g the
only one in existence."[617] God has made all things: pain and
pleasure, sin and merit, saints and sinners, Brahmans and butchers,
passion and asceticism. It is the Veda that distinguishes good and
evil among them.[618] The love of God and faith are the only road to
happiness. "The worship of Hari is real and all the world is a
dream."[619] Tulsi Das often uses the language of the Advaita
philosophy and even calls God the annihilator of duality, but though
he admits the possibility of absorption and identification with the
deity, he holds that the double relation of a loving God and a loving
soul constitutes greater bliss. "The saint was not absorbed into the
divinity for this reason that he had already received the gift of
faith."[620] And in a similar spirit he says, "Let those preach in
their wisdom who contemplate Thee as the supreme spirit, the uncreate,
inseparable from the universe, recognizable only by inference and
beyond the understanding; but we, O Lord, will ever hymn the glories
of thy incarnation." Like most Hindus he is little disposed to enquire
what is the purpose of creation, but he comes very near to saying that
God has evolved the world by the power of Maya because the bliss which
God and his beloved feel is greater than the bliss of impersonal
undifferentiated divinity. It will be seen that Tulsi Das is
thoroughly Hindu: neither his fundamental ideas nor his mythological
embellishments owe anything to Islam or Christianity. He accepts
unreservedly such principles as Maya, transmigration, Karma and
release. But his sentiments, more than those of any other Indian
writer, bear a striking resemblance to the New Testament. Though he
holds that the whole world is of God, he none the less bids men shun
evil and choose the good, and the singular purity of his thoughts and
style contrasts strongly with other Vishnuite works. He does not
conceive of the love which may exist between the soul and God as a
form of sexual passion.

2

The beginning of the sixteenth century was a time of religious
upheaval in India for it witnessed the careers not only of
Vallabhacarya and Caitanya, but also of Nanak, the founder of the
Sikhs. In the west it was the epoch of Luther and as in Europe so in
India no great religious movement has taken place since that time. The
sects then founded have swollen into extravagance and been reformed:
other sects have arisen from a mixture of Hinduism with Moslem and
Christian