The message of Guru Nanak, as it emerges from a closer study of his compositions, is that of a creed that is as rational as it is universal. It steers clear of ambiguities and circumventions; and its fundamentals have been spelt out so precisely as to be almost in the nature of maxims.
Since Guru Nanak views God as Karta Purakh (the Sole Creator), the Lord's unicity and boundless benevolence embraces all Creation. The Brotherhood of Man is a natural corollary to this view of the Supreme Master. Man's social commitment, with the consequent negation of a life of asceticism and renunciation is thus a very vital element of the Sikh view of life. Also, it, thus, lends it a rare catholicity of approach.
All this runs contrary to the approach of Siddhas and Yogis, who chose to shun the life of normal householders and sought to go in for a vast variety of esoteric practices often cumbersome and devoid of any real significance to the life of people at large. What the Yogis and Siddhas professed to acquire were super natural powers which they used more often for striking awe in the minds of the people than doing anything worth the name to ameliorate their lot. Guru Nanak's Siddha Goshti brings out the futility of their approach with a verve. Guru Nanak's message, noted for its clarity and directness needs to be re-capitulated and re-emphasized.
During the days of my association with Professor G.S. Randhawa, when he was busy recasting and revamping his, now, monumental work, Japu Ji, I was seized with a keen desire to prepare something in English on similar lines. When I mooted this idea to him, he with his usual positive approach, welcomed it and encouraged me to go ahead. I selected Guru Nanak's Siddha Goshti for the purpose. Later, he had the project duly approved and assigned to me.
The Siddha Goshti, like the Japu Ji, is one of the most im- portant compositions of Guru Nanak. It propounds the Sikh spiritual path as against the Yogis' who were interested more in establishing their hegemony over the gullible people by pretending to possess occult powers, rather than to teach them any fruitful path of enriching their lives, spiritual or temporal. The path they advocated was of penance and self-deprival of the valid pleasures of life. It is this attitude of theirs that this great work seeks to correct.
Apart from its concision of expression, the Goshtipresents great difficulty in the decipherment of Yogic terms that have, in the course of several centuries accumulated many shades around them and strayed far from the Classical Yoga concepts. As a result the same term meant one thing to one expounder and another to the other and, very often, something altogether different, to the different sects of the yogis themselves. The sum total of all this is that its decipherment and rendering into a foreign tongue springing from an altogether different milieu, presents great difficulty.
SIGNIFICANCE
Whereas Japu Ji, the quintessence of Sikh thought, un- folds the fundamentals of Sikh metaphysics and delineates ways and means for the individual human soul to seek re- union with the Universal Soul, the Siddha Goshti spells out further details of some concepts of Guru Nanak. It brings out effectively the futility of the practices of karma-kandis, parti- cularly the yogis who lay much store by Hatha-yoga. It advo- cates the path of Sahaj-yoga based on nam-simran, the ulti- mate object of which is the creation of the ideal man, or Gurmukh of the Sikh parlance. In the course of the exposition of the true path, many a concept and practices of the Yogic cult have been spelt out vis-a-vis Gurmati, the Sikh doctrines.
GOSHTI-AS A LITERARY GENRE
The expression goshti itself stems from the Sanskrit root gau. When suffixed by shiha or shitha, it implies 'a cow pen', i.e., a place where cows retire and chew the cud. Metaphori- cally, it has come to mean 'a debate', 'a dialogue', or 'a disputation'. It is a literary genre that had been very much in vogue in ancient India. Its use can be traced back to the Yama- Yami dialogue of the Rig Veda, to the Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita and other classics, such as the Yoga Vasishta and even Mahabharata. The form was popular even among the Greeks of yore. Symposia or dialogues in Plato's Republic are an instance.
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