Guru Nanak

← Encyclopedia

In the janam-sakhi paintings he is an old man before he is anything else: a white beard, a string of beads, a seated figure under a tree with a Muslim musician at his shoulder and a Hindu attendant at his feet. The image is later than the life it pictures — the earliest of these illustrated biographies come from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generations after the man they remember — and the historian holds them at arm’s length. Yet the composition states something the tradition wants stated about its founder, and states it before a word is read: that he sat at the seam between two religions and belonged wholly to neither. The figure under the tree is Nanak, born in 1469 in a village of the western Punjab, the first of ten teachers a community would call Guru, and the source of a path that begins from one conviction — that God is one, formless, and present everywhere, and that the divisions of birth and creed are not where God is found.

A householder of the Punjab

The village was Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, on the plain southwest of Lahore, in country the Mughals had not yet taken. It is now called Nankana Sahib, renamed for the child born there, and it stands today in Pakistan. His father, Mehta Kalu — Kalyan Das of the Bedi clan — was a patwari, a village accountant who kept the revenue records, and the son was set to the same trade. The detail matters to the way the tradition tells the story: Nanak was no renunciant by upbringing, no Brahmin schooled for the temple, but a man of the ledger and the weighing-scale. He married, in the account preserved by the community, a woman named Sulakhni, and fathered two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. He took employment at Sultanpur Lodhi, in the storehouse of the local governor Daulat Khan, measuring out grain and keeping the count. By every ordinary measure he was a settled man with a settled life.

The turn came at the river. At Sultanpur, the story runs, Nanak went each morning before dawn to bathe in a stream called the Bein. One morning, around his thirty-third year, he entered the water and did not come out. For three days he was given up for drowned; the river was dragged and nothing found. On the third day he reappeared, and for a further day he said nothing at all. When he spoke, the first words the tradition records from him were a refusal of the question everyone wanted answered — whether he was now Hindu or now Muslim. Na ko hindu na ko musalman, he is remembered to have said: there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim. The phrasing is not a denial that such people exist. It is a denial that the categories reach the thing that matters. Before the one God, the labels that sorted his neighbors into temple and mosque held no purchase; what God asked was not a creed but a life. In the tradition’s own frame the three days were not an absence but an ascent — Nanak carried into the divine presence and given the Name to repeat and the commission to teach it. The historian can date neither the river nor the words with confidence; the janam-sakhis that preserve them were composed long after, and they preserve much else that is plainly legend. What is not in doubt is that a man who had been an accountant emerged a teacher, and never again kept anyone’s books but his own.

Guru Nanak in conversation with the qazi Ruknuddin, from an 1830s janam-sakhi (illustrated life of the Guru). — Unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The four journeys

What followed the river was motion. For some two decades, by the tradition’s reckoning, Nanak walked — four great journeys, the udasis, that carried him out of the Punjab and across the religious map of his age and beyond it. The janam-sakhis send him east to the holy cities of the Ganges plain — to Varanasi, to the Buddhist ground of Bodh Gaya, into Bengal and Assam; south through the peninsula to Sri Lanka; north into the Himalayas, toward Ladakh and Tibet; and west, most strikingly, to the heartlands of Islam — to Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad. Through all of it a single companion walks with him: Mardana, a Muslim of the bard caste who played the rabab while Nanak sang. The pairing is itself a teaching. The Guru who said there was neither Hindu nor Muslim travels the length of South Asia with a Muslim minstrel at his side, and the hymns are born as song, struck on the strings, not handed down as doctrine.

The journeys are the part of the life the historian trusts least and the tradition cherishes most. The encounters they stage — Nanak confounding the priests at the bathing-places, lying with his feet toward the Kaaba to show that God faces every direction, debating the yogis in their mountain caves — carry the weight of parable, and several can be shown to be later inventions fitted to the teaching. But their drift is consistent and it is the drift of everything else he is known to have said. Wherever Nanak goes, he arrives at a sacred site and unsettles it: the merit men have attached to the place, the bath, the fast, the pilgrimage, the posture, he sets aside as the outward husk of a thing whose substance is inward. The holiness men sought at the river Ganges, he held, was not in the river.

Guru Nanak at Kurukshetra on the day of a solar eclipse, attended by a local prince — a Janamsakhi scene of the Guru confronting ritual custom. — Janamsakhi painting, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The One without form

The core of the teaching can be set down in a single line, and the tradition sets it down at the very head of its scripture. Ik Onkar: there is One. The phrase opens the Mul Mantar, the root invocation that begins the Japji, Nanak’s great morning composition, and the Japji in turn opens the whole canon. Ik is the numeral one; Onkar names the one creative reality that the number points to — a being declared in the verses that follow as true, the maker, without fear and without enmity, beyond time, unborn, self-existent, and made known through the Guru’s grace. The God of this confession is nirankar, without form: no image can hold it, no temple contains it, no priest stands between it and the soul. This is the formless devotion — nirguna, the worship of a deity without quality or attribute — that ran through the religious underground of late-medieval north India, and Nanak’s voice joins a chorus that included the weaver-poet Kabir, whose verses would one day stand in the same scripture as his own.

Yet a formless God is not, in Nanak’s frame, a distant one. The same One that no form can hold saturates the created order and is met within the human heart. The way to it is not flight from the world but attention inside it, and Nanak gave that attention a name and a discipline. Nam japna — the remembrance of the Name, the turning of the mind continually toward the One. Kirat karni — honest labor, the earning of bread by one’s own true effort. Vand chhakna — the sharing of what one earns, the giving of a portion to others. The three are named together still, and they are pointedly, deliberately ordinary. There is no cave in them, no begging bowl, no ash-smeared withdrawal. Against the whole apparatus of renunciation that his culture honored as the highest road, Nanak set the grihastha, the householder — the man or woman who works, marries, raises children, and finds God not by leaving that life but by living it awake. He had seen the holy men at their stations and was unmoved. The body starved at a temple gate, he held, moved God no more than the body fed at home; sanctity was not a property of Brahmin birth, and a bath at a sacred ford washed nothing but the skin.

The remembrance Nanak taught was not, in his frame, a technique for getting something. It was the soul’s recovery of what it had forgotten. The human condition as he diagnosed it is one of haumai — the self turned in on itself, the proud little “I-am” that takes the ego for the center and so cannot see the One. Caught in that forgetting, a person is bound to the turning wheel of birth and death, the round of transmigration that the religions of his world all took for granted; release — liberation from the cycle — comes not by works piled up or merit purchased but by the grace of the One met in the remembered Name, which dissolves the forgetting at its root. The contemplative and the social sides of the teaching are one thing seen twice. The man who has stopped mistaking himself for the center can no longer mistake another man’s caste for a measure of his worth, because both errors are the same error. To remember God truly is to see every other creature as the One sees it, which is to say without rank.

It is here that the social edge of the teaching cut deepest. To say that God is one and reachable by anyone who remembers the Name is to say that the gradations men live by do not run all the way down. Caste, in Nanak’s preaching, has no standing before the One; neither does the division of Hindu from Muslim, nor the authority of the religious specialist who trades on it. He would not grant that the merit of a pilgrimage, the cleansing of a fast, or the learning of the Sanskrit-bound priest brought a soul one step nearer the divine, and he said so in a vernacular that the unlettered could carry — the Punjabi of the fields, not the temple tongue of the few. The doctrine was not left as words. At Kartarpur — the town he founded late in life on the bank of the Ravi, gathering a community around himself — Nanak set the principle on a table. All who came ate together, in a single row, from one kitchen, without regard to the rank that would have kept them apart anywhere else: the langar, the free common meal, a theology one could taste. Beside it stood the pangat, the common row of seating that put Brahmin and outcaste, Hindu and Muslim, rich man and beggar shoulder to shoulder on the same ground. In a land where who might eat with whom was the very grammar of caste, the shared row was an argument, and it remains the most visible thing the tradition does. At Kartarpur, too, the daily rhythm took the shape it would keep: the community gathered before dawn to sing the hymns, worked the fields through the day, and gathered again at evening — devotion, labor, and the shared meal folded into one unbroken practice, the threefold path lived rather than recited.

The lamp passed on

Nanak died at Kartarpur in 1539, an old man among the community he had made. The succession he arranged is the hinge on which everything after him turns. He had two sons, and he passed over both. The man he chose was a disciple, Lehna, whom he renamed Angad — a word the tradition reads as of my own limb, a part of himself — and the renaming carries the whole logic of what Sikh authority would become. The teacher’s office did not descend by blood and did not stay with one body. It was a single light, jot, lit from one lamp to the next: nine Gurus would follow Angad, each understood to bear the same inner flame Nanak first carried, so that the ten are not ten teachers but one office held in succession.

The historian’s Nanak is harder to reach than the tradition’s, and the gap is itself part of the reception. Almost everything narrated of his life comes from the janam-sakhis, the “birth-stories,” collections of episodes assembled by later devotees and surviving in several distinct recensions — the Bala tradition, the Puratan, the Miharban, the illustrated B-40 manuscript — the earliest of them dating from the seventeenth century, more than a hundred years after his death. They are hagiography in the strict sense: lives written to edify, dense with miracle and with scenes constructed to dramatize a doctrine. Critical study, of which W. H. McLeod’s mid-twentieth-century work is the watershed, has shown how many of the famous episodes are later additions, fitted to the teaching and sometimes borrowed from the wider stock of holy-man legend. What survives the sifting is a spare outline — the Punjab birth, the Sultanpur employment, the turn to teaching, the founding of Kartarpur, the succession to Angad — around which the tradition has wrapped a luminous body of story. The two registers do not cancel: the documentary record is thin and the remembered life is rich, and the community has always lived inside the second without needing the first to license it.

That arrangement made of Nanak’s preaching a religion. Out of Kartarpur grew the tradition that named itself for its members — sikh, a learner, a disciple — and Sikhism carried his hymns forward as its founding voice. Angad is credited with fixing the Gurmukhi script in which they would be written. Later Gurus built the institutions: the territorial organization of the community, the central shrine at Amritsar that became the Harmandir Sahib, and, in 1604, the compilation of the first authoritative scripture. Into that book the fifth Guru gathered the hymns of the Gurus before him, Nanak’s foremost among them, and set beside them chosen voices from the wider world of formless devotion — Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev, the Sufi Farid — so that a Muslim saint’s lines and a low-caste cobbler-poet’s lines sit in the same canon under the same authority. In the tradition’s own account this is not borrowing but recognition: the One that spoke through Nanak had spoken through these others too, and the scripture simply gathers the witness. The historian, surveying the same milieu — the bhakti devotion of the age, the Sant singers of the formless Name, the Sufi orders threaded through the Punjab — sees a shared vocabulary and a shared enemy in empty ritual, and is tempted to read Nanak as a confluence, a syncretism of Hindu and Muslim streams. The tradition declines that reading at its root. What Nanak received, it holds, was revelation, not a recombination of materials lying to hand; the resonances are admitted, the origin is not conceded.

Five centuries on, the final Guru of the line was no longer a man. In 1708 the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, dying, declared that the office would pass into the scripture itself: the Guru Granth Sahib would be the eternal Guru, the living teacher of the community thereafter, and the line of human Gurus closed with him. The book that opens with Nanak’s Japji thus became the thing Nanak’s word had pointed toward all along — a teacher without body, without caste, without the form that no form could ever hold. The accountant who walked into a river and came out with a Name to repeat had, in the end, made his teaching into the one thing that outlasts every teacher who carries it: a voice on the page that any learner can open and hear.

→ Related: Sikhism · Guru Granth Sahib · Harmandir Sahib · Kabir · Bhakti Movement · Sant Tradition Nirguna Bhakti · Hinduism · Islam · Sufism · Syncretism · Reincarnation · Moksha · Varanasi · Bodh Gaya · Gautama Buddha