tSingh

Mekhane'ch Jannat you've missed a fundamental aspect of Gurmat Sidhant, Parmatma as saguna viraat svarup ishvar ki maya braham. That is who upasana and ardas is directed toward, the 'tuhi', and that exists through hukam. Without that you are left with little more than vijnanvaadi drishtsrisht buddhist sidhant...and without which a lot of the writings of the Gurus, which are directed toward Hari, end up being redundant or relative expressions of truth.

Did you actually read the article 'silence'? In the second paragraph it makes a long portracted statement about the great tragedy of bluestar for Sikhs, inc the delhi riots. The Hindustan Times newspaper is about as hindu as the guardian is christian...its india's leftist socialist newspaper produced the south rather than delhi, and is also the most intellectual daily. The Moghuls coming to destroy Anandpur Sahib was desecration, but if the Singhs had hidden in the Guru's house, crapping and peeing in his darbar, buckets full of excretion in the holiest of shrines, surely that is desecration?! All in an attempt to invoke another 'ghallughara' from the indian army, deliberately seeking the army to destroy the guru's ghar...now for me that is about as great a desecration as it gets. to USE our Guru's ghar in that way is very very questionnable.

hehe. thats a nice site, it has quite a few udasis on there too if you put in kumbh mela and look for the photos by frederic someone or other, including a procession one and another of one of the udasi akhara sri mahants (on a mobile)

Gurfateh, a good photo. I've not met these mahapurush formally, but i think thats Mahant Paal Singh Ji in the bhagva, and furthest left is Mahant Santokh Singh Ji of Paldi pind. The others i can't see clearly enough. This is at allahabad (near the nirmal chauni) last year. Where did you find this photo? That sentence you quote is a bit hammy. Basically, they are there for prachar, but also for a bit of interaction (Sri Mahant gets invited to other programmes by other groups and speaks, some of the Udasis and Nirmalay visit each other and others). I've read of one case (way back in the day) when a nirmala sought out a jivanmukt sannyasi (of no apparent affiliation to a samprday) as a new gurdev and wandered the himalaya with him for a few years. It was also used as an oppurtunity for the main players to agree on certain things, like for example Mahant Ganesha Singh being directed to compose his history of the nirmalas - Itihas Nirmal Bhekh, so it serves a number of purposes. the nirmalay and udasis have been attending every kumbh for a very long time. the nirmalay set up the panchayti akhara as a way of better organising themselves at each kumbh location (hence there are panchayti akhara deras at ujjain, nasik, allahabad and of course haridvar). I can't remember the earliest attendance, but it goes back to the 1700s. I presume Ustad Niddar Singh Nihang would know more about this than I, but the naga sadhus (juna akhara) were established by the great scholar Svami Madhusudan Sarasvati, author of the very technical advaitsiddhi (one of the earliest texts translated into braj by a nirmala) as a martial order of sadhus to defend against moghul hostilities back when. There is one story about Svami Madhusudan's actions which implies some form of conflict with the moghuls of the day in and around mathura. From what I've seen they no longer have those martial traditions, but you'll find lots of photos of them naked smeared in ash sporting a talwar, or even in one i've seen with a kamarkasa, a kataar and a narsinha.

singho, i sincerely apologise if you took my comments as a personal attack on your friend. you didn't read it properly, there is no personal attack in there. i thought i had put my point clearly, i haven't clearly enough so i apologise for not spelling it out more literally.

well said unbreakable. surely the purport of this article is that they feel sikhi is most materialist of all religions? its a shame that so many attempts at lauding sikhi come down to questionnable arguments about it being more scientific or the most compatible with modern western liberal democracy (a la 'the man in blue')...since both miss the whole point of what sikhi is! 'the flower is beautiful because it is beautiful'. Rather than this kind of stuff = 'the flower is beautiful because it is the one that most people in this town think it is beautiful right now' or 'the flower is beautiful because it is the one that fetches the best price at the market'. both are flawed arguments.

...as in the coptic tradition generally. I'm sure there are recordings on line.

that statement about the udasis was made by the then bahadur singh, which, typically, was a purely personal one-off incident he witnessed during his brief trip to punjab. he generalised it into a definitive institutional characteristic of a a 500 yr old tradition! no, udasis don't recite gurbani like greek orthodox monks (with a drone over which another recites), and there is no such thing as an udasi school of recitation. the only thing that is possibly distinctive about udasi recitation (compared to other sikhs) is when they recite udasi sanskrit salokas with the standard melody/metre (C-D-E-D-E-F-E-D-E-D-C...etc). i've seen a fair few udasis, and of those who do actively recite gurbani, i've never heard anything like what he mentioned back then...(don't get me wrong, i love greek orthodox chant, and even went to meteora a few years back for orthodox chant in the monasteries - and the chant of the coptic church is also fascinating for the language and style of recitation).

please 'patronise' away, always better to be safe than sorry, and i can be quite thick.

Ah well done Kam, i thought i'd read it recently! Shaheediyan ji, I wasn;t thinking of 'nanak nirmal panth chalaya', (which adorns just about every nirmala poster/publication ever!)

There's one in uggardanti bani, but i'm sure i've seen it elsewhere too, possibly in something by bhai gurdas ji.

oops www.dhudikeinfo.com

Another interesting website...www.dhudikinfo.com Like most Punjabi villages, you've got your sufi dargah, nirmala dera (Ucha Dera Sahib) and udasi dera (dera baba bhoran wale). What's interesting here is that according to Gyani Balwant Singh Kothaguru, Mahant Suchala Singh Ji Nirmala, the gurbhai of Mahant Sher Singh, was born into a muslim julaha (weaver) family in badhnikalan pind also in moga district. He is said to have excelled in katha of Sri Guru Granth Sahib and Suraj Prakash.

...of baba harnam singh ji

and there is a photo of him (which i saw on tv, although i was later told that you're not supposed to see it until you've done the full yatra of other nanaksar itihasik asthans or something)

An Udasin ashram in west bengal, but take a look at the image above the murti of baba sri chand!

I'm sure thats not true, although i once went to a big namdhari smagam and all i got was that strange purple stuff those who don't drink caffeine have (ayurvedic-ish mix of stuff). not even chaa can bring ekta.

that is very sad news for all of us

it unites us all...as long as it hasn't got meat in (goodbye nihangs), mirch or masala (goodbye satogunis) or makhan (goodbye 3HO) or caffeine in the chaa (goodbye namdharis) or served in steel thalis (goodbye 'bibeki' AKJ) or on the floor (goodbye forward looking committee vale), etc. surely the most divisive issue ever!

yep sewapanthis and udasis

nirvikalap being the end of the triputi of perciever, perception and percieved...only undifferentiated pure consciousness. the shunyavaadi void is the opposite to this state in the sense that this is the eternal, unchanging satchitanand (eternal, consciousness, bliss), i.e. nirguna parmatma. the word void has been used by Guru Maharaj to describe pure consciousness only. sehaj smadhi i'd taken to be the same thing. smadhi marks the end of jap (vritti, mind events), nididhyasana is profound contemplation, smadhi is beyond that, so i can't see how it is constant jap...but i may be wrong. i took sehaj smadh to be emphasising the spontaneous 'nadari' that causes nirvikalap smadhi leading to jivanmukti when one has become pavittar. hope that helps

its a very adhyatamic composition which you get in older nitnem gutkay and is traditionally read on sangraand. It works through each akhar while teaching sidhant...a sample of which is; Oankar sarab prakashi Aatam sudh akrai avinashi ees jeev mai bhed n janon saadh chor sabh braham pachanon there are a couple of nirmala steeks on this that i've read about, but never seen. I'd imagine they'd be pretty good knowing its contents. I'm not sure if Paintis akhri turns up in the very extended praan sangali or not. the gutka i've got has a bit of maryada with it too including reading it 108 times in the third pehar. if you need it for your book shop, i'm sure dtf have it, its one of the small cheap CSJS ones published along the lines of 'barah maha and puranmashi' by some gyani. interesting that someone asked about it. ask them where they heard about it from.

There is no such thing as a 'mainstream line' when it comes to lineages - a gurdev has a few shish, each goes on to become a gurdev, has a few more shish...but since the five nirmalas from kashi were put under the charge of bhai dya singh ji and bhai dharam singh ji, and considering that the nirmalay were much fewer in number initially, the parampras all eventually whittle down to one of those two panj pyaras.

all of them apart from nanaksar are sub-lineages of the broader bhai dya singh lineages within the nirmala samprday (while the other broader lineages are from bhai dharam singh). All follow the same parampra down to baba karam singh ji hoti mardan. Nanaksar has a link to the nirmalay via sant harnam singh and sant vadhava singh, the vidyagurus of baba nand singh ji, hence sants like baba ghala singh ji and baba ram singh ji being close to nirmal panchayti akhara nirmalas.

Since some people have been debating the old sehajdhari question again... here's a couple of websites that have been around for a while, by sehajdhari (possibly gristhi) Udasi Mahants still performing prachar of Gurmat to sindhi sehajdharis/hindus; www.darbarsahibhalani.org www.chidakashitrimurti.com I especially like the recording of the ardas at Darbar Halani http://www.darbarsahibhalani.org/bhajans/1%20-%20Ardas.mp3 the udasin have loads of websites on the web