yet his teaching is of great importance as marking the origin of a popular religious movement characterized by the use of the vernacular languages instead of Sanskrit, and by a laxity in caste rules culminating in a readiness to admit as equals all worshippers of the true God.[606] This God is Rama rather than Krishna.  I have already pointed out that the worship of Rama as the Supreme Being (to be distinguished from respect for him as a hero) is not early:  in fact it appears to begin in the period which we are considering.  Of the human forms of the deity Krishna was clearly the most popular but the school of Ramanuja, while admitting both Rama and Krishna as incarnations, preferred to adore God under less mythological and more philosophic names such as Narayana.  Ramanand, who addressed himself to all classes and not merely to the Brahman aristocracy, selected as the divine name Rama.  It was more human than Narayana, less sensuous than Krishna.  Every Hindu was familiar with the poetry which sings of Rama as a chivalrous and godlike hero.  But he was not, like Krishna, the lover of the soul, and when Ramaism was divested of mythology by successive reformers it became a monotheism in which Hindu and Moslim elements could blend.  Ramanand had twelve disciples, among whom were Kabir, a Raja called Pipa, Rai Das, a leather-seller (and therefore an outcast according to Hindu ideas) as well as Brahmans.  The Ramats, as his followers were called, are a numerous and respectable body in north India, using the same sectarian mark as the Vadagalais from whom they do not differ materially, although a Hindu might consider that their small regard for caste is a vital distinction.  They often call themselves Avadhutas, that is, those who have shaken off worldly restrictions, and the more devout among them belong to an order divided into four classes of which only the highest is reserved to Brahmans and the others are open to all castes.  They own numerous and wealthy maths, but it is said that in some of these celibacy is not required and that monks and nuns live openly as man and wife.[607]

An important aspect of the Ramat movement is its effect on the popular literature of Hindustan which in the fifteenth and even more in the sixteenth century blossoms into flowers of religious poetry.  Many of these writings possess real merit and are still a moral and spiritual force.  European scholars are only beginning to pay sufficient attention to this mighty flood of hymns which gushed forth in nearly all the vernaculars of India[608] and appealed directly to the people.  The phenomenon was not really new.  The psalms of the Buddhists and even the hymns of the Rig Veda were vernacular literature in their day, and in the south the songs of the Devaram and Nalayiram are of some antiquity.  But in the north, though some Prakrit literature has been preserved, Sanskrit was long considered the only proper language for religion.  We can hardly doubt that vernacular hymns existed, but they did not receive the imprimatur of any teacher, and have not survived.  But about 1400 all this changes.  Though Ramanand was not much of a writer he gave his authority to the use of the vernacular:  he did not, like Ramanuja, either employ or enjoin Sanskrit and the meagre details which we have of his circle lead us to imagine him surrounded by men of homely speech.