78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST with the complexities of their literature, fail to do justice to the wealth they have inherited. At best they make an attempt at simplicity and naturalness in their songs and festivals, but in their lives, their temples, their religious observances, they are unable to get free of the shackles of their scriptures. They have made a jumble of love and desire, the workings of the spirit and the inclination of the senses'.16 A Vaisnava once asked a Baul whether he was aware of the different kinds of love as classified in the Vaisnava scriptures. The Baul instantly gave his reply in a song: A goldsmith, I think, has come into the flower garden. He would appraise the lotus, By rubbing it on his touchstone ! Oh the fun, what a pity !17 The Bauls, however, have always paid high regards to Chandidas. In particular, the following song of Chandidas which was mentioned by Rabindranth Tagore in The Religion of Man for its philosophical and literary richness, has always evoked very positive response from the Bauls: Listen, 0 brother man, the Truth of Man is the highest of truths; there is no other truth above it.18 To conform to the emotional approach of the Bauls, the sahaja or the ultimate reality has gradually been transformed into a personal God. This Sahaja as the personal God is the 'Man of My Heart' which intrinsically calls for the realisation of the Sahaja or the ultimate nature of true self. The Baul conception of love is the love between human personality and the Divine personality residing within us as the true self or our SflA^y'fl-nature. As already indicated, the creed of the Bauls is, thus, fundamentally based on the question of self-realisation. This pivotal factor of self-realisation was also stressed in the Upanishads, but the eternal love as envisaged by the Bauls was not given much importance in the Upanishadic formulation of self-realisation.19 Let us now deal with the Sufistic conception of divinity and the ideal of love. The Sufistic overview in this regard can be located in Aliraja's Sufi text entitled the Jnana-Sagar. There it is said that God in his absolute aloneness could not realise His love and a second or a dual was required as the beloved. The Absolute, therefore, created a dual out of its ownself. The Jnana'sagar upholds that the universe had its origin in love, and the chaos was systematised into the cosmos through the bond of love. Man is the microcosm in which all attributes of the Absolute are united. Man thus synthesizes within his nature two