GYMNOSOPIIF aro mentioned by the writers of the time of Alexander's invasion, as a people of India who practised austerities for religion to quell the flesh and its desire,s. ./Elkut described them as living in the open air. They are yet daily to bo seen in various parts of India, some times without any covering, or with only a narrow strip of cloth, their bodies covered with ashes, exposed to the elements, and continuing to live as anchorites through a long life under the most painful circumstances. 3fenit (Institutes, 6, 22) says, Let the devotee push himself backward and forward on the ground or stand on his toes the whole day, or continuaLiy sit down and rise again ; let him go into the water at sunrise, noon, and sunset, and bathe ; in the hottest season of the year, surround himself with fire fires ; and in the winter stand constantly in a wet garment ; and so let him proceed ever, continuiitg his penances in severity.' Their present representatives are the Viragi and Sanyasi. in the Ramayana they are represented as lying in winter in cold water, living on dried leaves and water. Colonel 1Vade and Captain Osborne were witnesses to the interment alive, and disinterment, of a devotee at Lahore in 1837, who was buried for six weeks in a closed chest. It was suspended in a vault to
avoid the attacks of white ants. The seal of Ranjit Singh was on the tomb. The systems of Hinduism and Buddhism encourage austerities ; and the reformers Sakhya Sinha, Kabir, Rama nand, and Chand all favoured it. The idea seems to be connected with the prevailing belief as to transmigration, leading to the infliction of self torture as penance for the sins of the former or present existence, in the hope of absorption after the present term of life. The austerities are practised in the most varied form, from simple abstaining from marriage, to temporary or life long tortures and voluntary suicide by drowning, burning, placing themselves beneath the great wheels of idol cars. The tortures at the Holi festival, the deaths in the Ganges and at the Jaganath car, the prostrations for a pilgrimage around the hill of Govardhan, are of this kind ; and in 1866, a Hindu ascetic was sitting in a cave at the editor's visit to Ellora, where lie NS as said to have sat for five years.