power of Maya because the bliss which God and his beloved feel is greater than the bliss of impersonal undifferentiated divinity.  It will be seen that Tulsi Das is thoroughly Hindu:  neither his fundamental ideas nor his mythological embellishments owe anything to Islam or Christianity.  He accepts unreservedly such principles as Maya, transmigration, Karma and release.  But his sentiments, more than those of any other Indian writer, bear a striking resemblance to the New Testament.  Though he holds that the whole world is of God, he none the less bids men shun evil and choose the good, and the singular purity of his thoughts and style contrasts strongly with other Vishnuite works.  He does not conceive of the love which may exist between the soul and God as a form of sexual passion.

2

The beginning of the sixteenth century was a time of religious upheaval in India for it witnessed the careers not only of Vallabhacarya and Caitanya, but also of Nanak, the founder of the Sikhs.  In the west it was the epoch of Luther and as in Europe so in India no great religious movement has taken place since that time.  The sects then founded have swollen into extravagance and been reformed:  other sects have arisen from a mixture of Hinduism with Moslem and Christian elements, but no new and original current of thought or devotion has been started.

Though the two great sects associated with the names of Caitanya and Vallabhacarya have different geographical spheres and also present some differences in doctrinal details, both are emotional and even erotic and both adore Krishna as a child or young man.  Their almost simultaneous appearance in eastern and western India and their rapid growth show that they represent an unusually potent current of ideas and sentiments.  But the worship of Krishna was, as we have seen, nothing new in northern India.  Even that relatively late phase in which the sports of the divine herdsman are made to typify the love of God for human souls is at least as early as the Gita-govinda written about 1170.  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the history of Krishna worship is not clear,[621] but it persisted and about 1400 found speech in Bengal and in Rajputana.

According to Vaishnava theologians the followers of Vallabhacarya[622] are a section of the Rudra-sampradaya founded in the early part of the fifteenth century by Vishnusvami, an emigrant from southern India, who preached chiefly in Gujarat.  The doctrines of the sect are supposed to have been delivered by the Almighty to Siva from whom Vishnusvami was fifteenth in spiritual descent, and are known by the name of Suddhadvaita or pure non-duality.  They teach that God has three attributes—­sac-cid-ananda—­existence, consciousness and bliss.  In the human or animal soul bliss is suppressed and in matter consciousness is suppressed too.  But when the soul attains release it recovers bliss and becomes identical in nature with God.  For practical purposes the Vallabhacaris may be regarded as a sect founded by Vallabha, said to have been born in 1470.  He was the son of a Telinga Brahman, who had migrated with Vishnusvami to the north.