ANTI-FEUDAL DIALECTIC OF SIKHISM 25 Japji this creation was instantaneously brought into being once for all by the Divine Command. The created nature, matter or material reality was made self-moving by God who imparted motion to it once for all. Guru Nanak says in his Japji that matter (mayo) got pregnant in some mysterious way and delivered Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, symbolizing the causal laws or principles of becoming, enduring and disintegrating. In other words, matter is governed by these three causal laws or principles. Puran Singh in his English translation of Japji rightly interprets them as the "three dynamic principles that keep creation going.55 The Divine hukam takes the form of causality that operates both at the material and the ethical levels. Its ethical form is a new conception of Karmic law as a synthesis of freedom and necessity. This causality was imparted to the created reality once for all, as contended by Guru Nanak in his Japji. Instead of the passive purusa of the Sankhya system, there is in the Gurubani the concept of Karta-Purkh (the Creator); in place of prakrti (with sattva, rajas and tamas) there is the notion of nature intrinsically possessing the three principles of becoming, enduring and disintegrating. Concept of Creation The idea of creation occurs frequently in philosophy as well as mythological literature. But Guru Nanak's conception is philosophically unique in that as a causal category it harmonizes a spiritualist concept of the Absolute with a materialist notion of the phenomenal reality. The concept of creation is the basic generic idea of Sikhism. The different interpretations and schools of Buddhism flowed from its own basic generic idea of substancelessness of reality. But the divergent interpretations of Sikhism do not proceed from the focal idea of creation. Often the interpretations placed on the concept of creation negate its original conceptual signification. The idea of creation in the Sikh philosophy projects a new causal relation between the Absolute and the phenomenal reality, which is different from the types of relation envisaged in the concepts of appearance, reflection, manifestation, emanation, imitation, configuration, transformation and so forth. The conception of creation in Sikhism is often confused with that in the Bible. In Christianity, "God did not only create the world, he also keeps it in being99;8 the continual activity of God is essential to keep the world going in the same way in which continual passage of electric current is required to keep the bulb illuminated. On the other hand, according to the Sikh thought, God has made the world self-active by bestowing upon it once for all the three causal principles of becoming, enduring and disintegrating. The significance of the point lies in the fact that in this way the Sikh concept of creation acquires a spintualist-materialist character. The Sikh concept of creation is also distinct from the pre-Nanak ideas in Indian philosophy and mythology. The notions of creation based on parinamauada (Brahman-parinamavada, Prakrti-parinamavada) make the Creator as the material cause also of the reality. Here the concept of the