SUNDAR SINGH. — Hindu mystic, called Sadhu = "pious," b. at Rampur, on the Nepalese border, on 3 Sept. 1889, d. in 1932.
From the religious sect in which he was born, that of the Sikhs, which is a compromise between Islam and Hinduism, he gained the opportunity to know and understand the various trends of mysticism: the fervor of Islamic Sufism, the ritualism of Brahmanism, the practical-spiritual exercise of Yoga, and the doctrine of salvation of Buddhism. But none of these fully satisfied him. Only Christianity, known through the Anglican communion, convinced him, and in this church he received Baptism on 3 Sept. 1905, on his sixteenth birthday. At 19 he went to the missions in Tibet, from where he later traveled through northern and southern India, China, Japan, North America, and then to the West: England, Germany, and Sweden, where he befriended the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, N. Söderblom. He also made a journey to Palestine to retrace the footsteps of Jesus, whose appearance to him at the age of 15 had directed him toward Christianity; he studied deeply the great mystics of the West.
His vision is anti-intellectualistic, oriented solely toward the love of God, which Jesus Christ revealed to the world, satisfied only by prayer, which is the sole path to understanding divine things. His faith has the character of childlike simplicity, which led him to accept as real miracles and wondrous apparitions about which doubts have, objectively, been raised.
In substance, apart from the peculiar characteristics deriving from his race and his initial religious orientation, it is the mystical faith of a Protestant type, inasmuch as it is unconcerned with ecclesiology and is satisfied above all by the union of the individual soul with the deity through prayer.
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Conquered by the Hebrews, it was assigned by Joshua to the tribe of Issachar (Josh. 19:18). The Philistines camped there before the battle against Saul on Mount Gilboa (1 Sam. 28:4). It was the home of Abishag (1 Kings 1:3), of the pious woman whose son Elisha raised from the dead (2 Kings 4:8, 12; 8:1), and of the Shulammite (Song 7:1; Gr. *Σουκμάτης*). Today it is Solem or Sulam, a village on the southern slope of the so-called "Little Hermon" (≈ Nebi ed-Dahj) south of Mount Tabor. On the tell overlooking the village, pottery has been collected from the period of the Middle Bronze Age II to the Arab era.