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The caravans of the Sikhs coming from different climes, and different directions and belonging to different castes are on their way to the ‘Pond of Immortality’ where they shall bathe in the sunshine of the Guru. Their eyes are tearing the distances of time to have a glimpse of Him. Guru Arjan Dev goes clad in a single black blanket, after the fashion of the
Punjab peasantry with a repast for the disciples of Guru Nanak. Our mother Ganga, his noble consort, follows him with a. basket of bread on her head. And they both distribute the way-side refreshments to the disciples and with it the Name. The Sikhs go singing to Amritsar and there is seated Guru Arjan Dev. They recognise Him as the devoted peasant who fed them on their way to Amritsar. This sweet spirit of comradeship, in this country of castes, differences, duality and morbid and sick imitations of the ‘Great Renunciation’, so infused by the Guru is unique. The Man is made Sadh Sangat. All saw the Image of the Guru in all hearts. Men disappeared but the Image of the Guru with the angelic beaming faces entranced the eyes of the disciples. And such a Guru lost individual meeting himself in his brothers and sisters, was the Guru’s assembly of gods come on earth. The Guru and the Sikh intermingled and the sweet merging of the individual into the very universe of nature and man — the All becoming the image of One, and the One becoming the image of All — is the spirit of the Guru’s Sadh Sangat. This assembly in His inspiration was unique. Sadh is the one lost, the Sangat is the one gained, as Many as the All. Sadh Sangat, thus, is the mystic body of the Guru. And the State and the Society became one in Him as the individual made infinite. And the Guru dwells in the spirit of this spirit-born Humanity. He has promised His meeting us in the meeting of this rare assembly of gods.

Assuredly we are yet far away from the Golden Temple that sings of the Beautiful.

How disgraceful for us that we call a mere assemblage of un-inspired men a Sadh Sangat!

Let me tell you, one disciple, he or she, if there be, is capable of burning a whole people with love and making them evergreen. And we Sadh Sangat, and yet so inert! Extinguished lamps emit no light. We are wholly wrong in distributing titles to ourselves. We no more go with any original thirst to the Founts of Inspiration. On the contrary, we are nourishing a stupid complacency and deadening our soul thereby and calling a life-long stupor, and indifference to the highest verities of our traditions of inspiration by many ornamental names. So did our Hindu fore-fathers and they sealed up all the fountains of life. We, too, if we rise not to our full moral stature, shall soon become fossils, not Sikhs.

Beware of the magic of Brahmanical philosophic analysis of everything, even the most secret and complex infinites of faith, life and love. It killed them, it shall kill you. Analysis is the opposite pole of feeling. I worship my mother, I love my wife, but what would they be if I wished to know them by analysis!

The pang of separation from the Guru becomes a life long pure sadness, noble, beautiful sorrow of human life in the very breath of the disciples.
O Love I can no more praise Thee.
Thou hast wounded me too deep for song.
I’d rather be sad of Thee, in tears,
For thou art more beautiful than joy.
Wasting away in holy memory of Him is better religion than going to the temples and becoming redundantly glad by a meaningless ceremony. True worship is in the continuous pang for that Glory. Mere flower offering is a formality that kills the serious purpose fulness of love in empty theatricalities. All theatre and theatre-going, therefore, I say, leads us away from the genuine forms of true feeling. Feeling is always new, like the effects of the sky; its one moment is quite different from the next. Renunciation in that particular form as of Lord Buddha, is reality only there: in any other man’s case it ceases to be ‘feeling’, it is only ‘following’. Feeling alone is love, is art, is religion, ‘following’ is of no particular interest to the artistic seekers of That Noble Reality of a personal feeling.

The soul-pure figure of this pang spiritual which makes beauty a new glory everyday, is Rani Rajkor, the art-creation of a true disciple-character by Bhai Vir Singh, the great Sikh poet, in his The Prince Beautiful, written in Punjabi. She is the Sikh heroine. Her love is deep and silent and vital and painfully flourishes in the shade. In the glare it dies; much too Heavenly, much too musical to be announced so profanely. This relation of pangful love is between the Guru and the Sikh. All love has its sacred privacy and this too. In this love, art ceases and the artist grows to be the whole art.

The Song Of The Sikh

“Ah ! Well, let my hair grow long;

I cannot forget the knot He tied on my head;

It is sacred, it is his mark of remembrance.

The Master has bathed me

In the light of suns not yet seen;

There is eternity bound in this tender fragile knot.

I touch the sky when I touch my hair,

And a thousand stars twinkle through the night.

Who says the hair is no more than grass ?

Yet a single hair is a dear remembrance,

An heirloom, a trust, a pledge, a love,

A vow, an inspiration.

My form is but a statue of dumb gratitude

for The knot of Friendship tied by those Kings of Eternity,

The Gurus who came to the Punjab;

The Saviours who were gracious to love me,

and Made me a home in the Realm of Eternal Beauty.”

Puran Singh

Extract from Hail Hair !
by Dr. Birendra Kaur

Man is weak.  He is, when sincere, but a pilgrim to the Golden Temple.  And the path of the pilgrim is full of difficulties.  Sometimes hunger, theirst and nakedness and at other impertinent desires dim his faith and bend it beyond the limits of elasticity.  Faith breaks, the vision is lost, the nectar of naming Him is spilled.  Heavy darkness settles on his eyes, his limbs grow weary, his heart faints.  And the disciple is as dead.

The Sikhs with Guru Gobind Singh in the fort of Anandpur would not obey him, for the siege of the enemy was long and unbreakable and the Master desired to hold on till the last.  In His desire was victory.  But the disciples would not obey Him.  They deserted Him.  Had they obeyed Him, all would have been different.  But the great devotion for the Master was flaming in the peasant mud-huts of the Punjab.  More than man, the Sikh women were the same passionate love with Him, as the Mary and Martha of Palestine with the Messiah, in the olden times.  Doors were closed against the deserters.  There was no love for them after they left Him at Anandpur.  All loving hearts were shut against them.  But this act of the noble Sikh women kindled the extinguished hearts of the confused and weak disciples.  The forty martyrs of our history shall ever stand peerless in the glory of self-sacrifice for Him.  You remember when the sun went down, He went amongst the wounded and blessed them.  One of the dying disciples asked not for life, asked not for kingdoms, but only begged that all his brothers who deserted Him and gave it in writing to Him, might be soul-knitted with the Guru, with the Glory of the Infinite and that the document might be torn.  Guru Gobind Singh tears the document and forgives all–‘Retie the Broken Ties’ is one of our most stirring national songs.

 You remember how Bhai Buddha — The Brother Ancient — got the title. He saw his mother kindling a fire. And he saw that the smaller twigs caught fire first and the longer ones, a little later. And unlike us, the young men of to-day, who choose to live dull lives, mostly uninterested and unconcerned, that young man was much too sensitive. As the leaves of the sensitive plant are to the touch, so the little boy was sensitive to the touch of wonder. He wondered why the smaller twigs caught fire first. He was a genius. What is genius but that which responds with the sensitiveness of the sensitive plant to the Light of Heaven? He though his mother would go to see Guru Nanak seated under the shade of a tree. Seeing Guru Nanak is like touching the fire of Heaven. Seeing Him is to be kindled like a star from a star. He thought his mother would follow, but it was he who must first catch that gleam and burn with it.

With that inward realization of wonder, the young man did go to Guru Nanak.

At the sight of the Guru, he found he was wholly inflammable. His flesh and bones caught fire. The young man was called by the Guru. He heard his story and the Guru gave him the title of ‘The Brother Ancient’ — so young and yet so ancient in wisdom. Bhai Buddha is the ‘Brother’ — ‘The Sikh’.

No historian or biographer can tell us what happened then to Bhai Buddha. Ordinary history gives corpses of events, it registers accurately the dead facts which are mostly wrong. History has no testimony for our soul. You may study a friend of yours for a long time and yet find all your conclusions about his character upset by stumbling over a kind act of his to you, and that one silent act of his may discover to you that he is your Messiah. History and biography are both lies, so far as these matters are concerned. Who can report the soul correctly, which, till to-day remains unrevealed and undescribed, for it is always a surprise and a revelation. Such matters are beyond our analyzing intellects But mark the effects. The whole life of Bhai Buddha thenceford is a marvel. Living on a few grassy acres near Amritsar, with a few cows grazing by his side quietly, the ‘Brother Ancient’ lives self-enclosed, immersed wholly in the Guru. His lips pipe His Name. He fills himself with glory. The firmament revolves as a torch in his hand in the worship of the Beloved. His bosom throbs like that of a bird that trills a song. His hairs stand on end with ecstasy. His eyes are red, half-closed, rapt, vision-bound, wonder-bound, happy like the full-blown flower, and all so beautiful. And the continuousness of his kindled passion, shaking his day and night with joy, makes of him a radiant presence, a persuasive silence, a soothing influence, a peace incomparable shedding joy all around like the cloud, like the sun, like the moon, like the shade of a tree.

He lives in the wilderness, naming him. No heroic woman ever loved man more passionately than Bhai Buddha loved Guru Nanak. Constancy of love needs silent heroism. Intensity of pleasure comes to all animals during many a turn of life in this world. The sight of a woman may give that exquisite thrill ; the finding of a treasure by a poor man might give him a foretaste of the paradise, the poet may feel inspired for a rare moment at the sight of the beautiful universe, but nothing comes near the grandeur of the sublime passion of Bhai Buddha who lives like a whole universe in himself. The exterior expression of this ecstatic life is stopped owing to the continuous imbibing of the Great Reality. The language has lost all unnecessary words ; the sound has dropped the inanities of thought, the whole flesh has become the mind and having grown translucent has the opalescence of a mixed sheen of pearls and rubies. Bhai Buddha’s humanity has turned into daily food for the Divine Flower that has burst in him. Bhai Buddha is burning like a lamp at that altar of Guru Nanak. Silent burning is the only artistic expression of such an infinite kind of disciple-personality — such was the reaction of Bhai Buddha towards Guru Nanak.

Perhaps you might be led to think that, like the ancient Hindus, the ‘Brother Ancient’ had become a Saint, whose main concern was the contemplation of the pure, the Absolute, the Brahman.  The type of blissful humanity, the Brother Ancient represents, is quite new. The bliss of Guru Nanak’s Sikh waves in him like a vast ocean.  But it is ever in motion, and yet wholly at rest in itself.  The ineffable bliss of remembrance of Him has an infinite pang which it nestles within itself.  This pang of love is manifested in the life of the disciple in different ways.  It might take the shape of absolute forgiveness of a sinner, for in this acute pang, man is much too sweet for any revenge which, in many forms, is known on this earth as justice.  The vision of justice in the self-consciousness of the disciple is forgiveness ; there can be no other justice between man and man in the domain of discipleship, where love reigns and never hatred.

It might take the form of total self-sacrifice in peace or in war, or it might be content to live as beautiful as the lotus, doing without knowing, the greatest service to life that Pure Beauty can render.

It might take the form of a political revolution against tyranny, as it once did in the time of Guru Har Gobind and Guru Gobind Singh.

The bliss of the disciple is restless, with the human pain which moved Lord Buddha to compassion.

The Brother Ancient realizes his knowledge of sorrow when Guru Har Gobind went to Gwalior and was for a long time absent from Amritsar.  Amritsar was always holy to him because of His presence, but it become holier to him in an unspeakable anguish of spearation from Him.  In His absense, the Sikh worshippers came and went, but the Brother Ancient not seeing the Guru was restless, as fish out of water.  The Brother Ancient lights a torch as the night falls and goes round the temple singing his pang of separation, in acute remembrance of Him, as if He had come to listen to the disciple in the Golden Temple.  And He did come. Did He not tell Bhai Buddha on his return how he heard his love cries, every evening while at Gwalior ?

The Guru remains and transmutes the Torches of Separation, of the burning pain, into the Torches of Union, of the burning joy.  The colour of the Temple changes.  The Brother Ancient returns to his cloister and is mute again, happy like a child with the cows grazing on the turf.

 We see the very pang seeking to cool itself in a stream of burning lead, the disciples baring their breasts to bullets, to swords, and to bayonets.  No snow can cool it down, nor can rivers wash it away.  Death in His Name offers the cup of sweet companionship with Him through an intense ecstasy.  Painde Khan, the beloved sikh of Guru Har Gobind, tuurns a rebel, a traitor.  He comes to fight with the Master.  The Master allows the disciple the chance of giving him the first blow.  But Painde Khan fails.  he cannot give Him the cut of the combat.  The Master’s sword then wounds the disciple deep.  Painde Khan falls from his horse.  the sun is burning overhead, the sands are hot below.  The Master lifts up his disciple, puts his head in His lap and shades the forgetful Painde Khan by His large shield.  And the Master asks him, “Painde Khan, Thou art dying.  Say thy Kalma now”.

Painde Khan, the disciple, wakes up and says with his tremling lips, “My Kalma is Thy sword-cut, O Beloved ! Thy word, my salvation.  How intenseful blissful is such death at Thy hands, O Lord of Love !”

This deep personal love that coppices again and again even when cut, is the symptom of discipleship and it comes to one when he is called the Guru, ‘The Sikh’.

Our life is much influenced by the material attractions and we are least inclined to spiritual progress–the real motive of our life. If one is absorbed in spiritual trance, the worldly attachments vanish away and spiritual pleasures provide solace to the mind and soul. Though the spiritual experiences cannot be described in day-to-day human language, there are some clues showered by the exalted souls for the benefit of humanity.

The Guru came to this planet, to bless us with those clues and gave new life to the corpses with His spiritual touch. The present book is an unparalleled account of this resurrection. It provides a spiritual swing to the reader. The author Prof. Puran Singh (1881-1931 AD) was not a professional writer or an ordinary scholar. He himself was a mystic par-excellence. The spiritual experiences of course, cannot be shared by any ordinary writer, who has never treaded this path. The present writing is really an expression by an enlightened soul. The reader gets a severe stimulus on his heart and aspires to fly on spiritual heights.

The present book was first published in 1928 and it helped many a times to awaken the dead souls. This work has not lost its relevance even today and need to reprint this marvelous work for felt by all quarters. We see the fulfilment of our long-cherished desire in reprinting this book for the benediction of strife-torn humanity.

— Publishers

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