(“true guru”) In the
sant religious tradition, an epithet (label) that can refer either to the
Supreme Being or to a genuinely realized religious teacher, through whose
instruction a disciple attains the Supreme Being.
The sants were a loose group of central and north ern Indian
poet-saints who lived between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and who
shared several general tendencies: stress on individualized and interior
religion, leading to a personal experience of the divine; disdain for external
ritual, particularly image worship; faith in the power of the divine Name; and
a tendency to ignore conventional caste distinctions.
Many of the sants, particularly in northern India, thought
of the divine as without qualities (nirguna) and beyond human powers of
conception.
Given these aniconic and occasionally iconoclastic tendencies,
it is not surprising that the sant tradition highlights the importance of the
spiritual teacher (guru), since the guru’s human form is the only image that a
disciple has to work with.
In human form, the satguru guides the disciple’s spiritual
practice and thus becomes the vehicle for spiritual attainment.
Yet a true guru, according to the tradition, always remains
a servant rather than a master, maintaining and transmitting the teaching of
his or her particular lineage.
The sant notion of the satguru has been adopted into many
modern Hindu movements, most notably the Radha Soami Satsang.
