scribed, the
numbers often run into scores. But either their differences are based
on indifferent matters of detail in the cult and religious practice;
or the new sect is distinguished from the old simply by its endeavor
to make for greater holiness or purity as sub-reformers of older
sects. For all the sects appear to begin as reformers, and later to
split up in the process of re-reformation.

Two general classes of devotees, besides these, remain to be spoken
of. The Sanny[=a]sin, 'renouncer,' was of old a Brahman ascetic.
Nowadays, according to Wilson, he is generally a Civaite mendicant.
But any sect may have its Sanny[=a]sins, as it may have its
V[=a]ir[=a]gins, 'passionless ones'; although the latter name
generally applies to the Vishnuite ascetics of the South.

Apart from all these sects, and in many ways most remarkable, are the
sun-worshippers. All over India the sun was (and is) worshipped,
either directly (as to-day by the Sauras),[91] or as an incarnate
deity in the form of the priest Nimba-[=a]ditya, who is said to have
arrested the sun's course at one time and to be the sun's
representative on earth. Both Puranic authority and inscriptional
evidence attest this more direct[92] continuance of the old Vedic
cult. Some of the finest old temples of India, both North and South,
were dedicated to the sun.

DEISTIC REFORMING SECTS.

We have just referred to one or two reforming sects that still hold to
the sectarian deity. Among these the M[=a]dhvas, founded by (Madhva)
[=A]nandat[=i]rtha, are less Krishnaite or R[=a]maite than
Vishnuite,[93] and less Vishnuite than deist in general; so much so
that Williams declares they must have got their precepts from
Christianity, though this is open to Barth's objection that the
reforming deistic sects are so located as to make it more probable
that they derive from Mohammedanism. Madhva was born about 1200 on the
western coast, and opposed Cankara's pantheistic doctrine of
non-duality. He taught that the supreme spirit is essentially
different to matter and to the individual spirit.[94] He of course
denied absorption, and, though a Vishnuite, clearly belonged in spirit
to the older school before Vishnuism became so closely connected with
Ved[=a]nta doctrines. It is the same Sankhyan Vishnuism that one sees
in the Divine Song, that is, duality, and a continuation of
C[=a]ndilya's ancient heresy.[95]

Here ends the course of India's native religions. From a thousan