In a way, none of these values were new but in the crucible of the Bhakti Movement they combined to crystallise in a new form and give rise to a new … - Ram Swarup

These similarities were not accidental caused by a “Hindu environment”, as some post-Macauliffe Akali scholars try to explain. They arose because the Sikh Gurus were Hindus; they were brought up and nourished on Hindu scriptures; they were shaped by the Santtradition of their day which derived from the Upanishads and the Yogas and Sikh Gurus were Vaishnavas who remembered their God by the name of Hari or Rama or Govinda.Nanak alone used the word “Hari’ 630 times; in the Adi Granth, it occurs 8,300 times. Similarly, the word ‘Rama’ appears 2,500 times. Whether one understands these names in their more popular and Pauranik sense or in their more Upanishadic and Yogic meaning, in either case there is no escape from the traditional identity.

For example, Apollonius of Tyna, the great sage of the Greek world who is reputed to have come to India to meet its sages, is mentioned just to be told that his biography by Philostratus is "legendry". There is nothing improbable in a saint of the Greek world visiting India, but even if the biography is legendry, it is known to have been written by 220 AD, and even as a legend it is a good witness and tells us where India stood in the estimation of Greek sages and philosophers of an early date. It tells us that the Pythagoreans of Greece and the Naked Philosophers of Egypt had derived their doctrines from the "Wise men of India".

For liberation, one enters into another territory called nirvana-bhumi by the Buddhists and nirodha-bhumi by Patanjala Yoga. But between this and the previous stage there is an intermeditate ground, a no man's land. It is at the apex of samprjnata samadhi and at the beginning of asmaprajnata samadhi. ... Here by sustained practice of the Yoga of discrimination or viveka-khyati, which separates the seer from the seen and the instruments of seeing, Purusha is seen for the first time as separate from Prakriti.... When this knowledge arises, the asmita klesa is destroyed. ... But when the chitta or the buddhi knows that it merely reflects a light which belongs to someone othere than iteself, the spiritual man is born. The asmita klesa, known as the heart-knot in the Upanishads is destroyed.... But what we have called the intermediate no man's land above has a rough and ready sort of Buddhist analogue in its eighth samapatti: naivasamjna nasmajna, neither knowing nor unknowing. It means the samsara has ended but the nirvana has not begun; the mind has ended but the Self has not begun. What is called asamjna here is called asamprjnata in Patanjala Yoga.(p. 83 ff)