Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.4.5

6.4.5

I confess that this gross superstition filled me, on my first arrival in Hindoustan, with amazement. I knew not what to think of it. Sometimes I should have been disposed to consider the Fakires as remnants, if not as the founders, of the ancient and infamous sect of Cynics, could I have discovered anything in them but brutality and ignorance, and if they had not appeared to me vegetative rather than rational beings. At another time, I thought they might be honest though deluded enthusiasts, until I found that, in fact, they were, in the widest sense of the word, destitute of piety. Again, I reflected that a life of vagrancy, idleness, and independence may have a powerful and attractive charm; or that the vanity which intermingles itself with every motive of human action, and which may be discovered as clearly through the tattered mantle of a Diogenes as under the comely garb of a Plato, was probably the secret spring that set so many strange engines in motion.