Sant Sundardas: The Learned Man in an Unlearned Tradition

The nirguna sant tradition made a point of not being learned, and Sundardas is the learned one.

What the tradition normally said

Kabir: I never touched ink or paper.

And more than that, and repeatedly: pandits reading books are missing it; the Vedas and Puranas have not delivered anybody; a person who has read everything and understood nothing is worse off than one who read nothing.

Dadu in the same line: the direct thing does not come out of a text.

Ravidas, Namdev, Dhanna: all of them outside the learned class, and the tradition's argument depends on it. The list of Ramananda's disciples is an argument about who does not need the books.

And then Sundardas.

Sent to Kashi as a child by the panth's own seniors, given the full brahmanical curriculum: grammar, poetics, logic, Vedanta. Trained for decades. Returned able to write in the classical metres with the full apparatus of alankara.

And he used it.

What he actually did with it

Wrote nirguna poetry with technique.

His verse is metrically sophisticated in a way that Kabir's and Dadu's is not, and deliberately: he uses the classical Sanskrit derived metres, the figures, the structures of formal Hindi poetics, and applies them to material that had previously been written in deliberately plain language.

Which produced something the tradition did not otherwise have: nirguna teaching in fully crafted verse.

And which is a real gain and a real loss at the same time.

The gain: the arguments are stated more precisely than Kabir states them, the distinctions are held, and somebody reading Sundardas gets the yoga and the Vedanta laid out properly rather than gestured at.

The loss: Kabir's plainness was not a limitation, it was the argument. A verse a weaver can say is making a claim that a verse requiring twenty years of Sanskrit cannot make.

How the panth held it

Without apparent difficulty, which is worth noting.

They sent him. The decision to give a child of the panth a full Kashi education was made by Dadu's own senior disciples, deliberately, and nobody in the tradition seems to have regarded it as a betrayal of Dadu's position.

Which suggests the tradition's own view was that the objection was never to learning as such. It was to learning used as a credential, learning that produces authority over other people, learning that becomes the qualification for access.

And Sundardas's own verses take that line. He attacks scholarship as display, repeatedly and at length, from the position of somebody who has all of it and is telling you it does not do what people think it does.

Which is a stronger position to attack from than Kabir's, in one specific sense: he cannot be dismissed as somebody who did not know.

The general point

This is a recurring shape in the traditions and it is worth naming.

Learning is not the problem. What learning is used for is the problem.

Abhinavagupta, the most technically formidable philosopher in this whole series, says the same thing in Sanskrit. Tyagaraja attacks scholarship without devotion in Telugu. Basavanna attacks it in Kannada. Ramprasad attacks it in Bengali.

And every one of them was educated, and none of them gave the education back.

He wrote a great deal, and the collected edition runs to a substantial body of material.

Sundar Vilas

His principal work, and the one he is known by.

A large collection of verses covering the full range of his subjects: the nature of the divine, the criticism of hypocrisy, the yogic material, the description of the true sant, the transience of the body and the world, and the practical instruction.

And it is where his technical skill shows. The metres are varied and controlled, the figures are used deliberately, and the language is a polished literary Hindi rather than the deliberately rough speech of the earlier sants.

Jnana Samudra

The ocean of knowledge, his systematic work.

This is where the Kashi training is most visible. It sets out Vedanta properly: the analysis of the self, the treatment of maya, the levels of reality, the relation of the individual to the absolute, and it does so in the vocabulary of the schools rather than by suggestion.

Which no other Dadu Panth text does at that level.

Sarvangayoga Pradipika

On yoga, and comprehensive.

It treats the limbs, the practices, the obstacles, and the standard classification, and it is a real handbook rather than an allusion to one.

A note on this: the yoga in the sant traditions is the nath inheritance, the hatha and laya material that came through Gorakhnath's lineage into Kabir, Dadu and Nanak, and it is not the same territory as modern posture practice.

Panchendriya Charitra

The account of the five senses, an allegorical work in which the senses are treated as characters.

Adhyatma Anubhav, Ukti Anubhav and shorter works

On direct experience, on statements about it, and on the difference between the two.

The collected edition

Sundar Granthavali, edited by Purohit Harinarayan Sharma and published in the early twentieth century, is the standard collected works, and most later study rests on it.

What his verses actually argue

One. The sant is defined by conduct, not by marks.

He returns to this constantly. Not by the tilak, the rosary, the ochre, the hair, the vows or the recognised affiliation, but by what the person does when nobody is checking.

Two. Scholarship without the thing itself is a load carried for nothing.

Stated by a man with thirty years of Kashi behind him, which is why it lands.

Three. The body will not last and you know this.

The standard sant position, given in his hands the full rhetorical treatment.

Four. The name is available and free.

No qualification, no fee, no intermediary, and no prerequisite. Which is where the whole Dadu Panth position sits and where Sundardas, for all his training, does not deviate from Dadu by a step.

Five. Against ritual as substitute.

Pilgrimage, bathing, fasting, image worship treated as a transaction: he goes after all of it in the standard nirguna manner.

And the honest note on that: the Dadu Panth is a nirguna tradition and its position on image worship is genuinely a rejection, not a nuance. This app does not share that position, and Vandnaa is a saguna devotional app with images, aartis and temples throughout. Both positions are inside the Hindu traditions, they have argued with each other for six hundred years, and reporting what Sundardas held is not the same as adopting it.

A part of the Dadu Panth's history that is usually left out, and should not be.

What happened

In the eighteenth century the Dadu Panth raised armed regiments.

The Naga branch, or Nagas of the Dadu Panth, were a body of armed ascetics, and they were taken into the service of the Jaipur state.

They fought. They served as regular troops of Jaipur, they had recognised units, and they were paid and maintained by the state. The arrangement lasted into the nineteenth century, and the British administration recorded them.

Why this is worth saying

Because the Dadu Panth is a nirguna sant tradition founded by a cotton carder who taught the name and the plain life, and a hundred and fifty years later a branch of it was an infantry regiment.

And it was not unique. Armed ascetic orders were a general feature of eighteenth century north India:

• The Dashanami Nagas of the Shaiva orders
• The Ramanandi Nagas and the Vaishnava akharas
• The Nirmala and other Sikh orders in a different context
• The Gosains, who were also bankers and traders on a large scale

The context: the collapse of Mughal central authority, the rise of successor states, roads that were not safe, monastic property that needed defending, and pilgrimage routes that were contested between orders, sometimes violently, including at the Kumbh.

How to hold it

As history, plainly.

It is not a scandal to be hidden, and it is not a thing to be admired either. It is what happened to a devotional order in a period of general disorder, and the same thing happened to most of the large orders.

And it should not be read backwards onto Dadu or onto Sundardas. Sundardas died in 1689 and the Naga regiments belong to the period after him. Nothing in his verses supports it, and his position throughout is that the sant is known by conduct.

The general lesson, which this series keeps arriving at

Traditions drift from their founders, and the founder's text remains available as the standard by which the drift can be measured.

Which is exactly what Sundardas himself does to the religion of his own time: he holds the practice up against what it claims to be, and reports the gap.

And it is what the panth's own literature permits anybody to do to the panth.

One. Learning is not the problem.

The tradition that produced him made a point of being unlearned, and then its own seniors sent a child to Kashi for thirty years, and nobody treated it as a betrayal.

Which tells you what the objection actually was. Not to knowing things. To knowledge used as a credential, knowledge that creates authority over other people, knowledge that becomes the price of admission.

Applied: read as much as you want. The question is whether it makes you harder to talk to.

Two. He attacks scholarship from inside it.

Kabir attacking the pandits can be waved away as a man who did not know. Sundardas cannot: he has the grammar, the logic, the poetics and the Vedanta, and he is telling you it does not do what people think.

Which is generally the strongest position from which to criticise anything. Know it thoroughly first, then say what is wrong with it.

Three. The sant is known by conduct.

Not the tilak, the rosary, the ochre, the vows, the affiliation or the title. By what the person does when nobody is checking.

He returns to this more than to anything else, and it is the practical test the whole sant tradition offers, and it survives every difference of doctrine between them.

Four. Almost his whole time with his guru was as a small child.

He came to Dadu at about six, and Dadu died when he was about seven. Everything else came from Dadu's other disciples, from thirty years of study, and from ninety years of his own life.

Which is worth holding on to if you feel you have missed something, or came to it too late, or never had the teacher you should have had. The great disciple of Dadu Dayal had about a year with him, at six.

Five. On the nirguna position, honestly.

Sundardas rejects image worship, pilgrimage as transaction and ritual as substitute, in the standard nirguna manner, and that is genuinely his position.

This app does not share it. Vandnaa is a saguna app with images, aartis, temples and festivals throughout.

Both are inside the Hindu traditions, they have argued for six hundred years, and the argument has been good for both.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Ram Ram or Sat Naam, in the Dadu Panth manner, or whatever name is yours
• One verse of the Sundar Vilas, when you find a selection
• The conduct test, applied to yourself and not to others: what did I do when nobody was checking
• And the learning test: does what I know make me easier or harder to talk to

Where to go

• Sanganer, near Jaipur, where his samadhi is
• Naraina, Jaipur district, the principal Dadu Panth seat, where Dadu's relics are
• Dausa, where he was born
• The Sundar Granthavali, in Hindi, for the texts