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Rh added as an appendix to the Granth itself, which contain passages of great picturesqueness and beauty, and which, although not poetry in the technical sense of the word, still have many of its attributes. They resemble strongly, and compare favourably with, the writings of Walt Whitman, the American poet.

The Ádi Granth derives its chief authority from Bábá Nának, the founder of the religious system of the Sikhs, who wrote large portions of it about the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was collected in its present state by Arjun, the fifth of the Gurus or Sikh prophets, who added to the writings of Nának those of his successors and of other older mystical Hindu authors. More important than the Ádi Granth, as determining the military and political constitution of later Sikhdom. were the writings of the tenth and greatest of the Sikh Gurus, Govind Singh, who, in 1696, composed a voluminous work, partly by his own hands and partly by the aid of Hindi poets attached to him, teaching, in archaic and exceedingly difficult Hindi, the tenets of the new faith which he preached. Guru Govind Singh did not however change the esoteric doctrine of Nának in any essential particulars, although his teaching and practice were more distinctly pantheistic. He was himself a worshipper of the goddess Dúrga and allowed adoration of the inferior divinities of the Hindu Pantheon, although he preferentially advocated the worship of the one Supreme God.

The limits of space do not permit of telling in any detail the story of the lives of the ten Sikh Gurus,