I have already stated, if not in actual words, at least by inference, that Khayyam's philosophical and religious opinions were in certain essential points based upon the teaching of the Vedantas. He must have been familiar with the general scope of their philosophy, although attaching himself, as we have seen, to the ranks of the Sufi Mystics. Sufism and Babism are probably the most widely spread doctrines current in modern Persia, and after all are but forms of Vedantic pantheism despoiled of real significance by the effort to accommodate themselves to the creed of Islam. We learn from El Kifti that Khayyam «exhorted to the seeking of the One, the Ruler, by the purification of bodily movements, for the cleansing of the human soul,» an unmistakable exposition of Sufi practices, although based originally upon the customs of the Vedantic sages.
He certainly did not practice asceticism and other quasi-religious forms, which had been grafted upon the austere simplicity of the original Vedantic creed, but he did inculcate the necessity of acquiring «the knowledge of the unity of the soul with God»--the one thing important--which can only be achieved by the renouncement of desire, the purification of the soul from the lusts of the world, and the practice of kindliness, goodness, universal sympathy with mankind, and the patience which brings perfect work.
That Omar was a man of many moods is evident. His poetic faculties, acted upon by an intelligence that was profound, and by a wit as cutting as the _tulwar_ of a Persian soldier, swayed him hither and thither upon the sea of daily doubts and fears which are part of man's existence. Yet, in his way, he was a beacon light, not only in the history of Sufi Mysticism, but in the annals of God-seeking. I can find no better yoke-fellow for him than Luther, like whom he was indeed an Apostle of Protest.
Omar Khayyam was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half of our eleventh, and died within the first quarter of our twelfth Century. The slender story of his life is curiously twined about that of two other very considerable figures in their time and country: one of whom tells the story of all three. This was Nizam ul Mulk, Vizyr to Alp Arslan the son, and Malik Shah the grandson, of Toghrul Beg the Tartar, who had wrested Persia from the feeble successor of Mahmud the Great, and founded that Seljukian Dynasty which finally roused Europe into the Crusades. This Nizam ul Mulk, in his «_Wasiyat_»--or «Testament»--which he wrote and left as a memorial for future statesmen--relates the following, as quoted in the «Calcutta Review,» No. lix., from Mirkhond's «History of the Assassins.»