Preface To 'Guru Nanak's Siddha Ghosti' By Piar Singh 

During the days of my association with Professor G.S.Randhawa, when he was busy recasting and revamping his, now, monumental work, Japu Ji, I was seized with a keen desire to prepare some thing in English on similar lines. When I mooted this idea to him, he with his usual positive approach, welcomed it and encouraged me to go ahead. I selected Guru Nanak's Siddha Goshti for the purpose. Later, he had the project duly approved and assigned to me.

The Siddha Goshti, like the Japu Ji, is one of the most im­portant compositions of Guru Nanak. It propounds the Sikh spiritual path as against the Yogis' who were interested more in establishing their hegemony over the gullible people by pretending to possess occult powers, rather than to teach them any fruitful path of enriching their lives, spiritual or temporal. The path they advocated was of penance and self-deprival of the valid pleasures of life. It is this attitude of theirs that this great work seeks to correct.

Apart from its concision of expression, the Goshti presents great difficulty in the decipherment of Yogic terms that have, in the course of several centuries accumulated many shades around them and strayed far from the Classical Yoga concepts. As a result the same term meant one thing to one expounder and another to the other and, very often, something altogether different, to the different sects of the yogis themselves. The sum total of all this is that its decipherment and rendering into a foreign tongue springing from an altogether different milieu, presents great difficulty.

Conscious of my limited proficiency at the English idiom and the subtlities of this language, I requested Prof. G.S. Randhawa, Vice-Chancellor of this University to go through my rendering of the Siddha Goshti and recast it so as to have it meet the needs of the English readers. I picked up courage to make him this request, for I knew the reverence in which he holds the Holy Word of the Sikh Gurus and the concern he often expresses to protrude them most faithfully. He readily agreed to my request and went through my draft not once but a number of times till it got to its proper form. I am deeply indebted to him for this.

The format that the book has been given and the method that has been adopted, have been explained in the Editorial Note that follows. Likewise a Key to Translation too has been added.