Udasi: Difference between revisions

The Udasi sampradaya (tradition) was founded by Baba Sri Chand Ji Maharaj, the elder son, and sikh (disciple) of Sri Satguru Nanak Dev Ji. Its adherents not only revere Sri Guru Granth Sahib, but have in their treasure-house of sacred texts, Sanskritic scriptures such as the Veda, the Shastras, the Puranas, the Itihasas viz. the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, etc., along with works associated with the Gurus. To Udasis, also known as Nanak-putras (sons of Nanak), Guru Nanak Dev Ji is none other than the avatar of Sri Vishnu, and Baba Sri Chand Ji of Bhagavan Shiva. While the purpose of both was to protect the sanatan or eternal Dharma (moral and cosmic Order), the particular mission of Baba Ji was to spread the message of his Guru and father, Nirankar-svarup (the form of the Formless) Jagadguru Nanak Dev Ji. Thus, in the spirit of their founder, the scholarly Udasis were the missionaries of Gurmat.

The Udasis engage in pancadevopasana, the worship of a combination of five deities or the five qualified facets of the Brahman, namely Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, Durga, and Ganesh, and their philosophy is that of monistic or advaita Vedanta as popularised by Adi Sankaracarya. Amongst Udasis, some are celibate ascetics, others householders, some are jatadhari (dreadlocked) ash-covered Sadhus, and others have no distinctive appearance. Not only are they scholars of Sanskrit, their particularly adept in Ayurveda, the tradition Indian medicine. When the Khalsa Singhs were involved in war against the Mughals, it was the Udasis that kept the Guru’s tradition alive by becoming custodians of the Gurdwaras.

Given some of the beliefs and practices above, one may wonder who the Udasis are and whether they are confused. There are three possibilities of explanation: 1. either they do not know whether they follow ‘Hindu-ism’ or ‘Sikh-ism’, or 2. they have taken parts of both, or 3. it is in fact the world who is mistakenly confused by seeing things in black and white and it is the Udasis who, amongst other legitimate sampradayas going back to the Gurus, truly follow and understand the teachings of the Great Sovereign Masters. It is not they who have problems of identity, but everyone else.

Their reality depicts a diminishing truth, while the rest of the modernist world has been unknowingly duped into the duality of these two artificial and until recently, non-existent religious categories viz. ‘Hindu-ism’ and ‘Sikh-ism’ created by British Colonialists. This is not how it used to be. After all the suffix ism which is the crux of our problem of understanding the truth as it stood before the time of the Raj, conceptually and linguistically belongs to the Western world, and is alien to the traditional Indian mind. To understand the reality of religiosity before the intellectual impact of the British Raj in Panjab, and thus the world of the Udasis and other puratan (ancient) traditions, one must understand it from its own perspective, not from the foreign concepts and categories of western thought.

The above information was taken from Wikipedia - wikipedia.org