Many features of the Kabbala, such as the marvellous powers assigned to letters, the use of charms and amulets, the emanations or phases of the deity and the theory of the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, are amazingly like Indian Tantrism but no doubt are more justly regarded as belonging to the religious ideas common to most of Asia.[1171] But in two points we seem able to discern definite Hindu influence.  These are metempsychosis and pantheism, which we have so often found to have some connection with India when they exist in an extreme form.  Their presence here is specially remarkable because they are alien to the spirit of orthodox Judaism.  Yet the pre-existence and repeated embodiment of the soul is taught in the Zohar and even more systematically by Luria, in whose school were composed works called Gilgulim, or lists of transmigrations.  The ultimate Godhead is called En soph or the infinite and is declared to be unknowable, not to be described by positive epithets, and therefore in a sense non-existent, since nothing which is predicated of existing beings can be truly predicated of it.  These are crumbs from the table of Plotinus and the Upanishads.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1164:  But see on this point Census of India, 1911, vol.  I. part I. p. 128.]

[Footnote 1165:  Another instance is the shrine of Saiyad Salar Masud at Bahraich.  He was a nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni and was slain by Hindus, but is now worshipped by them.  See Grierson, J.R.A.S. 1911, p. 195.]

[Footnote 1166:  See for examples, Census of India, 1901, Panjab, p. 151, e.g. the Brahmans of a village near Rawal Pindi are said to be Murids of Abdul-Kadir-Jilani.]

[Footnote 1167:  Census of India, 1911, vol.  I. part I. p. 195.  The Malkanas are described on the same page.]

[Footnote 1168:  Such as Ghazi Miyan, Pir Badar, Zindha Ghazi, Sheikh Farid, Sheikh Sadu and Khwaja Khizr.]

[Footnote 1169:  E.G.  Browne, Literary History of Persia:  R.A.  Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Divan of Shems-i-Tabriz.]

[Footnote 1170:  He describes how he discovered the mechanism by which the priests made miraculous images move.  See Browne, Lit.  Hist.  Persia, II. 529.]

[Footnote 1171:  But there is something very Indian in the reluctance of the Kabbalists to accept creation ex nihilo and to explain it away by emanations, or by the doctrine of limitation, that is God’s self-withdrawal in order that the world might be created, or even by the eternity of matter.]

INDEX

Abbot. See Monasteries, and Organisation—­ecclesiastical

Abdul Kadir Jilani, III. 459

Abhakta, III. 426

Abhayagiri, I. 292, 293; III. 16, 19, 33, 297

Abhayakara, II. 112; III. 360, 387