍit Dayānand Unveiled, in which he avers that a number of men, some belonging to Gujarāt, others to Bengal, others to the Panjab, declared to him, either in conversation or by letter, that Dayānanda, in personal conversation with them, had acknowledged that his statements about the Veda were not matters of conviction but of diplomacy, that a religion must have some superstition as its basis, and that he had chosen the infallibility of the Vedas, because nothing else would be accepted by Hindus. Dayānanda had been dead eight years when the pamphlet appeared; and one of his followers attempted to demolish the writer by means of another pamphlet.¹ As the evidence was not carefully sifted by an impartial scholar at the time, it is not possible to say precisely how much weight ought to be attached to it; yet two or three of Agnihotṛi’s witnesses were religious men of known probity; so that it would be hard to set their testimony aside. I have also received myself, from an altogether different source, another piece of evidence which strikingly corroborates their statements. The Rev. P. M. Zenker of the Church Missionary Society, Muttra, writes of an incident which occurred when he was in Brindaban preaching at a spring festival. He cannot vouch for the year, but it was 1884, 1885 or 1886. One of the leaders of the local Ārya Samāj had a long and serious conversation with him in the afternoon. Mr. Zenker returned his call the same evening; when they had another long talk. I quote Mr. Zenker’s report of the conversation, so far as it refers to the Ārya Samāj:

My informant stated that Dayānand’s real object was to obtain for India all the advantages which Western civilization has conferred on the nations of Europe and America. But, being fully acquainted with the character of his Hindu fellow-countrymen, he knew they would hardly accept as a guide one who presented this as the sole aim and object of all the laborious training they would have to undergo. He therefore cast about for an expedient to gild the pill; and he thought he had found it in the cry, “Let us return to the pure teaching of the Veda.”

This conversation, which occurred only some two or three years after Dayānanda’s death in 1883, corroborates the statements of Agnihotrī’s witnesses, who had had personal intercourse with the leader himself. The evidence is not absolutely conclusive; but, taken along with the amazing character of Dayānanda’s commentaries on the Vedas, it will have considerable weight with the open-minded student.¹ 8. The following is the official creed of the Samāj :

i. God is the primary cause of all true knowledge, and of everything known by its name. ii. God is All-Truth, All-Knowledge, All-Beatitude, Incorporeal, Almighty, Just, Merciful, Unbegotten, Infinite, Unchangeable, without a beginning, Incomparable, the Support and the Lord of All, All-pervading, Omniscient, Imperishable, Immortal, Exempt from fear, Eternal, Holy, and the Cause of the Universe. To Him alone worship is due. iii. The Vedas are the books of true knowledge, and it is the paramount duty of every Ārya to read or hear them read, to teach and preach them to others. iv. One should always be ready to accept truth and renounce untruth. v. All actions ought to be done conformably to virtue, i.e. after a thorough consideration of right or wrong. vi. The primary object of the Samāj is to do good to the world by improving the physical, spiritual, and social condition of mankind. vii. All ought to be treated with love, justice, and due regard to their merits. viii. Ignorance ought to be dispelled and knowledge diffused. ix. No one ought to be contented with his own good alone, but every one ought to regard his prosperity as included in that of others. x. In matters which affect the general social well-being of the whole society, one ought to discard all differences and not allow one’s individuality to interfere, but in strictly personal matters every one may act with freedom.

But these sentences omit many of the points which it is most important to know.

9. The following are the leading theological ideas of the Samāj. Orthodox Hindus allow only men of the three highest castes to study the Vedas : Āryas invite all, both men and women, to study them. On the other hand, they condemn modern Hindu literature. They teach that there are three eternal existences, God, the soul and elemental matter. The soul undergoes transmigration according to the law of karma. Forgiveness is altogether impossible. Salvation comes only by continued well-doing; and the soul, even when released from transmigration, is not absorbed in God. The doctrine of avatāras, or divine incarnations, is denied. Idolatry is vehemently condemned, and also the practice of killing animals in sacrifice or of offering food on the altar to God. The fire-sacrifice of the Vedas is retained, but is explained as a means of purifying the air. The Hindu form of ancestor-worship, known as the śrāddha, is condemned as useless ; and pilgrimage is given up as superstitious.

10. A careful reading of the Satyārth Prakāsh shews that the ethical system of the Samāj is crude in the extreme. Many of the laws of Manu in all their barbarity are laid down for use in modern life. For example, the individual is encouraged to kill those whom he regards as monstrously evil men ;¹ and the king is advised to have the adulterer burned alive on a red-hot iron bedstead, and the adulteress devoured alive by dogs, in the presence of many men and women.² But it is in its marriage laws that the book goes farthest astray. Child-marriage is prohibited,³ and virgin widows and widowers are allowed to remarry,⁴ excellent regulations, as all will agree. But widows and widowers who have lived with their spouses are told not to remarry.⁵ Yet, for their relief, and for the relief also of husbands and wives in certain circumstances, the law of niyoga is laid down.¹ Niyoga is simply sexual relationships without marriage. The details are too horrible to transcribe. They may be seen in the book. In 1892 some Āryas brought a law-suit against a Hindu who wrote against niyoga, calling it adultery, but the case was dismissed.² One is glad to hear that many members of the Samāj would now like to repudiate this most immoral legislation, which is equally repulsive to the Hindu and the Christian.

There is another feature of the Satyārth Prakāsh which has attracted wide attention. All the outstanding Hindu sects, and Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity as well, are mercilessly criticized in it, and here and there with a good deal of malice and injustice. This section of the book has encouraged Āryas and provided them with very useful ammunition for their controversies, but it has also created vehement hatred against the Samāj in many quarters. Dayānanda’s stinging taunts have been effective in rousing a number of the sects to retaliation and defensive organization. This is noticeably true of the Sikhs,³ the Jains,⁴ the Aḥmadīyas,⁵ the Muḥammadans,⁶ and also of Paṇḍit Dīn Dayāl,⁷ the founder of the Bhārata Dharma Mahāmaṇḍala.

Dayānanda’s own methods of controversy, shewn in his public addresses and debates and also in his writings, have naturally been adopted by his followers. Wherever they go, one hears of slander, passion, and unfair methods; and disturbances in the streets and squares have been pitiably common.

11. I had the privilege of being present, in company with Dr. Griswold, at an Ārya Samāj Sunday morning service in Lahore in December, 1912. The place of meeting is a large oblong hall without seats, with a platform at one end and a high narrow gallery at the other. In the floor, in front of the platform, there is a square pit, measuring perhaps two feet each way. This is the altar. On one side of the hall a small platform for singers and a harmonium had been placed. When we entered, there was only one man in the hall, and he was laying some pieces of wood in order at the bottom of the square pit. When that was done, he set up a stick of incense on end on the floor at each corner of the pit. Some packets of aromatic herbs and several sacrificial vessels lay on the floor. Men came dropping in, and squatted in front and on the two sides of the altar. When there were perhaps twenty present, those next the altar began to intone some Sanskrit verses, amongst which we could distinguish some of the verses of Rigveda, X, 129. This continued about twenty minutes. By that time there were about thirty present. The fire and the incense sticks were then lighted; the aromatic leaves were shed on the fire; and ghi (melted butter) was rubbed on the outer edges of the altar. Other verses were now chanted, while the flames rose nearly two feet above the level of the floor. This is the havana, which Āryas are recommended to perform every morning, at the time of their devotions, for the purification of the air. This continued for about fifteen minutes. All then rose to their feet and sat down in various places in the hall. A young man mounted the platform to lead the service, one sat down at the harmonium and a few others gathered round him to sing. There were forty-eight present.

The second part of the service then began. It consisted of the singing of hymns, the repetition of texts (one of them the Gāyatrī), prayer and a sermon, all in Hindi except a few texts which were in Sanskrit. It was just like a Protestant service, and totally unlike any Vedic observance. During this part of the service many boys came in. Before the sermon began there were perhaps two hundred present. Later the number rose to two hundred and fifty. There was no woman or girl present. I am told they are not excluded, but a special service, conducted by a lady, is held at another time and place, which they attend in fair numbers.

12. The death of Dayānanda was a great blow to the members of the Samāj; yet the work was carried on with enthusiasm; and the movement has continued to grow at a rapid pace since then. Large sums of money were collected to perpetuate the memory of the founder, and in 1887, the Dayānanda Anglo-Vedic College was opened in Lahore. This great foundation, in which the flower of the youth of the Ārya Samāj receive a modern English education, and also instruction in the religion of the Samāj, forms a very worthy memorial to Dayānanda’s devotion and energy.

In 1892 the Ārya community fell in two. This division is parallel to the first split in the Brāhma camp. As Keshab led out the progressives, and left Debendra and the conservatives behind; so the Ārya Samāj broke up into the College or “Cultured” party and the Vegetarian or “Mahātma” party. The former are progressive, stand for modern education and for freedom in diet, and declare that the Ārya Samāj is the one true universal religion, which must be taught to all the world; while their opponents favour the ancient Hindu education, stand by vegetarianism and declare that the teaching of the Samāj is pure Hinduism, but not the universal religion.

13. I have failed to obtain printed reports of the work of the Samāj, so that it is rather hard to estimate what they are doing. Their methods, however, are well known. Those members of a local Samāj who pay 1% of their income to the funds elect the managing Committee of the Samāj. Then the Samājes in each Province elect representatives who form the Pratinidhi Sabhā, or Representative Assembly, of the Prov-ince. Since the split in 1892 there have been duplicate organizations. There are missionaries and preachers of the Samāj, some paid, others honorary. Most of the paid men were originally Hindu paṇḍits ; most of the honorary workers are men who have had an English education. The Samāj also copies other forms of Christian effort. They have their Tract Society, their Strī Samāj or Women’s Ārya Samāj, their Ārya Kumār Sabhā, or Young Men’s Ārya Association (a copy of the Y. M. C. A.), their Orphanages, and their work among the Depressed, which will be noticed elsewhere.¹

The Samāj is doing a good deal of education. Lala Lajpat Rai writes with regard to the schools and colleges of the progressive party :

At Lahore it has founded and maintains a first-class College, preparing scholars up to the highest standard and for the highest University examinations. This was created in 1886 in sacred memory of its founder, and is called “The Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College.” Its objects are to encourage and enforce the study of (a) Hindi literature ; (b) classical Sanskrit and the Vedas ; and (c) English literature and sciences, both theoretical and applied ; and, furthermore, “to provide means for giving technical education.” It owns considerable property, and has endowments yielding an annual income (including tuition and admission fees, etc.) of over Rs. 60,000 (£4000). The Principal is honorary, and has held the post with remarkable success since the foundation. On the staff are several of its own alumni, working in a missionary spirit on mere subsistence allowances. Directly or indirectly connected with the College are a number of secondary and primary schools maintained by the Samaj throughout the province, some of which receive the usual grants from the Educational Department. In the United Provinces, also, the Samaj maintains several schools on the same lines as the Anglo-Vedic or Anglo-Sanskrit Schools of the Punjab, their principal Anglo-Vedic school being at Dehra Dun.²

The centre and crown of the educational efforts of the Mahātma party is the Gurukula Mahāvidyālaya at Hardwar, a great institution, founded in 1902, in which an attempt is being made to give a true Hindu education and to save students from the contaminations both of Hindu home and city life and of Western civilization. It is a most interesting and promising experiment. The situation is all that could be desired; good food is provided, and the physique of the students receives a good deal of attention. Here is what a Christian writes of the conditions of life and study:¹

The students are admitted at the age of eight years, and the parents are under written pledge not to remove their sons from the school till the expiry of the 17 years’ course, i.e. till they have reached the age of 25. During the whole of these 17 years they may never once go home or leave the school. Indeed, they are only allowed to have a quarter of an hour’s interview once a year with their parents, and that in presence of their teachers. . . . During the whole of their long course they are watched day and night by their teachers and housefathers. Without these they may not go out even for a walk. No woman may approach the Gurukula. They live a simple, hardy life, on strictly vegetarian diet. . . . They wear the saffron dress of the religious orders.

There are many points to admire in the life and the methods of study. Almost all the work is done in the vernacular, not in English. Great care is taken to train the character as well as the mind, and the foundation of a true love of India is laid from day to day. One wonders, however, whether the exclusion of home influence is wise, and whether anything like a sound literary education can be given, while Dayānanda’s interpretation of the Veda is retained. There are other Gurukulas at Gujranwala, Farukhabad and elsewhere.

The Samāj does also a good deal for the education of girls. They have a very successful boarding school at Jullundur.

Lala Lajpat Rai, struck with the work of the Salvation Army, started recently in Lahore the Vedic Salvation Army.

In the Panjab and the United Provinces the Samāj has done valuable work by its testimony to monotheism, its opposition to idolatry and to other superstitions and by its educational work. Its polemic against caste, child-marriage, priestcraft, pilgrimage, and self-torture in the name of religion, is all to the good, although members of the Samāj are still bound by caste,¹ and many have not given up child-marriage. In these matters there is far more talk than action. The great expansion of the Samāj in recent years² gives promise of still farther growth, and the zeal of the members is proved by the very generous way in which they subscribe to the funds. Dayānanda’s praise of all things Indian, and his defence of the Vedas and of transmigration have proved very popular.

Yet there is no risk involved in prophesying that the Samāj will not have a great history. In the very sources of its present strength there is that which will inevitably lead to its ruin. The false interpretation of the Vedas, on which the whole structure rests, will inevitably crumble as enlightenment proceeds. The attempt to retain much that is old and outworn, instead of transcending it, is another source of weakness. The retention of the doctrine of transmigration and karma is in itself most dangerous. So long as that remains, a healthy monotheism is impossible,³ and caste cannot be rooted out.⁴

On the 30th of November, 1907, at the Samāj Anniversary in Lahore, Prof. Lala Sain Das, M.A., gave an address in which he asked the assembly to realize how little work they were doing in comparison with Christian Missions, how weak they were spiritually and how impotent socially through the caste system. He added:

Two new forces are now at work in India (1) English education, and (2) Christian evangelisation. The first, formerly a source of weakness to the Hindu society, has now proved a source of strength to the Ārya Samāj. Superstition at once gave way before the scientific education. In order, therefore, to fully avail ourselves of the former and to nullify the effect of the latter, we should open as many schools as possible where all the latest discoveries in science should be taught and education on national and modern lines should be imparted free to as large a number as our funds permit, and, secondly to carry the torch of Vedic light to the remotest corners of India at least where the Ārya Samāj is still unrepresented. But then there comes in the question of funds. Our rich men are not going to part with their money, because they have to minister to their own wants, to those of their sons and daughters and relations. Then there is a question of time. Now those who can spare time, won’t do it, because they have to attend to this business and to that business.¹

An article appeared in Lahore in December, 1912, by Dr. Gokal Chand, Barrister, Lahore, in which he declares that the Samāj is gradually losing its intensity, and tries to discover the causes of this weakening. He puts it down, first, to the want of a Scripture, a book of spiritual instruction which the ordinary man can take up and find help in: “the members of the Ārya Samāj do not read the Vedas.” Secondly, he notes they have no religious ministers doing pastoral work among the people. Thirdly, they want missionaries settled each in his district with an organization and assistants, just like Christian missionaries. Fourthly, they want men who have renounced the world and will live only for the Samāj.

LITERATURE.—GENERAL: Dr. H. D. Griswold, art. Ārya Samāj in ERE. Hand-Book of the Ārya Samāj, by Pandit Vishun Lal Sharma, Allahabad, the Indian Press, 1912, 6 as. (The best official account of the rise of the sect, its opinions and work.) BIOGRAPHY: The Autobiography is published in Durga Prasad’s translation of the Satyarth Prakash (see below). Maharshi Swāmī Dayānand Sarasvatī Jī Mahārāj Kā Jīvan Charitra, by Pandit Lekh Ram and Lala Atma Ram, Lahore, 1897 (the standard biography; in Hindī). The Life and Teachings of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, by Bawa Chhajju Singh, Lahore, Addison Press, 1903, two vols., Rs. 2. DAYĀNANDA’S WORKS: Rigvedabhāshya (a Hindī commentary on the Rigveda). Rigvedādibhāshya Bhūmikā (Hindī introduction to the commentary on the Rik). An English Translation of the Satyarth Prakash by Durga Prasad, Lahore, Virjanand Press, 1908, Rs. 2. The Ocean of Mercy (an English translation of Dayānanda’s tract on Cow-killing), by Durga Prasad, Lahore, Virjanand Press, 1889. CRITICISM: Chirol’s Indian Unrest, chap. VIII. The Niyoga Doctrine of the Ārya Samāj, by Ruchi Ram Sahni, Lahore, 1896, one half-anna. Pandit Dayānand Unveiled, by S. N. Agnihotri, Lahore, The Tribune Press, 1891, out of print. The Dayānandī Interpretation of the Word “Deva” in the Rig Veda, by H. D. Griswold, Ludhiana, 1897. DEFENCE: The Ārya Samāj, Its Aims and Teachings, by Lala Lajpat Rai, Contemporary Review, May, 1910. The Ārya Samāj and its Detractors, by Munshi Ram and Ram Deva, Hardwar, Satya Dharm Pracharak Press, 1911, Rs. 3. Agnihotri Demolished by Rambhaj Datta, Lahore, 1891, out of print.

2. ŚIVANĀRĀYAṆA PARAMAHAMSA¹

1. We take next another wandering ascetic whose teaching bears quite a close resemblance to Dayānanda’s.

Śivanārāyaṇa was the son of a Benares Brāhman, born perhaps about 1840. At home he seems to have received no education, and he remained practically illiterate to the end. While still a child, he was agitated with religious questions which his father could not help him with. He left home, according to his own account, when he was twelve years of age, and spent the rest of his life wandering all over India, at first only asking questions, afterwards teaching every one who would listen to him. He dressed in the simplest way, and lived practically like a sannyāsī, yet he never called himself such, and he does not seem to have been initiated into any order. We have no means of learning how he came to form the opinions he held. Mr. Mohini Mohan Chatterji of Calcutta, to whom I owe all the information I have about him, and who was one of his best friends, writes:

So far as his thoughts were not the results of his musings and meditations, they were due to his contact with all sorts and conditions of men he came across in his wanderings all over India.

He spent most of his time during the last years of his life in Bengal. In 1884 or 1885 he went to the temple of Kālī at Dakshineśvara near Calcutta and met Rāmakṛishṇa, but the two men were not drawn to each other. In July, 1888, Mr. Chatterji, who had already published his well-known translation of the Bhagavadgītā, met Śivanārāyaṇa ; and to this circumstance we owe the preservation of the latter’s teaching. Mr. Chatterji listened to him eagerly, and took notes of what he said. A few tracts in Bengali, in Hindī and English were first published. Then in 1902 Mr. Chatterji edited the Amṛita Sāgara, a volume in Bengali, containing the main elements of his teaching arranged in systematic form. The volume was published in Hindī also. Mr. Chatterji then took down from his lips an account of his wanderings and of the conversations he had with the people he met. This appeared in 1907 in English, a volume of 146 pages, published by Luzac, and called Indian Spirituality ; or the Travels and Teachings of Śivanārāyaṇa. Quite apart from the religious teaching, the book makes very pleasant reading, for it contains many interesting particulars about Hindu temples and the life of ascetics. He died at Kālīghāt, Calcutta, in 1909.

Mr. Chatterji writes,

Those who came under his influence were common people in the main ;

and again,

He expressly prohibited the formation of a sect. But there is a large number of men and women in Calcutta and other places, specially among the Mech tribe of Assam, who look upon him as a source of spiritual inspiration.

He taught as seriously as Dayānanda did that there is but one God ; but he attempted to conceive Him as having two aspects, the one unknowable, inactive, and tending to be impersonal, the other distinctly personal and active. He lays more stress on the will of God than any other Hindu thinker of the nineteenth century. There is one rather curious survival in his thought, viz., that God is specially manifested in light. Perhaps in connection with this same thought, he affirms that it is God’s will that all men should make to Him offerings in fire of things fragrant and sweet. Like Dayānanda, he holds that this form of sacrifice purifies the air.

He condemns idolatry with quite as much vehemence as Dayānanda ; but he goes further, and, like a prophet of the Old Testament, proclaims that the worship of idols degrades man and works ruin to the nation as a whole. His teaching on this point is most penetrating. He also condemned man-worship. Consequently, though he visited all the great shrines of India, he would not bow down to idols, nor would he prostrate himself before religious authorities, as Hindus are wont to do. He held most sincerely that the weakness of modern India was the result of idolatry and superstition. As he wandered through the country, he saw how gross the ordinary worship of the temples was, and how frequently fraud was employed to increase the popularity of a particular god or shrine. All this he condemned very frankly.¹ His attitude to social questions was also practically the same as Dayānanda’s. He opposed caste, condemned child-marriage, advocated female education, and declared woman to be equal with man. He says:

Similar reasons will show you the injustice of the treatment to which your women are subjected. Man and woman are equally related to the all-comprehending supreme Being, manifested as light. It is pleasant in His sight that each should be free to realise the perfection possible to the human individual.¹

His teaching is distinctly better than Dayānanda’s in two particulars. First, he did not press the doctrine of transmigration and karma. Clearly he had not realized what an incubus it had been on the theology of Hinduism and on the life of the common people; so that he occupied rather an ambiguous position towards it. Mr. Chatterji writes:

Transmigration did not receive much attention from Śivanārāyaṇā. He thought it had no bearing upon a man’s spiritual life or his mukti or salvation. He neither asserted nor denied its reality. He left the question open and practically ignored it.

The other point on which he advanced beyond Dayānanda was this: he did not hold the infallibility of the Veda, but recognized the value of many sacred books.

He believed that, if men would only recognize the true import of the two aspects of God, peace would come amongst all religions, and good will would be established in place of evil. At one time he urged the advisability of holding a great religious Conference with the object of bringing all men to one opinion with regard to God. The following is another of his proposals, which, if not very practical, gives us a peep into his mind:

Let all mankind have a common speech. Compile from all the scriptures of the world, in that common human tongue, a scripture, containing all that is useful for man to know concerning his spiritual and temporal welfare. Preserve that one and burn all the rest, burying their ashes out of sight.¹

He insists on the duty of training the body to be the obedient servant of the spirit, and he makes practical service of our neighbours an essential part of spiritual religion. The following summary is given at the end of one of his latest tracts :

1. Keep this world pure, so that no uncleanness may attach, within or outside, to the physical body, the senses, mind, food, raiment, dwellings, roads, bathing-places and so forth. Prevent the adulteration of food in every form.

2. Be “equal-sighted” to sons and daughters, and educate them equally ; secure equal rights to man and woman. Looking on all individuals as God and your own soul, cherish them, so that want and suffering may come to none.

3. Let each, to the extent of his power, lovingly, in God’s name, make offerings in the fire of things fragrant and sweet, such as clarified butter, sugar, etc., and help and encourage others to do so. This purifies the air, secures timely rain and abundant crops. Such is God’s law.

4. His name is the mantra, Om Sat guru. Let every man and woman call upon Him by inwardly repeating this name. By His favour all will attain the fourfold objects of desire, — religious merit or ethical perfection, possessions on earth, enjoyment and salvation.

5. Light or the sun and moon is His expression. Let all men at the rising and the setting of light with love and reverence bow down with folded hands and adore Him who is light, craving forgiveness of sins.

When you perceive the true nature of light, you will understand all phenomena of life and movement, such as birth and death, eclipses and the waxing and the waning of the moon.

6. Knowing Him to be all-comprehending and complete, keep your hearts well established on Him.²

Christian influence is very distinctly visible in his teaching at several points, notably in his attitude to idolatry, his freedom from the grip of transmigration, and his conception of the equality of man and woman.

2. A number of intelligent people in Calcutta still confess his influence; the Īsāmoshipanthīs are the outcome of the teaching of one of his disciples;¹ and a new sect has sprung from his teaching in Assam.² The Kacheris are a Burma-Tibetan race scattered throughout Upper Assam. One branch of the Kacheris are known as the Mech tribe. The word Mech is simply a corruption of the Sanskrit word Mleccha, which means “barbarian,” “unclean,” “foreign.” There is a good deal of unrest up and down the country; and the Mech tribe, having grown in knowledge and intelligence during recent years, very naturally dislike their tribal name.

Shortly after Śivanārāyaṇa’s death, a member of this tribe, Kali Charan by name, went to Calcutta and met some of his followers. He picked up the teacher’s main ideas, and carried away one of his Bengali books with him, Sār Nityakriyā, i.e. “Essential Daily Duties.” When he reached Assam, he taught the new doctrines as a means of changing the status of the tribe. He received a ready response, and the movement grew apace. He teaches the people that by accepting the new teaching they become Brahmas, or, as they pronounce it, Bormhos. He means they will become Brahman, God. Those who follow him call themselves Bormhos instead of using the old name Mech. They do their best to follow the teaching of Sār Nityakriyā, but they do not understand it well. They are setting themselves up as a caste, at least thus far that they will not eat with others. They have neither temples nor idols, but worship fire, earth, air, water and sun in a spot prepared for the occasion. These are supposed to be God. They offer fruits and vegetables, and sacrifice certain sweet-smelling substances in fire.

Kali Charan is their leader. He has some half a dozen chelas, disciples, who assist him. They use the Bengali literature published by Śivanārāyaṇa’s disciples in Calcutta. They are aiming at the economic development of the tribe, and therefore are collecting money for the erection of a technical school, shops and such like. They say that there are about two thousand families in the movement, but that is probably an overestimate. In any case it is now losing ground.

LITERATURE. — Indian Spirituality or the Travels and Teachings of Śivanārāyaṇa, by M. M. Chatterji. London, Luzac, 1907. Amṛita Sāgara (the teaching of Śivanārāyaṇa in Bengali), edited by M. M. Chatterji, Calcutta, Sanyal & Co., 1911, Rs. 2.

3. THE VEDIC MISSION

In 1886 a movement called Sādhāraṇa Dharma arose in Madras, and has continued active until to-day. The adherents of Sādhāraṇa Dharma declare their belief in Paramātman, or the Supreme Self, his government of the world and of individuals, and the possibility of realizing him by the development of one’s moral or physical powers and the use of them for the good of humanity ; and they promise to work for their own progress and the advancement of humanity. The following sentences come from the prospectus of the organization :

The Common Path (Sadharana Dharma) is open to people of any creed. Those who profess other faiths need not disclaim them when they adopt Sadharana Dharma. Sadharana Dharma aims not to establish uniformity but unity in variety throughout the different cults and sects of India, and by and by of the whole world.

In 1909 this organization was included in a wider body called the Vedic Mission. This new organization has two divisions, Vedic Dharma and Sādhāraṇa Dharma, the former purely Hindu, the later for everybody and anybody. For a time they were affiliated with the Bhārata Dharma Mahāmaṇḍal,¹ but its orthodoxy was too stiff for the Vedic Mission. The following sentences allude to that fact:

We take this opportunity of informing the public that our Mission has nothing to do with so called Hindu orthodoxy and priesthood. Nothing short of thorough religious reform based on “Vedic monotheism” will satisfy us. We do not want to please those orthodox people that may be indifferent or opposed to the spread of Sanskrit and Religious Education as well as the right kind of spiritual knowledge among the non-Brahmin castes and the depressed Classes.

The work is as follows:

The Mission has three branches of work, viz., (i) Educational — for spreading secular and useful religious knowledge among the masses, (ii) Medical — pertaining to the Ministry of Healing (the sick in body and mind), and (iii) Literary — including the study of comparative Mythology, Theology and Philosophy. The Mission advocates the cause of Vedic Religion and philosophy.

They have what they call a Vedic Mission College for training preachers and teachers, and they publish a good deal of literature. The leaders are Paṇḍit G. Kṛishṇa Śāstrī and an Australian. There is a branch in Delhi, under Svāmī Śivagaṇāchārya. Work is also being done in Australia. I find it impossible to make out how much is being done. The movement seems to stand nearer the Ārya Samāj and Śivanārāyaṇa’s teaching than anything else.

4. A CASTLE IN THE AIR

A Muḥammadan, who shall be nameless, has written a little book which it is perhaps kindest to regard as the product of a diseased mind. It is worthy of mention merely as another indication of the present state of affairs in India. Its folly may also serve to relieve my sober narrative. It is an attempt to fuse Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. A pantheistic theology and transmigration are mingled with Muḥammadan ideas and diluted Christian ethics. The writer calls himself the Holy Ghost, the very God and such like. Like Śivanārāyaṇa, he proposes one language and one Scripture for all men, and also a universal religious conference. From that there might emerge a universal religious empire. Constantinople would be the centre of this empire; the English would be its guardians; and the Promoter himself would be the spiritual teacher and head of the whole!

We now turn to a group of movements which have one striking feature in common, namely, their use of the person of Christ. They are a peculiarly interesting and instructive group; for two of them are Muḥammadan in origin, and two are Hindu.

5. THE AḤMADĪYAS OF QADIAN

1. The first is a very successful and combative sect which arose in the Panjab in the eighties, largely as a reaction from the striking success of a Christian mission in the Central Panjab and from the fierce onslaught of Dayānanda and his Samāj.

In the village of Qadian¹ in the Gurdaspur district of the Panjab, there was born, about 1838, in an ancient Muḥamma-dan family which had long been known for its attachment to the mysticism of Islam, viz., Sufiism, a boy called Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Very little is known about his youth or education; so that it is not possible to trace the growth of his mind, as may be done in the case of Dayānanda. He began to teach about 1879, and died in 1908.

2. The whole movement rests on his personal claims. He declared himself to be the Christian Messiah, the Muhammadan Mahdi, and the final avatāra or “Incarnation” of the Hindus. In one of his latest utterances he said,

My advent in this age is not meant for the reformation of the Mohammedans only, but Almighty God has willed to bring about through me a regeneration of three great nations, viz., Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians. As for the last two I am the promised Messiah, so for the first I have been sent as an Avatar.¹

The last claim, to be Hindu avatāra, was made for the first time towards the end of his life, and has had no results. He spent his life in trying to prove himself the Mahdi of Islam as well as the Christian Messiah, in seeking to shew that in him Christianity and Islam unite and culminate.

The conception is rather an unusual one for a Muslim; for, according to ordinary Muhammadan belief, the Messiah and the Mahdi are distinct persons;² and the common expectation is that the Mahdi will be a man of blood, a character which it would be impossible to combine with Christ. The Mirza gets over this last difficulty by declaring that the traditions which speak of the Mahdi as a man of blood are all forgeries, that the Guided One (i.e. the Mahdi) is to be a man of peace. Thus, the controlling idea of his conception of himself as a prophet is the character and work of Christ. It seems almost as if he had first come to believe himself to be the Messiah, and had then added the idea that he was the Maḥdi as a sort of inference from his position in Islam. In any case, nearly the whole of his apologetic is built up with the object of proving himself the Messiah. With that, then, we begin.

He does not profess to be Jesus Christ returned in propria persona. He claims to be the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Second Coming, on the ground that he has come in the spirit and power of Jesus. In order to make this claim seem reasonable, he uses two series of arguments.

A. He first sets about proving that Christ did not die on the Cross, rise from the dead, and ascend to Heaven.¹ He acknowledges that, if Jesus really died, rose, and went to heaven, then Christianity must be true, and he himself must be an impostor:

If Christ was in reality exalted in bodily form alive to heaven, then there is no need of further controversy, and my claim to be the promised Messiah is in vain. The reason is that my claim is based upon the natural death (wafat) of the Son of Mary.²

He avers that, while Jesus was truly crucified, He was taken down from the cross seemingly dead, but really in a swoon, recovered from His wounds, came to India, lived for many years and finally died in Cashmere like any ordinary mortal. The materials he uses to establish these propositions are as follows :

a. He revives the old swoon theory of the death of Jesus, citing as confirmation the facts, that He was on the cross for only a few hours and that His legs were not broken. He also uses the phrase, “Why seek ye the living amongst the dead?” and urges that the appearances of Jesus to His disciples after the crucifixion are those of a living man and not of a disembodied spirit. Christ’s own use of the experience of Jonah as a parallel to Himself is pressed into service. As Jonah was alive in the whale’s belly, so Jesus must have meant that He Himself would be alive in the tomb.

b. He cites the so-called Gospel of Barnabas, a mediæval Muḥammadan forgery, as a witness that Jesus did not die on the cross.

c. He asserts that over a thousand medical books, Jewish, Christian, Parsee and Muḥammadan, describe the Marham-i-Īsā, or Ointment of Jesus, and extol its powers. He asserts that after three days Jesus recovered from the swoon, and that the disciples applied this wonderful ointment to His wounds with such success that, within the space of forty days, He was entirely healed and ready for foreign travel.

d. In 1887 a Russian, named Nicolas Notovitch, travelled through Cashmere to Leh in Ladak and spent some time in friendly intercourse with the Buddhist Lamas of the monastery of Himis. Seven years later, he published a book in which he declared that the Abbot of the monastery had brought out and read to him an ancient manuscript, according to which Jesus, in the interval between His visit to the Temple of Jerusalem at the age of twelve and his baptism by John, travelled from Palestine to India, and studied under the Jains, Buddhists and Hindus of those days. The book appeared in French and in English and made a considerable stir both in Europe and India for some time. In an article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1894, Max Müller, who saw clearly that the tale was false, suggested that M. Notovitch had been so persistent in trying to get information that the Lamas, having nothing better to give him, had invented the story to satisfy him. But Prof. J. Archibald Douglas of the Government College, Agra, was inclined to think that Max Müller was too rash in concluding that the whole story was false, and therefore used his hot-weather holiday in 1895 to take a journey to Ladak in the hope of finding the Ms. But when he reached the monastery and told his tale, the indignation of the Abbot knew no bounds. No such Ms. is in the library, nor indeed in Tibet anywhere. The whole story was an impudent lie. Professor Douglas described his journey in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1896; and M. Nicolas Notovitch was recognized to be an unscrupulous adventurer. Yet many Hindus and Muhammadans still make use of his lies.

The prophet of Qadian sets forth this false story of a journey to India undertaken by Jesus before He began His ministry as proof that He travelled to India after His crucifixion. Could futility proceed to greater extremes?

e. The meaning of the Ascension, he argues, is that Jesus was separated from his disciples in order to preach in Afghanistan and Cashmere, the inhabitants of which countries, he avers, are the ten lost tribes.

f. In Khan Yar Street, Srinagar, Cashmere, there stands a tomb, perhaps a couple of centuries old, known to the people of the vicinity as the tomb of Yus Asaf. Clearly it is the tomb of some obscure Muslim saint. There is no tradition attached to the building.

The prophet maintains, however, without adducing the slightest evidence, that it is the tomb of Jesus, that Yus is a corruption of Yasu, which he equates with Jesus, and that Asaf, coming from the Hebrew asāf, to gather, designates Him as the “Gatherer” of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

g. Lastly, he asserts that Christianity is spiritually dead, and argues that, if Jesus had really risen from the grave, and ascended to heaven, to reign there in spiritual power, His Church would exhibit His energy and life. Hence we can infer that He did not rise.

It ought to be noticed that, in denying the Ascension of Christ, the Mirza is a heterodox Muslim; for the Muhammadan belief is that God took Him to heaven, that He is now there, and that He will return at the end of the world to slay the Antichrist.

B. Having thus in his own way set Christ aside, he proceeds to give positive arguments in support of his assertion that he is the Messiah himself.

a. As the Old Testament prophecy of the second coming of Elijah was fulfilled in John the Baptist, who was not Elijah, so the New Testament prophecy of the second coming of Christ will be fulfilled, not by a personal return of Jesus, but by the appearance of one coming in the spirit and power of Jesus.

b. In the Koran Christ’s prophecy of the coming of the Comforter is referred to. The Greek word in John 16, 7 is paracletos, advocate, defender, comforter. Muhammad seems to have got this word mixed up with the similar Greek word periclytos, which means famous, and took it as a prophecy of his own name, which, whether in the form Muhammad or or Ahmad, means praised, glorified. Hence the words of the Koran,¹

And remember when Jesus the son of Mary said, “O children of Israel! of a truth I am God’s apostle to you to confirm the law which was given before me, and to announce an apostle that shall come after me whose name shall be Ahmad!”

Our prophet could not fail to seize upon this text, despite the fact that his own name is not Ahmad but Ghulam Ahmad, i.e. the servant of Ahmad (Muhammad). He uses it, as several other self-styled prophets of the name of Ahmad have done, as a definite prophecy of himself.

c. He bases another argument on the doctrine of the millennium taught in the Apocalypse. Counting by lunar years, he divides the time since the appearance of Jesus into two millenniums, and makes his own appearance the beginning of the third. The first is the millennium of the devil’s imprisonment, during which time Muḥammad appeared. The second is the millennium of the devil’s freedom, marked by the declension of Islam and a frightful growth of evil. The third, which the new Messiah introduces, is the millennium of the Kingdom of God.

d. He draws out a great many parallels between Jesus and himself. There is first the political parallel: the Indians under British rule are in very much the same condition as the Jews were under the Romans. Next comes the moral and religious parallel: the corruptions of India to-day are in many respects like the corruptions of Palestine in the time of Christ. Thirdly, he describes himself as a divinely appointed mediator between God and man, a true intercessor for man, and a perfect image of God. On the ground of these parallels he claims that his mission is altogether like the mission of Christ.

e. He also claims that he is able to prove the truth of his Messiahship by miracle. The only facts seriously put forward as miracles are certain prophecies which he made.

It is said that he predicted the death of no less than one hundred and twenty-one persons. Of these we need refer only to two. He predicted the death of Paṇḍit Lekh Ram, his chief antagonist in the Ārya Samāj. The man was murdered soon afterwards, under circumstances which gave rise to the strong suspicion that it was the deed of a Muḥammadan who had managed to become intimate with the paṇḍit on the pretence of being an enquirer. Again, he predicted that his Christian antagonist, Deputy Abdullah Atham, would die within the space of fifteen months. Precautions were taken by Mr. Atham’s friends to protect him from possible assassination, and he outlived the time assigned to him. These prophecies went on for some time; but they proved so mischievous and dangerous that, on the 24th of February, 1899, the Govern-ment of the Panjab issued an order, ordering him to cease making such prophecies. The prophet, under grave pressure from the Government, solemnly promised :

(1) To refrain from publishing any prediction involving the disgrace of any person, or in which anyone should be represented as an object of God’s displeasure. (2) To refrain from publishing any challenge to appeal to God to indicate by the signs of His displeasure, such as disgrace, etc., the party in a religious controversy which is in the wrong. (3) To refrain from publishing any writing purporting to be an inspiration, the object of which can be reasonably taken to be the disgrace of any person, or the representing of him as an object of the Divine wrath.¹

He also predicted the birth of sons to certain friends, but, unfortunately, fulfilment did not always follow. Sometimes there was no birth at all, sometimes the sons turned out to be daughters, to the disgust of the parties and the discomfiture of the prophet.

In 1898 he published a pamphlet called, A Revealed Cure for the Bubonic Plague, in which he declared the Marham-i-Īsā, or Ointment of Jesus, mentioned above, to be a perfect remedy for bubonic plague, on the ground that it had been “prepared solely under the influence of divine inspiration.” Hakīm Muhammad Husain of Lahore was the manufacturer of the ointment. Unfortunately, the Government again interfered with the action of his “divine inspiration,” and prohibited the exploitation of the specific.

He also prophesied that his people would be immune from pestilence without plague inoculation.

His own death from cholera in 1908 formed a fitting climax to this series of fraudulent impostures.

f. His claim to be the Second Adam is another of his arguments for his Messiahship. Dr. Griswold writes:²

At the close of the sixth day, God created the first Adam. But one day is with the Lord as a thousand years. Therefore at the close of the sixth millenium or the beginning of the seventh, the second Adam is to appear. We are now at the beginning of the seventh millenium, if we reckon according to the lunar year, which is the inspired mode of reckoning; and so the time is fulfilled for the second Adam to be manifested. Where is the Second Adam to appear? “In the East and not in the West,” says the Mirza Sahib; “for from Gen. ii. 8 we learn that God had put the first Adam in a garden eastward. It is therefore necessary that the second Adam should appear in the East, in order to have a resemblance with the first in respect of his locality.”

g. Towards the end of his life he began to claim that he was greater than Christ:

I swear by the Lord . . . that the words expressing my dignity revealed from God . . . are far more weighty and glorious than the words of the Gospels relating to Jesus. . . . My superiority lies in being the Messiah of Muhammad, as Jesus was the Messiah of Moses.¹

He also began to carp at the character of Christ, accusing Him of drunkenness, lack of philanthropy and several other such things.

He has not so much to say in proof that he is the Mahḍi, yet a couple of arguments may be noted. i. There is a saying traditionally ascribed to Muḥammad which runs:

What will be your condition when the Son of Mary shall descend among you, and your Imān from you?

Clearly the Messiah and the Mahḍi are here regarded as distinct personalities, the Messiah coming from heaven, the Mahḍi arising among Muslims. Hence the Mirza translates the passage:

What will be your condition when the Son of Mary shall descend among you? Who is he? He will be your Imān, who will be born from among you.

This opens the way for his own claims.

ii. He cites the passage from the Koran quoted above¹ as a proof that he is the Mahḍi, declaring himself the Burūz or spiritual reappearance of Muḥammad.

3. Apart from these personal claims, his teaching is an attempt to find, amidst the irresistible inrush of Western education and Christian thought, a middle path between impossible orthodoxy and the extreme rationalism of Sir Syed Aḥmad Khan.² He is opposed to jihad, i.e. Muslim religious warfare, and the spirit of the ghāzī, or religious fanatic, as well as to a bloody Mahḍi; and he condemns tomb-worship. He says the Koran teaches that slavery ought to be gradually abolished. He says polygamy, the veiling of women and divorce were permitted by Muḥammad to prevent worse evils.

His sect, which, in organization, is like a Samāj, has its headquarters in Qadian, and is called the Sadr Anjuman-i-Aḥmadīya, or Chief Society of Aḥmad.

His success shews that he was in some respects an able man, but one can scarcely say more than that. The reasoning which we have given above as advanced in support of his claims is a fair sample of his teaching and of his thought. One might illustrate his scholarship by the puerilities he advanced to shew that Arabic is the mother of all languages. He was probably self-deceived in the matter of his Messiahship rather than a conscious impostor, but one can scarcely believe him to have been honest in all his pretensions and assertions.

He was as eager for disputation as Dayānanda himself, and as violent and unscrupulous in controversy. He was a most vehement opponent of Christianity. He did not shew the genius for practical organization that his great rival did, but he founded a high school and a few other institutions. He edited two papers, one in the vernacular, the Al-Hakam, and one in English, the Review of Religions, and published large quantities of tracts, open letters, challenges, memorials to Government and such like. The sect has its own regular weekly services and its conferences, like the Samājes.

The likeness of the movement to Persian Babism is very striking, and well worth study.

The whole movement is outside orthodox Islam. Dr. Griswold writes :¹

In the numerous fatwas, which Muhammadan Associations all over India have issued against the Mirza Sahib, the strongest words of denunciation are used. Thus he is called Kafir ‘unbeliever,’ Dajjal ‘Anti-Christ,’ mulhid ‘heretic,’ murtadd ‘apostate,’ kazzab ’liar,’ be-iman ‘faithless,’ dag habaz ‘deceitful,’ etc., etc. With such epithets as these is the ‘certificate’ filled, with which Muhammadan orthodoxy has dismissed the Mirza Sahib from its fellowship and service.

His successor, Hakim Nur-ud-Din, was not a man of the same strength and capacity as the founder, yet the sect went forward steadily. Nur-ud-Din died recently, and the community has fallen into two very hostile parties.

The sect has also a branch in Shorapur in the Deccan. A man named Abdulla has been the leader there for many years, but he now declares that he himself is the prophet; so that his followers have fallen into two companies, one loyal to the original founder, and one loyal to Abdulla. Feeling runs very high; orthodox Muslims oppose both parties; and three lawsuits are pending against Abdulla.

4. A member of the sect, Mr. Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, a Pleader of the Chief Court, Lahore, began a Muslim Mission in England some two years ago. He settled first at Richmond, but has recently gone to Woking, where he has his office close by the Muḥammadan Mosque erected by the late Dr. Leitner, formerly Principal of the Oriental College, Lahore. The chief means whereby Mr. Kamal-ud-Din carries on his propaganda is a monthly magazine called Muslim India and Islamic Review. Lectures are also delivered from time to time in different places. A new English translation of the Koran is being prepared for use in England. Recently, Lord Headley, who for years has proclaimed himself to be more in sympathy with Islam than with Christianity, formally accepted Muḥammadanism in connection with the mission. This accession has caused great rejoicing in the Panjab. Two Moulvies have been sent to England from Delhi to strengthen Mr. Kamal-ud-Din’s hands.

Naturally orthodox Muslims do not quite like to have Islam represented in England by such a heterodox group as the Aḥmadīyas. A pamphlet has recently been written by the Secretary of the Anjuman-i-Himayet-i-Islam¹ in Lahore, which violently denounces the mission.

LITERATURE. — Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, by Dr. H. D. Griswold, Ludhiana, The American Tract Society, 1902, one anna. The Ahmadiya Movement, by Dr. H. D. Griswold in The Moslem World for October, 1912. Also The Review of Religions, an English monthly published in Qadian, and many little pamphlets. The Unknown Life of Christ, by N. Notovitch, London, Hutchinson & Co., 1895.

6. THE NAZARENE NEW CHURCH

This short-lived organization sprang from the Aḥmadīya movement, but was so different in its teaching that it must be kept distinct.

In 1890 Mr. E. J. S. White, a Government servant, then stationed at Kurnool in South India, who was keenly interested in Muḥammadanism, paid a visit to Qadian and was greatly influenced by the prophet. But he could not follow him completely; for as he said in a letter to a friend of the writer recently:

My view of Islam has always been that it is the mere perverted continuation of the Nazarene or Ebionite sect, the immediate community of disciples of our Lord, which contained the descendants of the Lord’s brethren and His own disciples, and maintained the pure doctrine derived from Him, having nothing to do with the Gentile churches founded by Paul, in the midst of which it became a heresy and was crushed out of existence.

So he started the Nazarene New Church, seeking to mingle what he considered to be the purer elements of both Islam and Christianity in a Unitarian doctrine. He published a book of prayers in Urdu, so that Muḥammadans might be able to understand their prayers, which is scarcely possible while they use the Arabic. He also maintained the freedom of women and the duty of allowing them to join, under restrictions, in the worship of the mosque. A Eurasian named Snow became a Muḥammadan in Hyderabad, Deccan, in 1892 and became one of White’s helpers. In 1893 a number of pamphlets were issued. In these we find it stated that members of the Nazarene New Church should adhere strictly to the Law of Moses “as perfected by our Master Jesus.” They are to accept the Gospel of Matthew and some other parts of the New Testament, but not the writings of John or Paul. They are recommended to read the Koran as a perfect exposition of the Unitarian doctrine. Pilgrimage to Nazareth is enjoined as one of the principal duties. The following sentence occurs in one of these pamphlets:

The Church in India is directed by an apostle who, until the Spirit shall send one more worthy, is John White in the Blood of the Lamb.

Snow was guilty of a good deal of abusive language with reference to Christianity. The founder, who is still alive and resides at Cocanada in South India, writes:

The late Daud Khan Bahadur, head of the Kurnool family, and a few other Muhammadans were very sympathetic supporters of the movement. After I left Kurnool I endeavoured to form a Nazariah or Qadiani Jamaat at Ellore, at Secunderabad and in Madras, but nothing came of it.

So the movement soon ended.

The two Hindu movements which use the person of Christ are small groups, almost altogether confined to the common people.

7. THE CHET RĀMĪS

In a village in the Lahore district of the Panjab, Chet Rām was born about 1835. The family were Vishnuites by sect, and belonged to a class of shop-keepers and money-lenders. Chet Rām was uneducated, and almost illiterate. He could keep his shop accounts but that was all. He spent some two years in China, from about 1858 to 1860, as a camp-follower in the second Chinese war. When he returned, he settled down in his father-in-law’s village Buchhoke, and kept a shop and sold opium and liquor.

To this shop there came from time to time a Muhammadan ascetic of the Chisti order, named Syed Mahbub Shah. He was given to drink, and was often seen in the village in a dull intoxicated condition. Clearly, the man’s teaching was eclectic; for he gathered Hindu as well as Muḥammadan disciples, and he was accustomed to speak about Christ. Up to this time Chet Rām was an idolater. Then, probably when he was about twenty-seven years of age, he became fascinated by Mahbūb. He became his disciple, and hence-forward followed him everywhere, and served him with the utmost faithfulness. We have no record of what Mahbūb taught him; but it seems clear that he led him to reverence Christ and the Bible.

Mahbūb died when Chet Rām had been his disciple for some three or four years, probably about 1865 or 1867. He was buried at Buchhoke; and, for three years, Chet Rām haunted the tomb, sleeping on it every night, or actually inside it, as tradition now goes. Then one night he had a vision of Jesus Christ, and received a command from Him to build a church on that very spot and to place a Bible therein. A simple Panjabi poem, ascribed to Chet Rām, describes the vision. We quote a few of the stanzas of a translation made by the Rev. G. L. Thakur Dass of Lahore :

1. Upon the grave of Master Mahbúb Sháh Slept Sàín Chet Rām.

2. O dear (reader) it was midnight, Full moon, stars were as hanging lamps;

3. Unique was that night, surpassing the shab qadr; Rays were falling from the full moon.

4. There appeared a man Whose description is without bounds;

5. A man came in a glorious form Showing the face of mercy;

6. His countenance beautiful as the full moon, No man could look at that beauty;

7. Glorious form, tall in stature and erect, Appeared as if a clear mystery of the Deity.

8. Sweet was his speech, and simple his face, Appearing entirely as the image of God.

9. Such a glory was never seen before, The coming of the Lord Himself was recognized in it.

. . . . . .

25. Afterwards I began to think, What was all this which Omnipotence did?

26. Then my soul realized That Jesus came to give salvation.¹

The date of the vision must have been somewhere between 1868 and 1870. From that time Chet Rām became, in his own way, a follower of Christ. He built a small church and placed a Bible in it, and began to gather disciples “in the name of Christ.” He succeeded in inducing a number of men and women, both Hindu and Muḥammadan, to attach themselves to him. He lived a wandering life, moving about the country with a number of his followers, everywhere proclaiming Jesus as Lord, and suffering much persecution from both Hindus and Muḥammadans. He sought the friendship of Christians and missionaries in a general way, but did not join the Christian church. One Sunday in 1887, Chet Rām and his followers came to the American Mission Compound in Lahore; and both the Rev. C. W. Forman and the Rev. C. B. Newton give accounts of the appearance and the behaviour of the leader and his disciples. Mr. Newton went with them to Buchhoke, and saw the church. We have also a report from a missionary in Ludhiana of the year 1888.

Chet Rām died at Buchhoke in 1894 and was cremated; and his bones were buried beside his master’s.

Of Chet Rām’s character Mr. Newton gives us a very pleasing picture, though it is clear that he had but little knowledge of Christ:¹

During my stay, I had an opportunity of observing Chet Rām’s conduct and character; and certainly the case is a remarkable one, though the good in him is so obscured by superstition and ignorance, that one can scarcely call his case a very hopeful one. He manifests on all occasions a strong feeling of love and reverence for Christ, and undergoes persecution and contumely for His name. His treatment of others is marked by a spirit of rare kindness and generosity. One day a faqīr, a total stranger, from some distant place, came to the takyā, and told a story of his sufferings, having been robbed of some article of clothing. Chet Rām at once pulled off his own principal garment, and gave it to him. He never refuses appeals of this kind.

He was no real student of the Bible. He was ignorant and had no desire to read. Sometimes his talk was quite incoherent.

Chet Rām’s daughter was appointed his successor and the head of his sect, while the leader was alive. She is an unmarried woman, and is pledged to lifelong celibacy. She lives at the headquarters of the sect, which are now in Lahore.

Just outside the Taxali Gate, Lahore, and at a distance of only two or three hundred feet from the Royal Mosque is a small garden thickly planted with trees and flowers and trailing vines and containing a tiny square building and several faqīrs’ huts. The square building has one room, perhaps fourteen feet by ten, and contains certain relics of Chet Rām such as his bed and his Bible. In front of the building is a pole surmounted by a cross. Such are the monastic headquarters of the Chet Rami Sect in Lahore.²

The only other leader whose name is known is one Munshi Nathu, who has been called the theologian of the sect. He has interpolated large pieces into Chet Rām’s poem.

The creed of the sect is quite short. It is engraved on a tablet over the door of Chet Rām’s cell at headquarters. The translation is as follows:

Help, O Jesus, Son of Mary, Holy Spirit, Lord God Shepherd. Read the Bible and the Gospels for salvation. Signed by Chet Rām and the followers.¹

In this we note the recognition of the Trinity, the duty of reading the Bible and the belief that salvation is made known in the Gospels.

The sect teaches another doctrine of the Trinity besides that contained in the above creed. They believe in the existence of Allah the Creator, Parameśvara the Preserver, and Khudā the Destroyer; and they use this trinity to set forth the supremacy of Jesus. Allah represents Muhammadanism, Parameśvara Hinduism, and Khudā, who is the greatest of the three, is Jesus. Jesus is the true God. He is the giver of all gifts. All the Muhammadan prophets and saints and the Hindu gods and incarnations were sent by Jesus. He is the supreme ruler over all. He is the Son of God. The Father and the Son are of one nature.

Now that Chet Rām is dead, his followers give him a very exalted place. They say he is not dead, but is present now and works in the hearts of his followers. As Hindus recognize their guru to be God, they consider Chet Rām to be Christ Himself. They praise Chet Rām as much as they praise Christ. They are accustomed to say:

There is a God, if Chet Rām says so; There is no God, if Chet Rām says no.

After his cremation, his ashes were mixed with water and eagerly swallowed by his disciples. It is their veneration for their Teacher which keeps them from joining the Christian Church.

The followers of Chet Rām are either householders or monks. When a man joins the community, there is a ceremony of baptism. When a birth takes place, the creed is recited in the ears of the child, and also the names of the twelve Apostles. When a member wants to become a Chet Rāmī monk, he tears off his clothes, casts dust upon his head and thus becomes a monk. This is known as Earth-baptism. The monks get their living by begging; and they are the only clergy of the sect. It is their business to preach the Gospel of Chet Rām. Like most modern Indian ascetics, they are addicted to the use of intoxicating drugs, such as bhang, charas, opium.

As to the Chet Rāmī worship Dr. Griswold writes:¹

There does not seem to be any fixed form of worship among the Chet Rāmīs. One old faqir declared that for the enlightened there is no need of religious worship. ‘We have received,’ said he; ‘worship is for those who have not received.’ I invited Munshi Nathu to attend our Church services in Lahore. He proceeded to tell me that all such worship is man-made worship. I have spent many hours at the Chet Rami Khanqah in Lahore, conversing with Munshi Nathu. He said to me on one occasion, ‘This conversation of ours is worship: no other worship is needed.’ All Chet Rāmīs are supposed to own a Bible, and the few who can read doubtless read it. Ghulam Muhammad one day said to me: ‘I read the Bible every day and especially on the Sabbath. I was just reading the first chapter of John’s Gospel, when you arrived.’ The Chet Rāmī creed is repeated as an act of worship, and the Hymn of Chet Rām is chanted. There are some forms of worship which show decidedly the influence of Hinduism and Mohammedanism. At the Khanqah in Lahore are preserved with great care certain relics of Chet Rām. At evening lighted lamps are placed before the Cross and the Bible. On one occasion I noticed the evening worship of two Chet Rāmī women. They came and bowed themselves to the ground first before the cross and then before the Bible, and so went their way. A considerable use is made of amulets. Charms are made and inscribed with the Chet Rāmī Creed and with the names of the Twelve Apostles, and hung about the neck.

Most of the members of the sect are poor, illiterate people. They are a small body, probably less than a thousand in number. There is a good deal of brotherly feeling amongst them. Yet caste remains among them, and Hindu converts do not mix with Muḥammadan converts. The duty of philanthropy, and of the endurance of persecution, has been carefully taught them, but, apart from that, there does not seem to be much emphasis on morality. They frequently carry a long rod surmounted by a cross. On the horizontal bar of the cross there is usually inscribed the creed of the sect.

8. THE ĪSAMOSHIPANTHĪS

A group of Hindus in South Behar, mostly cobblers and masons, have formed a new sect and call themselves Īsā-moshipanthīs, i.e., the Jesus-Messiah-followers.¹ Besides these simple people, there are a few educated ascetics who are identified with the sect. They study the Bible, and lay a good deal of stress on the teaching of Jesus. They do not class Christ with the incarnations of Vishṇu; yet they have mixed up His life with the story of Kṛishṇa. Christ’s death is of more importance to them than His resurrection. They meet for worship on Fridays. It is said that the sect is the result of the teaching of one of the disciples of Śivanārāyaṇa Paramahaṁsa.² I am told they number two to three thousand.

The four movements which close this chapter are grouped together, because, though they have all accepted a good deal that is new, the system in each case is very distinctly Hindu, and the worship of the teacher as God is prominent in all. The first pair are closely related in the elements they borrow from the West and in the claim that their teaching is scientifically trustworthy and verifiable.

9. THE RĀDHĀ SOĀMI SATSANG

1. The word satsang seems to come from the Sikhs, among whom it means “a company of pious people.” The phrase Rādhā Soāmi cannot be explained apart from the history of the sect. It is dealt with below.¹

In order to secure a reliable account of this society and its teaching, a few paragraphs are here transcribed from a manual of doctrine published by the second guru.²

1. The Rādhā Soāmi faith derives its name from its original Founder, the Supreme Being, Rādhā Soāmi, who appeared in this world in human form and designated Himself Sant Satguru or perfect Saint or true Guide and Preceptor, and preached holy doctrines to sincere enquirers of Truth for the deliverance of their spirit from the bondage of body and its surroundings, as well as from the pains and pleasures of this world, and for the ultimate admission of their spirit into the Holy Presence of the Supreme Being after traversing and breaking through the trammels and impediments in the material spheres.

2. The Holy name Rādhā Soāmi has been given out by the Supreme Being Himself. It resounds in splendid refulgence in the higher spheres, and can be heard within themselves by those who perform devotion by practising Surat Śabd Yoga according to the instructions given by the Supreme Being Himself.

3. This Holy name Rādhā Soāmi signifies both the Supreme Being and the original Spirit or Sound current (or Word) which emanated from His Holy Feet, and which is the prime factor and principal agent in the whole creation.

4. The three degrees or grand divisions, comprised in the entire creation, according to Rādhā Soāmi faith are :

5. SPIRITUAL

6. SPIRITUAL-MATERIAL

7. MATERIAL-SPIRITUAL

Pure spirit, uncontaminated with matter, exists in the first grand division. Here the Supreme Being reigns over absolutely spiritual life. This, the purest possible form of life, has no desire but to love and serve the Supreme Being. The joys — the very existence — of this pure spirit-life are derived from the Supreme Being who is the Ocean of spirit, love and joy. Nothing concerning this degree is known or has been known to the founder of any religious creed. It comprises six sub-divisions and is called the Dayāl Desh or the Regions of Mercy.

7. The second or Spiritual-Material degree or grand division is entirely free from all worldly passions and desires of the lower order. Likening the Supreme Being to an Ocean, the president of the second degree is a tide from that Ocean. He is a kind of Viceroy who rules over all life existing in the space comprised in the second and third grand divisions committed to his care. As its name indicates, the spiritual-material degree contains both spirit and matter. But matter is, comparatively speaking, pure and is subject to, and controlled by spirit. Life here is very pure, and, though clothed in pure material forms, spirit predominates. This degree also comprises six subdivisions and is called the Brahmāṇḍa or the regions of Universal Mind and pure matter.

8. In the third or Material-Spiritual degree matter predominates over spirit. Life is composed of spirits wholly clothed in coarse matter. Having quite forgotten the higher abode from which they originally sprang, the spirits here have acquired carnal desires and passions. This also comprises six sub-divisions and is called the Piṇḍa or the regions of Individual Mind and coarse matter.

9. This degree is dominated over by a wave emanating from the Supreme Being and flowing through the tide which has already been likened to a Viceroy. This wave or current may, for want of a better name, be called a Governor who presides over the Material Universe and controls matter.

10. The Supreme Being, as already said, is unknown. The Spirit or the Viceroy who presides over the second degree, is the Lord God of the Bible: he is the Sat or Sacchitānand or Brahman of the Vedānta, the Nirvāṇa of the Jains and the Buddhists and the Lāhut of the Mahomedan Saints. The Spirit or Governor who rules over the third degree is the Brahmā or Parmātmā or God of most religions in the world.

11. The entire creation below the first degree is composed of two parts, namely, spirit which is all good and pure, and matter which is always more or less bad. Man is a drop from the Ocean, that is, the Supreme Being. This drop of pure good spirit is so mixed with matter that it becomes in bondage thereto, and unless aided by a Superior Spirit is always liable to yield to temptation and deteriorate or sink down in matter.

12. There are two streams in our solar system; the one ever improving, the other always deteriorating. The spirits of the first of these streams pass from plants through the lower creation till they reach man; they then become angels or heavenly spirits and ultimately merge into the Supreme Being or remain in His Presence. Maintenance of individuality in the changes later than man depends upon the practice of devotion according to Surat Śabd Yoga or the union of the Spirit with the Word — the Word being the emanation from the Supreme Being. If such devotion be not practised, the spirit loses its previous individuality and becomes merged into a lower stage fit for its reception. A devotee, when merged into the Supreme Being, can assume his individuality at pleasure. Such a being is called a perfect Sant, a Special and Beloved Son of the Supreme Being. But the spirits who belong to the deteriorating stream are wholly under the influence of matter. At every change they get lower and lower until they reach the lowest form in the creation.

13. The Supreme Being has Special and Beloved Sons called Sants and Param Sants, who are full of mercy and love and who descend periodically upon the earth to deliver spirits from the bondage of matter and to carry them to the Presence of the Supreme Father.

14. Any one desirous of reaching the Supreme Being must search for a Sant Satguru (incarnation of the Supreme Being) or a Sadh Guru (one who has reached the top of the second grand division) and invoke His help, and receive instructions from one of these Superior Guides, as to the manner of his devotion and procedure.

15. The name of the Supreme Being is Rādhā Soāmi. He is impersonal, but personal in the second and third divisions and when He manifests Himself through humanity as Sant Satguru. His attributes are mostly met with in the Sant Satguru, who might be called an incarnation of Sat Purush Rādhā Soāmi, the true Supreme Being.

16. The deliverance of spirit from the bondage of body, senses and mind, and its gradual ascension and eventual entrance into the first or highest division by the practice of Surat Śabd Yoga is perfect salvation according to Rādhā Soāmi faith.

17. Rādhā Soāmi faith is not built on the basis of scriptures appertaining to Hindu or any other religion, but on the precepts or instructions of the Supreme Being Himself, Who appeared on this earth in human form and graciously performed the functions of a Sant Satguru for the benefit of degraded humanity.

18. The sound heard internally is a current which has originally emanated from the Supreme Being and is the means not only of concentrating the will but also of raising the spirit to the source from which it emanated.

19. It must be clearly understood that by Śabd or Word or internal voice is meant the spirit or life current which enlivens every part of the body and is the main principle or essence which supports life in and gives activity to every being or body in the whole creation or Universe.

20. At present the spirit of man is residing in the third or material-spiritual region, and has, therefore, to do all the work here by means of the senses and the mind which are mediums between it and the material objects, and consequently, as a natural result, its power has become quite hampered. But as soon as it begins to ascend, the powers which are now lying dormant, become active and the spirit acquires ultra-material or higher powers.

21. The method for taking back the spirit to its Supreme source is first to concentrate at the focus of the eyes the spirit and mind which are diffused in our body and in a manner tied to external objects by desires and passions, and next to commence its journey homewards by attending to the internal sound, or in other words, by riding the life or sound current which has originally emanated from the Supreme source.

22. The current which has been instrumental in having brought it down here must naturally be the only true path for its return to the original source, and whoever finds this current is on the path of emancipation. This current which is the spirit and life current, is called in the Rādhā Soāmi faith, Sound (Śabd) or Word or Holy Name.

23. To approach the Supreme Being, there is absolutely no other means except the practice of Surat Śabd Yoga under the guidance of a Sant Satguru or a Sadh Guru, or a sincere lover of the Supreme Being who has received instructions from, and is helped in his practice by one of those Superior and Holy Spirits.

24. Prayer is necessary to obtain blessing and mercy to help man’s perfect salvation, but it must be offered from the inmost heart and not confined to mere utterance. It must be also backed up by works of faith and charity performed through love and affection for the Supreme Being.

25. In following this mode of devotion the following restrictions are made with regard to diet and mode of living. No intoxicating drink or drug and animal food is to be taken and immoderate indulgence in any desire is to be avoided. Animal food is forbidden on account of its producing a material tendency in human nature, and intoxicating drink is detrimental to a calm and natural state of the brain and the nervous system. Other public and private duties should be carried on as usual.

26. The moral code appertaining to Rādhā Soāmi faith is comprised in two sentences : (1) All acts including spiritual practice which tend to free the spirit from matter and raise it towards its source are good works. (2) All acts which tend to degrade the spirit by weighing it downwards deeper and deeper into matter are bad works. Again any action done with a view to help the needy from unselfish motives is good work ; and the contrary, bad work in this world.

27. A member of Rādhā Soāmi faith is strictly forbidden to divulge the secrets or mention to any one (even to a fellow member without express permission) the glory and wonder of the higher creation he sees now and then within himself, or the happiness and extraordinary joy he experiences during his practice, or the special Mercy, Grace and Protection extended to him from time to time on important occasions by the Supreme Father and Sant Satguru.

28. One fact stands out clear from the above statement of doctrine that the guru occupies a place of supreme importance in the sect. He is the centre of the whole ; for he is not only the source of revelation but the essential means of salva-tion. Thus the sect ought to have an unbroken succession of gurus. There have been already three, and a fourth is now required. The following facts are taken from a book by the third guru.¹

The first guru was an Agra banker of Kshatriya caste, born in 1818. His name seems to have been Tulsī Rām, but he is better known as Śiva Dayāl Saheb. He came of a pious Vishnuite family, and had his guru, whose name was Tulsī Saheb; yet, according to the sect, he did not learn any of the deep things from his guru, but brought his divine knowledge with him from the other world. He is said to have had the power of sending people into samādhi,² that is, a sort of religious trance, and of enabling them to see visions. He publicly proclaimed his doctrine in 1861. He left two books, each named Sār Bachan, i.e. “Essential Utterance,” one in poetry and one in prose. He died in 1878. His ashes lie in a sacred tomb in the Rādhā Soāmi Garden, Agra.³ His titles are Rādhā Soāmī Dayāl and Soāmījī Mahārāj.

The second guru was born in Agra in 1828, in a family of Kāyastha caste. He was a government official, serving in the Post Office, and finally rose to be Postmaster-General of the United Provinces, and received from Government the title Rai Bahadur. He was thus known as Rai Saligram Saheb Bahadur. Of his early life and his relations with the first guru, whom he met in 1856, Max Müller⁴ writes:

It seems that the horrors of the mutiny in 1857 made a deep impression on his mind. He saw thousands of men, women, and children butchered before his eyes, the rich reduced to poverty, the poor raised to unexpected and undeserved wealth, so that the idea of the world’s impermanent and transient nature took complete possession of him and estranged him from all that had formerly enlisted his interest and occupied his energies. From his very youth, however, his mind had been filled with religious and philosophical questions, and he is said to have devoted much time from his youth onward through all the years of his official life to the study of the Sacred Scriptures. No wonder therefore that after witnessing the horrors of the mutiny and its suppression, he should have wished to flee from this den of misery and to get happiness unalloyed and permanent where alone it could be found. He went to consult several Sannyāsīs and Yogīs, but they could not help him. At last one of his colleagues at the Post Office recommended his elder brother as a spiritual guide who could be trusted. For two years he attended his lectures, compared his teaching with that of the Upanishads and other holy writings, and then became his devoted pupil or Chela. During his stay at Agra he allowed no one else to serve his master. He used to grind the flour for him, cook his meals, and feed him with his own hands. Every morning he could be seen carrying a pitcher of pure water on his head for the Guru to bathe in, which he fetched from a place two miles distant. His monthly salary also was handed over to the Saint, who used it for the support of his pupils, wife and children, and spent the rest in charity.

In 1878, on the death of the guru, he became head of the sect, and retained his position until his death in 1898. His samādh, sacred tomb, is at Pipalmandi, Agra. He left behind him several works in poetry called Prema Bānī, “Love Utterances,” and Prema Patra, “Love Letters,” and a little manual in English called Rādhā Soāmi Mat Prakāsh, “Exposition of Rādhā Soāmi Doctrine,” from which our exposition of the teaching of the sect is taken. He also wrote several small treatises in Hindī and Urdū. It seems certain that the sect owes a great deal to this man’s clear intellect and power of expression. The first guru may have been the source of the leading ideas and of the religious practice of the sect; but one can scarcely doubt that the order and precision which now mark its teaching were the fruit of Saligram’s vigorous and orderly mind. His title is Huzoor Maharaj.

The third guru was a Brāhman of Bengali extraction, named Brahmā Śaṅkar Misra. He was born in Benares in 1861, quite near the place where Kabīr taught. He received an English education, and was a Master of Arts of Calcutta University. He held a position in the Accountant General’s Office, Allahabad. He joined the Satsaṅg in 1885. In 1898 he became the head of the sect. In 1902 he came to the conclusion that it was necessary, for the health of the Satsaṅg, to give it a well-expressed constitution and a definite organization. He created a Central Administrative Council, and had a Constitution and By-laws drawn up. He left a few poems in Hindī and he wrote two brief expositions of the faith for the Census Officers of the Panjab and of the United Provinces. When he died, he left, in manuscript, a volume of three hundred pages, called Discourses on Rādhāsoāmī Faith, which contains much more sound than sense. He left also a few letters in English which have been published under the title Solace to Satsaṅgīs. He died in 1907. In Benares, where he died, they have purchased a famous house and garden. It used to be called Nandeshwar Kothi, and at the close of the eighteenth century it was used as the residence of the British judge and magistrate of Benares. Here in 1799 Mr. Davis, the judge, was attacked by a body of native troops, who had just killed the British Resident. He placed himself at the top of a narrow staircase leading to the roof, and succeeded in defending himself, his wife and two children with a spear, until he was rescued by a regiment of cavalry. The garden is now called the Rādhā Soāmī garden. A fine building has been erected in it, which is used for the worship of the sect. It is a large hall with a gallery and a raised platform. At the back of the platform there is the tomb of the third guru, and on it there hangs his photograph, so that the faithful may look upon his face and adore him. His title is Mahārāj Saheb.

Since his death the community has been unable to agree as to who is to be the next guru. Until 1913 there were two prominent candidates, Mr. Sircar Kamta Prasād of Murai, near Ghazipur, and Mr. Mādhava Prasād Saheb, who is the Chief Superintendent in the Accountant-General’s Office, Allahabad. The former died in the autumn of 1913; so that Mr. Mādhava Prasād Saheb has now a far better chance of being chosen; but there are groups who are unwilling to follow him, and at least two other candidates.

3. Thus far we have relied on the literature published by the sect, but there are many important facts which do not appear in the official books. For this further information I am indebted to members of the sect or to people who were members but are no longer so.

The first guru was a man who had had no Western education and did not know English. We may compare him with Rāmakṛishṇa.¹ His wife, whose real name I have not discovered, was a woman of great piety and goodness. They acted together as religious teachers, although the guru was probably the greater of the two. There was no organization, no sect, in those days. Disciples came to them and received instruction; and the photographs of both the man and his wife were given them to contemplate during their private meditations.

The guru belonged to a Vaishṇava family, as we have already seen. His connections were with the Kṛishṇaite gurus of Brindaban. From time to time he and his wife dressed up as Kṛishṇa and Rādhā to receive the worship of their disciples. The second guru also got himself up as Kṛishṇa from time to time. Thus the guru-worship of the sect was probably borrowed unchanged from the practices of the gurus at Brindaban. In February, 1914, I was able to visit the Rādhā Soāmi Bāgh (i.e. Garden), some four miles outside Agra, where the tomb, samādh, of the first guru is. I was shown over the prem-ises by Mr. Tota Ram, who was educated at Roorki and served Government as a civil engineer for years, but has now retired, and is both architect and builder of a fine new marble structure being erected over the samādh. I was greatly interested to find two photographs hanging on the front of the samādh, a woman and a man. I asked my guide who they represented. He answered that the woman was Rādhā and the man Soāmi, and then explained that they were the first guru and his wife. He also said that Rādhā was not the woman’s real name.

Images RĀDHĀ. Wife of the first guru SOĀMI. The first guru The second guru The third guru

So far as my information goes, it was the second guru, Rai Saligram Saheb Bahadur, guru of the sect from 1878–1898, who organized the Satsang, systematized the teaching and gave it its modern character. I have also been told that the sect owes its name to him. It is most noteworthy that this extraordinary name, Rādhā Soāmi, bears four significations in the sect. It is the name of God Himself; it is the name which the first guru bears, as the perfect incarnation of God; it is the sound which the spiritual sound-current (Śabda) makes as it rings through all regions; and it is the name of the sect. It is necessary also to realize that the real meaning of Rādhā-svāmī is Kṛishṇa, as Lord of Rādhā (his cowherd mistress in the latest cycle of the myth); and that Soāmi is only a curious phonetic misspell for Svāmī. How comes it that this name stands for God in a sect which rejects the whole Hindu pantheon? We can only conjecture, until some scholar explores the Hindī writings of the first guru; but it almost seems as if, in the first instance, it had been applied to the first guru and his wife, as they shewed themselves to their disciples in person and in portrait, and as they still appear on the samādh, and also in our reproduction of their portraits,¹ and had then been applied to God, of whom the guru was held to be the full and perfect revelation. The third guru quotes a Hindī couplet, said to be by Kabīr, which is supposed, by transposition, to say that the name of God is Rādhāsvāmī;¹ but the couplet is clearly a forgery: it nowhere occurs among the writings of Kabīr, published or unpublished; the language is of a later date than Kabīr; and the forger was a bungler, for, when transposed according to rule, the name reads Ārādhsvāmī, and not Rādhāsvāmī.²

The cosmogony is curiously like the Buddhist scheme, which also has three planes or worlds, the Formless World, the World of Form, and the World of Desire, each sub-divided into sections. We may also compare the Theosophic scheme, which sets forth reality as existing in seven distinct planes.

Most of the conceptions of the sect are Hindu, and of these the majority are Vishnuite. God, the World, and the Soul are recognized as realities; the soul is an aṁśa, or portion of God; the spirit-current (Śabda), which streams from the Supreme and is the source of all things, corresponds to the śakti, or energy of God, in the Vaishṇava and Śaiva systems. Transmigration is retained. The doctrine of immortality shews traces of the Vaishṇava conception, that the soul retains its personality for ever; but the incarnation doctrine differs very seriously from the Vaishṇava idea; for it is men who become incarnate and not God Himself.

4. The practice of the sect is summed up in the phrase Surat Śabd Yoga, that is, union (yoga) of the human soul (surat) with the spirit-current or word (Śabda). The methods employed are unknown; for they are imparted by the guru to the disciple under a vow of secrecy; but it is clear that they are occult practices of a hypnotic nature such as are used in Theosophy. There are hints in the literature that the initiate sees wonderful lights and extraordinary scenes, and wins supernatural powers. Instructions about the practice are given partly in meetings of the sect, in which the guru delivers lectures, partly in private, when he receives his disciples individually or in small groups. The guru gives his photograph to each disciple, that he may have it before him during his religious practice. The prescribed exercises (sādhanāni) ought to be practised from two to three hours every day.

As to the powers of the Sant Satguru Dr. Griswold writes:

The incarnate Sant Satguru, even while on earth, has his citizenship in the Rādhā Soāmi Dhām (realm). He is not controlled by the forces and currents which come from low levels of earthly lives; for, “as in the state of somnambulism, all the functions of the body and senses are performed from a plane higher than that which the soul occupies in the wakeful state, so all the actions of the incarnations of the True Creator are regulated by the currents coming direct from the Supreme Being himself.” The Sant Satguru who has attained to the highest stage of being might leave the body at any time and return to his own proper sphere; but he stays on earth a certain time for the salvation of believers. This is of his grace.

We are told in the books that the sect recognizes no temples, shrines or sacred places, except those sanctified by the presence of the guru or his relics: that the practice of the sect can be carried on anywhere. This is quite true; for the initiate can sit down, with the photograph of his guru in front of him, and practise his meditations and his exercises wherever he pleases, so long as he does it in secret. But for their meetings the members of the sect prefer to have their own buildings and the presence of either the living guru or the relics of one who has passed away. There are three relic-shrines already in existence, each called gurudwāra (the guru’s chamber), two in Agra and one in Benares. Each guru’s photograph hangs on his tomb.

In the daily meetings of the sect portions of their own sacred books or of the writings of Kabīr and other Hindu saints are read. There is a prayer, hymn-singing and an address by the guru, if he is present, by some other one, if he is not present. Besides these common practices, there is the adoration of the guru or of his portrait;¹ but of that I have received no detailed description. Several things are clear, however. We are told in the books that each member brings to the meeting with him a wreath of flowers, which he places round the neck of the guru. The wreath is afterwards returned to him, filled with the spiritual power of the guru. Everything that has touched him is charged with his sanctity and influence. All relics from his body, such as clothing, hair, nail-parings or water in which he has washed his feet, are sacred and precious. There are some very disgusting practices connected with this idea, certain products of his body being actually eaten or drunk by his followers. When he dies, his body is burnt; and his ashes, mixed with water, are swallowed by the faithful. The place where he resided is considered holy; and contemplation of his image is held to be contemplation of the Supreme Being.

Rādhā Soāmis are taught that there is no need for them to give up their life as householders and become monks.² Indeed, the lives of the three gurus themselves show what is the ideal. Yet, in spite of this, in the Constitution of the Satsang drawn up in 1902, a set of rules is given for the enrolment and conduct of Rādhā Soāmi monks.³

There is one side of Rādhā Soāmi influence which is very curious, their want of touch with modern movements. The gurus discourage study. The members shew no national feeling whatsoever, nor any serious interest in the life of the country. If any member were to accept a public position of any prominence, he would be looked down upon. Economic, literary or educational progress is no part of the ideal of the sect. This neglect of public affairs is what takes the place of the old ascetic renunciation.

5. The points that attract new members seem to be, first of all, the secrecy of the religious practice of the sect, with the hope connected therewith of gaining supernatural wisdom, enlightenment and power. The living guru, believed to be an incarnation of God in the fullest possible sense, is a distinct attraction. Within the meetings of the sect there is a good deal of freedom. Men of all castes mix freely together, and even on occasion, dine together in secret; and there is no strict separation of men and women. There is thus a sort of free happy fellowship within each group of Satsaṅgīs, as they call themselves. Finally, membership in the sect does not involve any breach with one’s own religion. The fact that a man is a member of the sect is often kept secret. As in Theosophy, you may be a Rādhā Soāmi and yet remain a Hindu, a Muḥammadan or a Christian. People are taught that all religions are true, and that the Rādhā Soāmi faith is an extra, fit to be the complement of any religion, and supreme over them all. Membership is thus made quite easy. Yet it is definitely stated that the religion is for all, and that outside the Satsaṅg there is no salvation.

There is no proselytism in the sect, except in so far as the individual member may express his high appreciation of the guru to his personal friends. One Satsaṅgī tried to make me realize how many miracles had accompanied the gurus throughout their lives. They teach only people who wish to be taught; and they would rather win a few intelligent men than crowds of common people.

6. The affinities of the theology of the sect stand out quite clear. Most of the teaching is purely Hindu; it stands nearer to Vaishṇavism than to any other part of Hinduism, and is perhaps most closely allied to the teaching of Kabir. This is reflected in the practice of the sect. While they profess to find all truth in the books of their own gurus, they do use the writings of certain Hindu and Muḥammadan saints, and amongst these they give Kabīr the highest place. But, though the system is in the main Hindu and old, there are modern elements. There is an attempt to place religious leaders in the various spheres of the universe, according to their merit; and there are a number of Christian elements in the teaching. The unknown Supreme is constantly called the Heavenly Father; His will is frequently emphasized; and Satsangīs are taught to seek His approbation. The Sant Satguru, who alone can reveal Him, is called His beloved Son. God created man in His own image. Love is emphasized in the teaching of the sect in such a way as clearly to reveal its Christian origin; for it goes far beyond the old ideas connected with bhakti. Works of faith and charity, the spirit of service and prayer, are laid down as necessary duties. Finally, the forms of worship in the regular services, apart from the adoration of the guru, are Christian.

In this connection, however, nothing is more noteworthy than the many points in which Rādhā Soāmi and Theosophical doctrine and practice coincide. The most important items are: the unknowable Supreme, the spheres and their regents, the human revealers of religion, the emphasis on the Word, reincarnation, the use of methodical exercises (sādhanāni) of a hypnotic character for the development of the spiritual powers and of the photograph¹ of the guru in meditation, the worship of gurus, the supernatural powers of the gurus, the claim that the teaching of the sect is scientifically accurate and verifiable in every particular, esoteric teaching, secret practice, and all the talk about astral and higher planes, adepts and such like.

LITERATURE. — Rādhā Soāmi Mat Prakāsh, by Rai Salig Ram Bahadur, Benares, 1896, for private circulation, 10 annas. (This is by far the best presentation of Rādhā Soāmi Doctrine in English.) Discourses of Radhasoami Faith, by Pandit Brahm Sankar Misra, Benares, The Satsang, 1909. This very verbose volume has a Prefatory Note which contains details about the three gurus. For the other works of the gurus, see above, pp. 163, 164, 165. The Radha Swami Sect, by the Rev. H. D. Griswold, Ph. D., Cawnpore Mission Press.

10. THE DEVA SAMĀJ

1. Śiva Nārāyaṇa Agnihotrī was born in a Kanauji Brāhman family in 1850, in a small town in the Cawnpore district of the United Provinces. When he was sixteen, he entered the Government Engineering College at Rurki, and got the degree of Overseer after some years of study and service there. Before the close of his course, he came greatly under the religious influence of the Curator of the Instrument Depot of the College, and through him became convinced of the truth of the Vedānta philosophy as taught by Śaṅkarāchārya, namely, that God is impersonal, and that the human spirit is God. In 1871, while he was acting as a master in the College, both he and his wife underwent a ceremony of initiation and became disciples of the Curator-guru. He also began to see clearly the need of religious and social reform. Hence he banished idolatry from his household and set his wife free from the restrictions of the zenāna.

In 1873, now 23 years of age, he was appointed Drawing-master in the Government School, Lahore; and in that city he has lived ever since. Here he at once came under the influence of the Brāhma Samāj, with its doctrine that God is essentially personal. Both he and his capable wife became active Brāhma workers. In 1875 he was appointed honorary minister of the Lahore Samāj, and soon became well known in the city as a man of character and a good speaker. Wherever he went, large audiences gathered to hear him. The Ārya Samāj was planted in Lahore in 1877, as we have already seen, and very soon rose to great influence. The following year, Agnihotri began a long-continued crusade against its false pretences about the Veda. In January, 1880, he attended the anniversary meetings of the recently founded Sādhāran Brāhma Samāj in Calcutta;¹ and he and three others were ordained as the first missionaries of the movement.² For two years longer he gave all his leisure to work for the Lahore Samāj; but in 1882 he gave up the post of Drawing-master in the Government School, in order that his full time might be devoted to missionary labour. We are also informed in the recent literature of the Samāj that on his birthday, the 20th of December of the same year, he took his great vow, expressed in a Hindī couplet, the translation of which runs:

The supreme object of my Life is to serve the world by establishing the kingdom of Truth and Goodness on this earth and by destroying what is opposed to them; may I spend my whole life for the fulfilment of this supreme object!

In any case his full powers now began to make themselves manifest. He proved effective as a writer as well as a speaker. Books, pamphlets and tracts poured from the press. For a little time a sort of simple copy of the Salvation Army, called the Brāhma Sena or Brāhma Army, was used as an auxiliary. He made his influence felt in every section of public life in Lahore. But it was not long before difficulties arose within the Samāj. His methods displeased the quieter members; and his forceful will and autocratic temper led to constant friction with the other leaders. He wanted to rule. He would often be heard to say, “I am born to command not to obey.” Most of the members were apprehensive that he would soon set up as the authoritative guru of the Samāj. The way his followers now express this is: “His life-mission was unique and quite different from the object of the Brāhmo Samāj.” A split became inevitable.

2. Accordingly, he seceded from the Brāhma Samāj, taking with him a fair number of followers, and organized, on the Queen’s Jubilee day,¹ February 16th, 1887, a new society to be known as the Deva Samāj. The name was clearly chosen in order to distinguish the new society from the old, and yet to indicate its close relationship to it. Brāhma is an adjective formed from the word Brahman, the name of the supreme God of the Upanishads. Deva is the ordinary Sanskrit word for one of the innumerable gods of the Hindu pantheon, but is probably used in the name of the society as an adjective. So that the whole name means the Divine Society. A creed was soon issued, which showed that the aims and beliefs of the new community were very similar to those of the Brāhma Samāj; yet there were significant differences. The Deva Dharma, the divine religion of the divine society, is a special divine dispensation,² and so is distinct from the Brāhma Dharma. The doctrines are Brāhma doctrines; yet the beginnings of a guru-doctrine are perceptible; and, within a few years, the leader could say of himself, “My mission is unique”; “I am free from sin”;³ and “I am a ship of hope and a leaven for elevating nations.” The work of the Samāj ran along the usual lines: only Agnihotṛi dabbled in spiritualism.

In 1893 he became involved in a libel case which, dragging on for five long years, greatly hindered the work of the Samāj. During this period Agnihotṛi’s mind underwent a very serious change; and at its close a new period opens.

3. From 1898 down to the present day the Deva Samāj has been an atheistic society, working for educational and moral ends. Yet the members attribute to the guru such a supreme place in human evolution and give him such a position in their own minds and devotional practice that we are fully justified in saying that, practically, he is regarded and worshipped as a god. Indeed, they call him sattya deva, a real god.¹ The literature of the earlier period was at once withdrawn from circulation as far as possible; a new creed, quite different from the previous one was promulgated; and, for several years, there was no public preaching or disputation. The literature of the sect is now sold publicly and many of the meetings are public; but the devotional meetings and the worship of the guru are held in private. The chief book of the Samāj is called the Deva Śāstra, or Divine Scripture, and the teaching, Deva Dharma, or Divine Religion.

4. The teaching of the sect is that the universe consists of matter and force, which are uncreated and indestructible, and which manifest themselves in four forms, inorganic, vegetable, animal, human. Man’s life or soul is the builder of his body, the most essential part of his existence. The soul develops if it possess the necessary capacity and unite with the right evolutionary environment; but if it lacks the capacity or fails to grasp the environment, it degenerates; and if degeneration is not checked, it will become extinct. A soul that rises to the Complete Higher Life is thereby raised above the danger of degeneration and extinction. The soul then survives in the form of a refined human body.

Good action leads to development, evil action to degeneration. When a man reaches a certain height of development, he is entirely beyond the danger of degeneration and dissolution. In order to reach this higher life, it is necessary to unite with one who has already risen to these heights. The guru of the Deva Samāj has risen to the highest possible heights, and thus is the true environment for souls eager for progress. He is an unprecedented manifestation of the powers of the highest life.

Image: MAHĀMĀNANĪYA PUJANĪYA ŚRĪ DEVA GURU BHAGAVĀN. Paṇḍit S. N. Agnihotri

Since matter and force are the only reality that exists, there is no such thing as God or gods. Every conception of God that has been held among men is purely imaginative, and consequently harmful.

The teaching about the guru himself is the key to the whole life of the sect. He is the highest result of the evolution of the universe. He has evolved the highest powers that any being on this earth has ever had. Nay, he possesses in his soul all the powers of the Complete Higher Life and is its highest ideal. Hence many of the titles used of Hindu gods are conferred upon him. He is Mahāmānanīya Pūjanīya Śrī Deva Guru Bhagavān (the Most Reverend, Most Worshipful, Most Exalted, Divine Teacher and Blessed Lord). Since he became the god of the Samāj, he has tended to withdraw into seclusion. He no longer figures in the public life of Lahore. He seldom instructs any one except his own disciples, very seldom gives outsiders interviews, and delivers addresses only in meetings of the Samāj. Much is made of the vow he is said to have taken in 1882. Much is also made of his sacrifices.

The guru teaches and practises spiritualism. Being the summit of all evolution, he possesses powers whereby he is able to see into the other world, and to have personal dealings, through mediums, with souls there. He states that many of his own dead relatives have become convinced of the truth of his teaching, and have found salvation through him. He delivers addresses to spirits who assemble from time to time to hear him at the Samāj building.

Transmigration is denied. This is one of the elements of Brāhma teaching which have been carried over into the new period.

5. Those who wish to become members of the Samāj have to take the following ten vows.¹

6. I shall not commit the following four sins relating to my profession or calling: — (a) I shall not take bribe. (b) I shall not weigh or measure anything more or less, with a motive of cheating some one. (c) I shall not substitute one thing for another with a view to cheating some one. (d) When certain remuneration for a certain work or price of a thing has been agreed upon, I shall not dishonestly pay less or take more than is due according to the agreement.

7. I shall not commit theft.

8. I shall not withhold anything borrowed by or entrusted to me.

9. I shall not rob any person of his money, land or any other article by force or fraud.

10. I shall not gamble or do any act which involves loss or gain of money or property through betting.

11. I shall not lead a useless life when I am able to do some work.

12. I shall not commit adultery, polygamy, or any unnatural crime.

13. I shall not use, prepare, cultivate, buy or sell, or give to any person any intoxicant such as Wine, Opium, Bhang, Tobacco, Charas, Chandoo, Cocaine, etc., for the purpose of intoxication.

14. I shall not eat flesh or eggs myself, or give or direct others to eat flesh or eggs or anything made thereof.

15. I shall not kill any sentient being, barring certain right occasions.

When any one wants to become a member of the Samāj, he writes a letter to the guru, putting into it a catalogue of all his past sins, telling how he has been brought to a better mind by the guru, and promising to give them up. From time to time thereafter he writes in a similar strain. All these documents the guru preserves most carefully.¹

6. The guru is seldom present at the regular devotional meetings of the Samāj, but his photograph hangs before the congregation. An image would be used; but hitherto the cost has stood in the way. When the people have assembled, all stand up, and the conductor offers a tray of flowers to the portrait,² or hangs a garland round it. All then bend low in adoration. The stotra, a Sanskrit hymn in praise of the guru, is then sung by all, and a Hindi translation is read by the conductor. All then prostrate themselves before the portrait. When all are seated, the conductor offers prayer to the guru. Then a hymn is sung. This is often followed by a sermon, or a meditation on the virtues of the guru, and another hymn; or a passage is read from the Deva Śāstra. The conductor or some other one then closes the meeting with another prayer. The burning of incense and the waving of lights (ārati) before the portrait were originally parts of the service, but they have been discontinued. When the guru himself is present, the service centres in him; and when members call on him, they prostrate themselves at his feet. His birthday is the anniversary of the Samāj.

7. The methods of the Samāj are practically all Christian. Many of them the guru brought with him from the Brāhma Samāj; the rest have been copied direct from Christian missions. The Samāj has missionaries, and also lay-workers, both men and women. They have two High Schools, a number of Primary Schools, a School for the Depressed Classes, and a Training College for mission workers, called the Bikāshālai, or House of Development. A good deal of attention is given to female education. They have a successful Board-ing School for Girls at Firozepore, teaching up to the Matriculation Standard. They do a little medical work, have two Widows’ Homes, and have held Industrial Exhibitions. They lay a good deal of stress on social reform, as we have already seen, and endeavour to do a little social service. They have a Temperance League and a Vegetarian League.¹

Literature is much used in spreading the teaching of the Samāj. The guru’s chief work is a Hindī book, the Deva Śāstra, i.e., the Divine Scripture, which, he believes, is destined to eclipse all the sacred books of the world. The portrait of the guru which forms the frontispiece of the Deva Śāstra is reproduced in the plate facing page 177. There are a few more books of some size in Hindī which expound the principles of their doctrine; and there are a great many pamphlets in Hindī, Urdū, Sindhī and English. A series of schoolbooks in Hindī has been published. Four journals are published: an English monthly, called the Science-Grounded Religion, an Anglo-Sindhī monthly, called the Sindh-Upakārak, an Urdū fortnightly, called Jiwan Tattva, and a Hindī monthly, called the Sewak, which is meant only for those belonging to the Samāj.

The Reports read at the Anniversary Meetings tell of steady expansion.² Lahore and Firozepore are the two chief centres of the work; but members from Sindh, Baluchistan, the N. W. Frontier Province and the United Provinces attend the annual meetings.

8. The sources and connections of the system stand out quite clear. The scientific elements are fairly prominent: the conceptions of life, seed, soil, growth, evolution, progress, degeneration, extinction, are scattered throughout the literature. Originally, the guru seems to have been considerably influenced by Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World; but his later thought is drawn mainly from Spencer. Hinduism shews itself in the Samāj in the beliefs about the guru and in the worship, and lingers on in the practice of caste, though transmigration has been expelled, and in the stress laid on vegetarianism and on the preservation of animal life. The influence of Christianity is visible throughout, chiefly in the vigorous moral sense which characterizes the doctrine of salvation, and in the claim made in every report, that numerous individuals have been saved from various forms of vice by the teaching of the Samāj;¹ also in the rejection of transmigration, in the demand for social reform, and in the practical methods employed. The religious atheism of the Samāj reminds one of Comtism, but the position of the guru is distinctly Hindu. Curiously enough, his doctrine of conditional immortality is not unlike that preached by the Rev. Edward White in London, shortly before the rise of the Deva Samāj.

9. All went fairly well with the Samāj until 1913, when the guru took two measures which have raised a storm. He appointed his own second son, Devānand, who keeps an athletic store in Lahore, to succeed him. Naturally, Dev Ratan, who has been associated with him for twenty-four years, and for many years has been his right hand, did not think this quite the right appointment. In the second place he published a book, called Bignan-Mulak Tattva Siksha, in which he declared himself the perfect ideal, the perfect object of worship, the perfect giver of life, perfection and salvation for all mankind. No one has been equal to him in the past; no one will ever equal him in the future. The worship of all other beings, whether imaginary gods and goddesses or real men, should be abandoned as harmful.

The consequence is that Dev Ratan, the one considerable man in the movement after the guru, has seceded from the Samāj; and one of the sons of the guru, his brother-in-law, his sister-in-law, two graduates and some others have come out with him. The bulk of the members have, however, remained. The seceders have formed The Society for the Promotion of Higher Life. Their position is the old teaching without the guru. Meantime the guru has published the letters of confession¹ written to him by Dev Ratan in former years, and seeks to show from them what a bad man he is; — a proceeding which suggests many thoughts. What the outcome of all this will be no one can tell.

LITERATURE. — OFFICIAL: Devaśāstra, by S. N. Agnihotṛi, Lahore, Jivan Press, Rs. 5. (The chief scripture of the Samāj; in Hindī.) Dev Dharm, Lahore, Deva Samaj Office, price 1 1/2 as. (An account of the teaching of the sect, in English, in fifty pages.) A Dialogue about the Dev Samaj, Lahore, The Jivan Press, 1912, 1 an. (A brief account of the Samāj and its work.) CRITICAL: Pandit Agnihotṛi and the Deva Samāj, by Dr. H. D. Griswold, Lahore, 1906. (A clear account of the Samāj.) A Lecture on Pandit S. N. Agnihotṛi and His Atheistic Propaganda, by Kashi Ram, Lahore, N. W. Indian Press, 1908.

11. TWO MINOR GURUS

Two young Hindus, belonging to our own day, the one a Telugu, the other a Tamil, have each sketched a system and gathered a few disciples. Both have been deeply influenced by Christ; yet, the main teaching of each is Hindu; and they both wish to be worshipped as gurus. They are of no importance as leaders, but their teaching may be worth notice as further evidence of the character of Indian thought to-day.

1. The Telugu guru² is not quite ready yet to appear in public to expound his system. His thought, as it at present exists in his mind, seems to be fundamentally Hindu, but with a good deal of Christianity worked into it. He declares that his system is for all men, and that he selects what is good from all religions.

At present he seems to be a pantheist. The whole world is God, and we are part of God. God is not a Spirit. God is not Sat, Chit, Ānanda, except in so far as the universe deserves these titles. God is non-moral. He has no will. He does not act. He does not listen to prayer, and does not receive sacrifice. God does not answer prayer : prayer automatically answers itself.

He condemns idolatry entirely.

He finds all metaphysics in the Rigveda. He acknowledges that Hindu mythology is absurd, and explains Brahmā as sthūla, i.e., the material world, Vishṇu as antaḥkaraṇa, i.e. man’s inner faculties, and Śiva as the first cause. He asserts that there is no mythology in the Rigveda. He is writing a Commentary on it. In his attitude to the Rik he stands very near Dayānanda.

He bids his followers concentrate the mind on certain words or phrases from the Rigveda (e.g. the Gayatrī, the most famous of Hindu prayers), because he holds they are instinct with meaning. They are to concentrate the mind on that, until only one thought remains. He believes in the power of Yoga methods, but says they are dangerous.

He calls Śaṅkara and Buddha great philosophers. He has not much respect for Muḥammad. He acknowledges that the Gītā is not an utterance of Kṛishṇa.

He says the world is eternal. He does not believe in the re-creation and destruction of the world. He believes in karma and transmigration; but he does not seek deliverance himself at all; nor does he admire men who seek deliverance. He desires rebirth, in order to work for the good of humanity. This is curiously like the attitude ascribed to the Bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Moral law is made by man. What is best for society is moral. In moral action he would advise us to copy Jesus. He holds that the life of Jesus was entirely given up to doing good; and he says that He died for men. He also declares that Jesus is now a living angel, who can answer the prayers of Christians.

He urges his followers above all things else to philanthropic action. He also urges them to prayer and moral action. He insists on moral asceticism.

He is a Brāhman; yet he eats with Christians in secret. He is in favour of mixed marriages, even between people of different races. He is anxious to make Brāhmans less conservative; but, as he has not yet appeared publicly as a teacher, he conceals his anti-caste tendencies. He is opposed to polygamy, but is not in favour of widow-remarriage, nor in favour of marrying girls after puberty. The age of the marriage of men ought to be raised. He is a married man with a family. He lays no stress on the monastic life, but makes working for humanity the prime thing.

Though he has not proclaimed himself a public teacher as yet, he has gathered a number of friends around him and formed a sort of society. Weekly or fortnightly a meeting is held. He presides; some one reads a paper in Sanskrit, and he comments on it.

The disciples consider him worthy of divine honour. Each bows down individually to him.

2. The young Tamil has been rash enough to publish a little book to explain his position. It is simply a rhetorical exercise, containing no systematic thinking. The elements contained in it are drawn mainly from the Śaiva Siddhānta and from Christianity, but Vaishṇavism is not quite neglected. The Christian elements are distinctly subordinate to the Hindu, and the need of the guru is one of the most prominent points. He describes, in a mystical way, his own meeting with his guru, whom he calls the Anointed, and to whom he attributes his conversion. His language throughout is modelled on the Bible; but in every case Christian truth is volatilized, so as to become equivalent to Hindu doctrine. Baptism, the Holy Ghost, Regeneration, the Kingdom of God, Eternal Life, and other such phrases are scattered about his pages everywhere; and many texts are quoted from the Gospels; but all are emptied of their real meaning.

Footnotes