Guru Gobind Singh Ji

Guru Gobind Singh Ji       ~  BY PROF. PURAN SINGH

They of India have not understood Him. Gandhi calls him a "misguided patriot." Men of this world, who wish to comprehend Truth by their own intellectual measures, are forever incapable of understanding the true nature of Inspiration, which is the life-breath of the really great. Whenever they approach such inscrutable personalities, they make but grotesque estimates. After centuries of intellectual advancement, they stand still exactly on the same spot, utterly incapable. In one age to them, Joan of Arc is but a witch and the end of the intellectual justice is to case her in fire. Today the ghost of non-violence is let loose and Guru Gobind Singh is a "misguided patriot." Christ says, "Judge not." Because we are not omniscient nor seers of all the three times – past, present, and future – it is impossible for us to judge truly even common fellow-men like ourselves, in spite of an intimate contact and even identity of our natures and motives. Much more difficult becomes our forming opinions about beings who have in their inner nature, transcended our plane of existence.

The intellectuals who are great, who are famous these days, at best, are but synthetic personalities, the mere laboratory products of the systems of the schools of man-made, mind-born Ethics, and are but toy replicas of the great, whose conduct is spontaneous, whose character is the radiation of the sun.

They are the products of those mysterious cosmic processes, which make the sun and the moon. For the dead toy replicas of the great it becomes physically impossible to analyze the inner motives of the beings of immortal inspiration. All opinions expressed by such lower men about those who live, move and have their being in acceptance of the cosmic inspiration, are as false as the opinion of the clergy who declared Joan of Arc a witch and sentenced her to be burnt alive.

Sword is the symbol of the creative processes of that mysterious incomprehensible Creator-Complex of nature. Nature is not Creation they say, it is spontaneous evolution they say; it is not Being they say, it is Eternal Becoming they say; it is not spiritual they say, it is material and mechanical they say; it is all electrical substance they say; it is not soul they say; but only the insane doubt now that it is a complex. No one view can define it accurately. Guru Gobind Singh sees the flash of the sword in this dark mystery complex. He sings his "Song of Sword" and by its cadence transmutes the miserable wretched people of Punjab, not into temporal kings, a miracle, which even an ordinary worldly man of empire carving ambitions like Sivaji, could perform in transmuting his mercenary soldiers into Peshwas, but into Phula Singh Akalis. Cut these disciples of Guru Gobind Singh as they did cut Bhai Mani Singh, instead of blood, the nectar of inspiration flows from their veins. The name of the Eternal resounds in their bones and as they of the world sawed them asunder, only that glorious cadence (Sat Nam) was in response to the axe strokes. His disciples rose all of a sudden from nowhere, as Superman, who were, as the same time, like the clouds of the sky, raining as they were bidden to rain, and striking down like the bolt of heaven as they were bidden.

Not protest but obedience was their creed. Their protest was one with the protest of the Divine Creator complex, called Hukam by Guru Nanak in Japji, and it shone in the Image of Sword seen by Guru Gobind Singh.

The Khalsa came ready made from Him … that blue-wearing Superman, armed from head to foot wholly dedicated, ready to die – the historian says, as Minerva from Jupiter – a highly explosive personality, showering both nectar and thunder, as the merest tool of the Cosmic Complex.

In human history there is no example of such transcendent inspiration, unless we go and see the personalities imbued with the Bushido spirit of Japan, as transmuted by the spirit of the great Tathagata. I have often said that Guru Gobind Singh created a spiritual Japan in the Punjab out of His spirit and he can be sympathetically understood only by the Bushido spirit of Japan as informed of Buddhism.

Riding His Blue Horse, clad in the robe of the whole starry Heaven, and followed by His Five Horsemen, he goes riding by the doors of His lowly disciples still and as the horses strike the rocks, the sleeping ones awaken still and sing:

O King of Purple eternity,
who loves us,
Who comes and lies with us at,
Night unknown to us,
Comforting us in our distress,
O Weaver of the Crest Jewel of all-Godliness,
all-Humanity,
Come and meet us the peasants of the Punjab.
O Glorious Guru Gobind Singh!
Come ride through our hearts,
Come ride through our eyes.

Guru Gobind Singh is the Indweller of Souls. He is the vision that vitalizes the decaying the finite centers of life with the touch of the Infinite. Name Him and you are transported. Name Him and you ride very death to His Door. Woe be for the day, who, surrendering their soul to the false brilliance of any intellect, the disciples of the Glorious Guru would turn their back on Him – once before in history, they did so. The disciples left Him at Anandpur. But they found no place to go to. Wives denied their husbands, mothers their sons, sisters their brothers – for the Punjabi Sikh woman truly saw there is no life but with Him. What is the world without Him? So they died. So they lived.

There is no standard in the East or in the West by which these intellectuals can form an idea of the inspiration of the Infinite. It was a stream that flowed to Him, which He received within Himself. "I was," said he, "Reluctant to come here on this earth. But I came."My soul is still engulfed in that current of Inspiration-Infinite.

He came and he went. Only the trail of his garment, still shines, the sound of the hoofs of His steed is still audible. Wrapped in that shining garment, listening to that sound, we go daily where He is. This is the religion of His Disciples. Our eyes are red with the glory that He has shed on our paths. And we go on.

His sword waves the lightning flashes in the cloud-filled sky, but it rains after the centuries of oppressing heat.

"Man is the Temple,
Let this flame burn within there,
As the Lamp of the Eternal,
They are my Khalsa,
In whose hearts burns this Inspiration
Of the Infinite, day and night.
The story undimmed,
He is the pure."
(Prof. Puran Singh)

Professor Puran Singh ji (1881-1931)

PROFESSOR PURAN SINGH, poet and scientist, was born on 17 February 1881 at Sarhadd (Abottabad) in a Khatri family (father: Kartair Singh; mother; Parma Devi). His father worked in the revenue department at Salhadd, though their ancestral home was in the village of Dera Kalsa in Rawalpindi district. A strikingly handsome young man, Puran Sirigh passed the high school examination in 1897 from Rawalpindi and his Intermediate examination from the D.A.V. College, Lahore, in 1899. He was still reading for his B.A. when he got a scholarship to study abroad. In April 1900 he proceeded to Japan to specialize in industrial chemistry. He learnt Japanese and German before entering Tokyo University on 28 September 1900. One of his favourite extramural activities at the University was making public lectures, which were usually critical of British rule in India. He expatiated on this theme in a novel that he wrote. He published for some time an English monthly, the Thundering Dawn, which also mainly addressed itself to the theme of British repression in India. Puran Singh completed his education in Japan in September 1903, and returned to India. Before he left for India, he had met the Indian mystic Svami Ram Tirath who had made a deep impression on his mind. Under his influence, Puran Singh had shaved and taken the vows of a sannyasi. His mother travelled to Calcutta to bring him home. But he declined. Ultimately he was persuaded to visit his home to see his ailing sister. He ultimately returned to the householders way. On 4 March 1904 he got married to Maya Devi.

Four crucial events—his Japanese experience, his encounter with the American poet Walt Whitman, his discipleship of Svami Ram Tirath, and his meeting with the Sikh savant Bhai Vir Singh—left permanent marks on his impressionable mind. As a student in Japan, he had imbibed the ethos and aesthetics of a beautiful people. He had been wholly charmed by their ritual and ceremony, industry and integrity. The openness of their nature and the holiness of their heart's responses made him forever a worshipper of life's largeness and generosities. He was greatly influenced by the romantic aestheticism of Okakura Kakuzo, Japanese artist and scholar. Walt Whitman, the American poet, had left a deep impress on his poetics and practice as on his world view. It was in Japan that he came under the spell of Ram Tirath, who regarded Puran Singh as an echo or image of his own self. The power of this spell was so strong that Puran Singh turned a monk. Although he eventually graduated to Sikhism, this was much too profound an experience to be entirely washed out of his consciousness: he subsumed it in the dialectics of his Guru's creed. The meeting with Bhai Vir Singh in 1912 at Sialkot proved the final turn of a spinning soul in search of certitude: it was after this meeting that he regained his lost faith in Sikhism. Perhaps he had strayed to return with greater vigour and conviction; his bursting creative energy had now found its focus and metier.

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Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network

Photo credit: http://hvirk.blogspot.com/2011/07/prof-puran-singh-photos.html