Jul
29
The Spirit Born People
July 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
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.
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