Satguru

(“true guru”) In the sant religious tradition, an epithet (label) that can refer
either to the Supreme Being or to a genuinely realized religious teacher,
through whose instruction a disciple
attains the Supreme Being. The sants
were a loose group of central and northern Indian poet-saints who lived
between the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries and who shared several general
tendencies: stress on individualized
and interior religion, leading to a personal experience of the divine; disdain
for external ritual, particularly image
worship; faith in the power of the divine
Name; and a tendency to ignore conventional caste distinctions. Many of
the sants, particularly in northern India,
thought of the divine as without qualities (nirguna) and beyond human powers of conception. Given these aniconic
and occasionally iconoclastic tendencies, it is not surprising that the sant tradition highlights the importance of the
spiritual teacher (guru), since the guru’s
human form is the only image that a disciple has to work with. In human form,
the satguru guides the disciple’s spiritual
practice and thus becomes the vehicle
for spiritual attainment. Yet a true guru,
according to the tradition, always
remains a servant rather than a master,
maintaining and transmitting the teaching of his or her particular lineage. The
sant notion of the satguru has been
adopted into many modern Hindu
movements, most notably the Radha
Soami Satsang.