Sundar Singh

SUNDAR SINGH. - Hindu mystic, called Sadhu = "pious", b. at Rampur, on the border of Nepal, on Sept. 3, 1889, d. in 1932.

From the religious sect into which he was born, that of the Sikhs, which is a compromise between Islam and Hinduism, he received the possibility of knowing and understanding the various orientations of mysticism: the fervor of Sufi Islam, the ritualism of Brahmanism, the practical-spiritual exercise of Yoga, the doctrine of salvation of Buddhism. But none of them fully satisfied him. Only Christianity, known through the Anglican communion, persuaded him, and in this church he received Baptism on Sept. 3, 1905, on his sixteenth birthday. At the age of 19 he went to the Tibet Missions, whence he subsequently journeyed through northern and southern India, China, Japan, North America and then the West: England, Germany and Sweden, where he formed a friendship with the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, N. Söderblom. He also made a journey to Palestine to retrace the footsteps of Jesus, whose apparition at the age of 15 had oriented him toward Christianity; he studied in depth 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 solely by prayer, which is the only way to the understanding of divine things. His faith has a character of childlike ingenuousness that made him regard as real miracles and wondrous apparitions concerning which, objectively, doubts have been raised.

In substance, apart from the peculiar characteristics that come to him from his lineage and his initial religious orientation, it is the mystical faith of the Protestant type, inasmuch as it is not concerned with ecclesiology and is satisfied above all by the union of the individual soul with the divinity through prayer.