Page:Hindu Gods and Heroes.djvu/112

110 about 1608. In the verses of these poets the worship of Kṛishṇa is raised to a level of high spirituality. Rāmānanda, who apparently lived between 1400 and 1470 and was somehow connected with the school of Rāmānuja, preached salvation through Rāma to all castes and classes of Northern India, with immense and enduring success. To his spiritual lineage belongs Tulsī Dās (1532-1623), whose Rāma-charita-mānasa, a poem in Eastern Hindi on the story of Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa, has become the Bible of the North. The same influences are visible in the poems of Kabīr, a Moslem by birth, who combined Hindu and Muhammadan doctrines into an eclectic monotheism, and is worshipped as an incarnation of God by his sect. He died in 1518. A kindred spirit was Nānak, the founder of the Sikh church (1469-1538).

By the side of these upward movements there have been many which have remained on the older level of the Bhāgavata. The most important is that of Viśvambhara Miśra, who is better known by his titles of Chaitanya and Gaurāṅga (1485-1533); he carried on a "revival" of volcanic intensity in Bengal and Orissa, and the