Manmukh to Gurmukh: the Guru’s concept of Evolution of Man
Here, it is necessary to state the Manmukh-Gurmukh concept which is essential for understanding the Sikh worldview. As the Gurus say, over millions of years life has evolved into man from a tiny speck of life. The Guru says, “For several births (you) were a mere worm, for several births, an insect, for several births a fish and an antelope”, “After ages you have the glory of being a man”! “After passing, through myriads of species, one is blest with the human form”.-~ “God created you out of a drop of water and breathed life in you. He endowed you with the light of reason, discrimination and wisdom”. “O man, you are supreme in God’s creation; now is your opportunity, you may fulfill or not fulfill your destiny”. At its present stage of development, man is without doubt better equipped than other animals, in so far as he has a higher sense of discrimination. But as an ego-conscious being, he is still an animal, being a Manmukh. This implies that whatever be human pretensions, man is basically and organically a self-centered being. His psyche is governed by egoistic consciousness, that being his centre of awareness, control and propulsion. Because of his present inherent limitations of coconsciousness, it is virtually impossible for man to avoid conflict, aggression, and wars. But the Gurus clearly hold out hope for man. There are four stages of evolution or development. The Guru says, “God created first, Himself, then Aaumen, third, Maya (multifarious things and beings) and fourth, the next higher stage of the Gurmukh who lives truthfully”. The Gurus clearly say that it is human destiny to reach the fourth stage and to meet God, or to be a Gurmukh, or one who is in tune with the fundamental Reality or Universal Consciousness, God, Naam, or Love. His ideal is not merger in God or salvation, or union as an end in itself. Being the instrument of, or in touch with God’s Altruistic Consciousness, he is spontaneously benevolent, compassionate, creative and loving. It is very important to note that the Gurmukh or Superman is not a quietist, he ‘lives truthfully’. He lives as did the ten Gurus. For, Guru Nanak, was called just a Gurmukh. This is the next higher stage of evolution towards which life is striving and not towards darkness and death as materialist scientists would have us believe. Nor does Sikhism accept any concept of the basic sinfulness or fall of man from grace. It only indicates the constitutional weakness, immaturity or imperfection of man at its present stage of the evolutionary process or development. Hence, it gives us an ideology of optimism and hope, invoking and exhorting us to make moral effort.
Survey of higher Religions
Before we draw our conclusions, let us make a brief survey of some religious ideologies of the world and find the place of Sikhism among them. There are four clear religious ideologies that are current today.
Dichotomous Religions
First is the category of religious systems like Buddhism, Jainism, Nathism, Vaisnavism and Vedanta, in which there is clear dichotomy between the spiritual life and the empirical life. Monasticism, sanyasa, otherworldliness, celibacy, Yogic meditation and ahimsa are the common but important features of this category. They hold out no hope for man, except by withdrawal from life and
Yogic or one-point meditation. In each case, it is a path of personal salvation without any involvement in the socio-political affairs of man. Practically, all the Indian religions, except Sikhism, belong to this category.
Judaism
Second is Judaism which has a long and chequred history. Basically, it is a system in which there Is no dichotomy between the religious life and the empirical life of man. Prophet Moses, who got the revelation, was both a religious and political leader. His Torah or his Commandments and laws prescribe and govern the entire gamut of the spiritual and temporal life of the Jews. It is a system that prescribes rules governing the conduct of prayer, rituals, sacrifices and their socio-political life. The renowned Hillel when asked to explain the 613 commandments of the Torah, replied, “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbours. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary, go and learn it”-° In short, it is basically a life-affirming system. It makes no distinction between the spiritual and the socio-political life of man. The Torah governs every aspect of it. As to the means of resistance, Judaism recommends the use of force by saying, “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth”, and indicates rules for a righteous fight.°’ But, over its long history including the period of prophets, this aspect of its principle has to an extent been altered, or changed at least by some sects of the community. At the time of the Babylonian attack (Sixth Century B.C.) on Palestine, prophet Jeremiah strongly recommended nonresistance or pacifism. He asserted that the attack was God’s punishment to the Jews for their non-observance of His Laws.°® His assertion was something like Mahatma Gandhi’s statement that the Bihar earthquake was a punishment to the Hindus for their practice of untouchability. However, over the centuries thereafter, many religious sects of Jews like Essenes, Kabbalists, Hasidists, Therapeutics,” and even some Pharisees accepted the principle of non-resistance, pacifism, withdrawal and otherworldliness. Even monastic and celibate cults appeared among Jews, discarding both the world and the use of force. This important change, in a basic religious principle, we believe, came about in this religion in later parts of its history, when Judaism was unable to cope with challenges sociopolitical environment, and their religious fervour had been exhausted. Practically, all these otherworldly sects appeared after the destruction of the First Temple and the fall of Jerusalem, when thousands of Jews were driven out as exiles and slaves to Babylonia. We wish to stress that these fundamental changes in Judaic ideology, including otherworldly or monastic sects, appeared only during the lean period of Jewish history. This happened about eight centuries after the revelation of Moses, and after the hey days of Jewish life in the times of David and Solomon. But, it is very significant that despite the presence of somewhat pacifist or otherworldly cults and sects in Judaism, and despite about 2500 years of suffering and travail, the idea of Zionism, a virtual revival of earlier non-pacifist ideals, strongly reappeared in Judaism in the last century. And it is an important fact that Einstein, who says that his life was spent ‘between politics and equations’ was a staunch Zionist. So much so, that when Israel was formed he was offered its presidency. However, apart from this apparent doctrinal ambivalence in its ideology, Judaism is a highly exclusive religion, not quite universal in its character, affinities and approach.
Christianity
The Judaic heritage of Christianity is undoubted. As in Judaism, in Christianity too, there is in principle no dichotomy between the spiritual lite and the empirical life of man. For, Christ emphasizes both loving God with all one’s heart, and loving one’s neighbours as oneself. But like Buddha, he also emphasis’s the pacifist principles, ‘resist not evil’ and ‘turn the left cheek if hit on the right’. Religious history demonstrates that pacifist religions almost invariably become otherworldly, even if they were life-affirming in the beginning. Because of their religious pacifism, the Christians declined to take up service in the Roman army. In fact, historians like Gibbon and Sir James Frazer have mentioned Christian otherworldliness as one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. It is obvious that Christianity which, like Judaism, was a religion of householders, showed, by the beginning of the 4th century AD, clear monastic trends.” Increasingly, monasteries and nunneries appeared as a significant development in the Christian religion. This life of monasticism, asceticism and nunneries led, on the one hand, to otherworldly quietist mysticism, and, on the other hand, to corruption and malpractices in the Catholic Church.
Consequent to this schism in the life of the Christian Church, ultimately arose the Reformation, causing a major blow to the supremacy of the Church and its role as the guiding moral force in the life of the Christian society. Lutheran and Calvinist reforms not only shattered the universal character of the Church, but also brought about its subordination to the national State. In addition, because of Luther’s leanings towards the feudal princes, he took a very hostile and feudalistic stand against the rights of the peasantry. This landslide in the fortunes of the Church caused its gradual waning as a major moral influence in the socio-political life of the Christian societies. After the rise of science, which was considered to be the new elixir, it came to be believed that it would, in course of time, cure most human ills. The net result is that in the last 300 years, Renaissance, scientism, empiricism and secularism have virtually eliminated religion from the moral life of man in the West.
Toynbee says, “This transfer of allegiance from the Western Christian Church to parochial Western secular state was given a positive form borrowed from the Graeco-Roman civilization by the Renaissance”. “This avowed worship of parochial states was by far the most prevalent religion in the Christian society”. Since the loss of supremacy of religion in the Christian society, Western life has lost its moral moorings. Nationalism, communism and _ individualism have been the unstable off springs of this broken home. “Together with Darwinism, secularism and positivism, they have dehumanized the Western culture, reducing liberalism to a self-serving, highly competitive individualism”. By relegating religion to the background and having lost the moral springs of the Western culture, either utilitarian ethics has been accepted as an expedient substitute or a reductionist search has been made to find appropriate ethical elements in the life of the animals, or in the material base of man which is considered to be its fundamental constituent. And this search has finally come to the dismal conclusion that all ethical life is ‘a defence mechanism’ or a ‘reaction formation’ to the impacts of the environment. After the Second World War, a third of the population of the world was living under the Communist system. As the century is closing, these countries find that despite the myth of dialectical movement and synthesis, the system has been unable to make any synthetic values or devise a system of ethics which is able to maintain cohesion within these societies. And it is the existence of this moral vacuum that made the Foreign Secretary of the Soviets proclaim that ‘universal values should have priority over class, group or other interests’.©° The warning remained unheeded, and the Russian Empire has collapsed, purely because of its inability to build internal cohesion. At the ethical plane, this decries, in a way, the validity of Darwinism, and its struggle for existence, and Marxism with its dialectical movement of class struggle. It involves equal condemnation of economic wars, cut-throat competition, consumerism and increasing disparities in Capitalist societies.
From the point of internal cohesion, the position in the Capitalist countries of the West is no better. Mounting number of divorces, broken homes, drug addiction, alcoholism, and individualism have created a situation in North America, that the Christian Church raised a strong voice saying that Secularism was a common danger and needed to be eliminated as a social force, and that Christianity should seek the cooperation of other religions to combat its evil influence. Christianity had given to the empirical life in the West its cohesion, strength and élan; the divorce of religion from politics and the empirical life, has left Secularism a barren institution without any hope of a creative future. This is the tragedy both of Communism and Capitalism. It is this tragedy with its dark future that the North American Churches wanted to avoid. But in the temper of the times, this voice of sanity was drowned in an exhibition of suicidal egoism of the European Churches who felt that “Secularization, not secularism, is the primary process. It is a process in which some of the values of Christian faith have been put into a secular framework, bringing about a powerful force which is destroying all old ideas. Hence, secularization is an ally, because it will destroy Hinduism, Islam and other forms of what they considered to be superstition. So we should ally ourselves with secularization and see it as the work of God”. Later, it was again repeated: “We do not feel that we have anything lacking. And so we are opposed to dialogue unless it is for the sake of testifying to Jesus Christ”. “That was it. Then they passed a resolution saying that under no circumstances should multi-religious dialogues be undertaken because multi-religious dialogues put Christianity on the same level as other religions, and this is unacceptable. So because the European Christians had that point of view, the World Council of Churches has not been able to engage in multi-religious dialogues for quite some time.
This is the state of affairs of the moral life of man in Western countries that lead the dominant culture of our times. Recently, however, some priests in Latin America have raised a voice for an integrated and composite culture of Liberation Theology, invoking the Bible in support of a revolutionary struggle to help the poor. Father C. Torres states, “The Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin’. Theologian, Molt Mann says, “Political theology wants to awaken political consciousness in every treatise of Christian theology. Understood in this way, it is the premise that leads to the conclusion that, while there may be naive or politically unaware theology, there can be no apolitical theology”. He concludes, “The memory of Christ crucified compels us to a political theology”.” But these are still minority voices in the Christian world.
Islam
Islam started with a full blooded combination between the spiritual life and the empirical life of man. It is this combination that swept everything before it and created an epoch which is unrivalled in its achievements. It is a religious system and culture which is, in many respects, more comprehensive and unified than the parochial culture of the city states of Greece. It is hardly complimentary to the Christian world of the West that while today it seeks to fashion many of its cultural institutions on the basis of Greek classical models, yet these, but for the interlude of the Islamic epoch which preserved most of the Greek thought, would have been lost to posterity. Never was the concept of human brotherhood advanced, in thought and deed, on a scale as during this epoch. It speaks volumes for the liberalism of Islamic culture that the hey days of the Judaic literature, philosophy and thought synchronize with the countries and periods of Islamic rule. Not only were some of the Jewish classics written, but Maimonides, the king of Judaic philosophy, also flourished and wrote during the Muslim rule. As against it, under Christian rulers the Jews suffered periodical massacres, persecution and the segregated life of the ghetto. Admittedly, the Muslim rulers, were by comparison quite liberal towards the followers of other religions. Islamic contribution to the scientific thought of the day was significant. But far more important is the contribution of men like Al Qushairi, Al Ghazali and Arbi to the religious thought of man.
There is, however, little doubt that mystic quietism and otherworldliness of Sufis is a growth that appeared during the time of later Caliphs, when they indulged in luxurious and un-Islamic living. It has happened in the case of Judaism and of Islam, both whole-life religions, that in times when religiously sensitive souls found it difficult to face the social or sociopolitical challenges, they withdrew themselves into the shell of quietism, otherworldliness, monasticism and asceticism. Sufi sects appeared all over the Muslim world, but they never posed a challenge to the oppression and misrule of the Muslim emperors or kings. In this respect, the Jewish prophets were quite bold in their criticism of Jewish rulers, including David and Solomon.
It is very significant, and shows the lofty spiritual status of the Sikh Gurus and the basic ideological affinity between the two religions, that a Sufi saint like Pir Buddhu Shah thought and sacrificed two of his sons for the cause of Guru Gobind Singh.”” But it was the Sikh Gurus and not the Sufis who challenged the growing Mughal tyranny. This instance demonstrates that although as an Organisation, Sufis had become otherworldly and failed to confront the major challenge of societal oppression in the Muslim empires, yet when the Sikh Gurus had actually taken up the challenge and the ideological struggle was on, the Sufi saint made it clear that, considering the tenets of Islam, on which side should be the sympathies of a pious person.
There are, however, some scholars like Iqbal and Abdu’s Salam who believe that like the otherworldliness of the Christians, as in the case of the Roman Empire, Sufis also became a significant cause of the decline of the Muslim cultural supremacy in the world. For, there is considerable truth in Dr Mohammad Iqbal’s couplet: “Whether it is the facade of a great republic, or the domain of a glorious empire, if its polity is divorced of the religious component, the system is reduced to sheer Changezian barbarity and tyranny”. Thoughtful and saner elements in the Muslim world seem to be disillusioned with the bankrupt Western Secularism, and are trying to revert to a reformed and composite culture of Islam.
