Questions

According to al-Biruni, the sufi theories of the soul were similar to those in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Like the Yoga Sutra, sufi works also stated that ‘the bodies are the snares of the souls for the purpose of acquiring recompense’. Al-Biruni also identifies the sufi doctrine of divine love as self-annihilation with parallel passages from the Bhagavad Gita. There was also much exchange of ideas between the Sufis and Indian yogis. In fact the hatha-yoga treatise Amrita Kunda was translated into Arabic and Persian, So C is right.

Hujwiri was known as Datta Ganj Baksh. Hujwiri comments that before he settled in Lahore some sufis believed in theories that he calls brahmanical. According to Hujwiri they wrongly believed that ‘annihilation (fand’) signifies loss of essence and destruction of the personality, and that subsistence (baqa) indicates the subsistence of God in man.

The phrase ‘between the cup and lip’ needs to be replaced with ‘between the cup and the lip’. It means a situation where things did not happen at the last minute the way they were expected to due to unforeseen reasons. Thus, the correct formation would be, ‘There is many a slip between the cup and the lip’.