Apart from all these sects, and in many ways most remarkable, are the sun-worshippers.  All over India the sun was (and is) worshipped, either directly (as to-day by the Sauras),[91] or as an incarnate deity in the form of the priest Nimba-[=a]ditya, who is said to have arrested the sun’s course at one time and to be the sun’s representative on earth.  Both Puranic authority and inscriptional evidence attest this more direct[92] continuance of the old Vedic cult.  Some of the finest old temples of India, both North and South, were dedicated to the sun.

DEISTIC REFORMING SECTS.

We have just referred to one or two reforming sects that still hold to the sectarian deity.  Among these the M[=a]dhvas, founded by (Madhva) [=A]nandat[=i]rtha, are less Krishnaite or R[=a]maite than Vishnuite,[93] and less Vishnuite than deist in general; so much so that Williams declares they must have got their precepts from Christianity, though this is open to Barth’s objection that the reforming deistic sects are so located as to make it more probable that they derive from Mohammedanism.  Madhva was born about 1200 on the western coast, and opposed Cankara’s pantheistic doctrine of non-duality.  He taught that the supreme spirit is essentially different to matter and to the individual spirit.[94] He of course denied absorption, and, though a Vishnuite, clearly belonged in spirit to the older school before Vishnuism became so closely connected with Ved[=a]nta doctrines.  It is the same Sankhyan Vishnuism that one sees in the Divine Song, that is, duality, and a continuation of C[=a]ndilya’s ancient heresy.[95]

Here ends the course of India’s native religions.  From a thousand years B.C. to as many years after she is practically uninfluenced by foreign doctrine, save in externals.

It is of course permissible to separate the reforming sects of the last few decades from the older reformers; but since we see both in their aim and in their foreign sources (amalgamation with cis-Indic belief) only a logical if not an historical continuance of the older deists, we prefer to treat of them all as factors of one whole; and, from a broader point of view, as successors to the still older pantheistic and unitarian reformers who first predicated a supreme spirit as ens realissimum, when still surrounded by the clouds of primitive polytheism.  Kab[=i]r and D[=a]d[=u], the two most important of the more modern reformers, we have named above as nominal adherents of the R[=a]m[=a]nand sect.  But neither was really a sectarian Vishnuite.[96] Kab[=i]r, probably of the beginning of the fifteenth century, the most famous of R[=a]m[=a]nand’s disciples, has as religious descendants the sect of the Kab[=i]r Panth[=i]s.  But no less an organization than that of the Sikhs look back to him, pretending to be his followers.  The religious tenets of the Kab[=i]r Panth[=i]s may be described as those of unsectarian Unitarians.