Religious Problem in India

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 74

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THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA
he institutes the ceremony of Pahul, initiation, simple, warrior-like. He takes water; his wife happens to be passing with five kinds of sweetmeats, and he takes of the five sweetmeats, a little of eachi, and throws them into water. He stirs the water with a two-edged knife; he sprinkles it on the five men around him, and gives to each of them to drink, and they in twn sprinkle him and give him to drink, and he proclaims them as the Khālsā, the pure, and bids them add to their names the epithet of Singh, the Lion. These are the first initiated disciples, marked ont from all others by special signs that every Sikh must carry on his person. The long hair, dividing him from the shaven Hindū; the comb; the two-edged dagger or kuife; the steel bangle; the short breeches, coming to the knee. These are are the five marks the five K's as they are called, because each begins with a K in the vermacular--whereby le separates every Sikh from all surrounding him, and which the trne Sikhs bear to-day. That is the ceremony which he lays down as the ceremony of initiation, and wherever five Sikhs are gathered together, there, he said, would be his spirit, and there the power of initiation. He is to be the last of the Guns; after him 110 other teacher is to come; the power is to go into the hands of the Khālsā to be exercised by the council of its chiefs, the Guru Mātā; the authority for the Sikhs lies in the sacred book which, later, Guru Govind completes.
Now he is the warrior chief :und the Sikhs Hock