Nānak

Indian religious leader

• Born: April 15, 1469
• Birthplace: Rāi Bhoi dī Talvandī, Punjab (now Nankana Sahib, Pakistan)
• Died: 1539
• Place of death: Kartārpur, Punjab, Mughal Empire (now in Pakistan)

Nānak was a religious reformer who synthesized the fundamental principles of Islam and the tradition of Hinduism into a new universal religion called Sikhism. His teaching emphasized the equality of all human beings and regarded responsible social action as integral to true spiritual practice. Monism and the rejection of excessive ritual are the basic tenets of this religion.

Early Life

The historical facts concerning the life of Nānak (NAHN-ahk) can be gleaned only by sifting them carefully from the embellishments of myth and legend. The essential story of his life, however, seems fairly clear. Nānak’s father, Kalu, was a relatively well-to-do person and commanded local influence.

Nānak was a precocious and gifted child possessing unusual intelligence and an extraordinarily pronounced concern for the well-being of everyone with whom he came into contact. He had a contemplative nature with a strong inclination toward otherworldly preoccupations. Stories about his childhood and the years toward adulthood indicate these qualities. It is said that even when Nānak was an infant, his heart would melt at the sight of others’ suffering. At play, he would devise games imitating holy men and involving mental concentration to achieve a perception of God.

Nānak’s intellectual abilities and spiritual insights had already developed phenomenally before he was old enough to start school, although the story of his questioning the teacher on the first day of school about the significance of the letters of the alphabet and his composing on that occasion an acrostic on each letter is almost certainly apocryphal. The same must be said about his discussion with the family Brahmin when the latter came to invest him with the sacred thread. Nānak rejected the thread, thus refuting the importance of the external trappings of religion. A hymn by Nānak ascribed to this occasion must be of later date.

Nānak was married at a very young age and soon had children, but to his father’s dismay he did not settle down to a regular occupation. If Kalu sent him on a trip to buy merchandise for business, Nānak gave away the money to holy mendicants and called it a “true transaction.” Asked to work at the family farm, he left things unattended. Stories about this period of his life relate several supernatural occurrences. For example, one hot, sunny day while herding cattle, he fell asleep under the shade of a tree. The shade did not move with the sun’s movement. Another time, a cobra was seen shading his head with its hood while he slept in the sun.

Life’s Work

At the age of eighteen, Nānak moved to Sultanpur, where his father and brother-in-law procured for him employment as storekeeper and accountant at a government store. He stayed there for about ten years, settling down to a well-regulated life. He maintained his family with only a small portion of his salary, giving the rest away to the poor. He spent his spare time meditating or discussing metaphysics with holy men and continued thus to progress steadily in his spiritual search. One morning, when he went for his daily bath in the Bein, a nearby stream, he disappeared, some thought in the Bein. During his disappearance, he had a spiritual experience. Soon after he reappeared, he proclaimed that he was neither Hindu nor Muslim, left his family and all other worldly belongings, and set out on worldwide travels.

Popular accounts of Nānak’s travels are filled with fantastic occurrences. He is described as traveling to distant places, often by a supernatural process of instant self-transportation. These stories do have a basis in history, however, and they are also quite meaningful in another way, for they convey in a veiled manner aspects of his teaching. Primary biographical sources, such as they are, claim that he went as far as Assam in the east, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the south, Tibet and China in the north, and the Middle Eastern countries and Turkey in the west. On many of these journeys, he was accompanied by his Muslim disciple, Mardana. Wherever Nānak went, many people became his followers. Hindus regarded him as their guru and Muslims as their Pir, and eventually his followers came to be known as Sikhs, meaning disciples. Thus started Sikhism , a new religion transcending the boundaries of Hinduism and Islam.

The religion that Nānak preached emphasized a monistic metaphysics and the importance of social and moral responsibility. The elements of his teaching are illustrated by various incidents during his peregrinations. According to one account, Nānak pointed out the difference between the wholesomeness of honest living and the corruption of ill-gotten wealth by squeezing in separate hands two morsels of food, one from a hard-working carpenter with whom he stayed and the other from a rich man whose banquet he had refused. From his host’s food poured milk and from the rich man’s food poured blood.

In another story, Nānak reformed a highway thug whose name, Sajjan, meant friend. With his hospitality and show of piety, Sajjan enticed travelers to stay with him and robbed them while they slept. Nānak shocked Sajjan into realizing the true meaning of his name and the karmic consequences of evil deeds. Sajjan mended his ways. At Hardwar, on the banks of the Ganges, Nānak stood in the river and started to splash water toward the west. Asked by the Hindu pilgrims what he was doing, he said that he was watering his fields in the Punjab. When they laughed, he asked how they expected the water they threw toward the sun to reach the sun, thus pointing out the futility of rituals. Similarly, in a dialogue with a pundit, he expounded on the vanity of learning devoid of the inner experience of true reality. Inner peace, he insisted, is obtained by contemplation, not mere reading. During his sojourn in the Himalayas, he met some yogis. He reprimanded them for hiding from the social and political turmoil of the time, saying that it was their duty to guide and help oppressed humanity.

The best-remembered story about Nānak’s travels is one about his visit to Mecca. It is said that on reaching the Kaaba, Nānak lay down with his feet toward the shrine, the holiest in Islam. Outraged, the keepers of the shrine admonished him to move his feet away from the Kaaba. He refused and told them to turn his feet to where there was no God. As they dragged him around, the Kaaba moved in the same direction as his feet, the moral being that God is everywhere. In the turmoil caused by Bābur’s invasion of India, Nānak was taken prisoner. It is believed that Bābur, whose interest in religion was deep, heard about Nānak and met with him. Nānak is said to have given him instruction and conveyed to him his concern for people’s suffering.

In about 1526, Nānak ended his travels and settled down at Kartarpur, on the bank of the river Ravi in central Punjab. There he consolidated his life’s work and laid down the essential organizational bases of the Sikh religion the institutions of guruship, prayer, sangat (congregation), langar (communal meal and sharing), and family. He returned to the life of a regular householder, considering it far superior to renunciation as a means of spiritual realization. Before his death, in 1539, he chose his best disciple, Angad, as the next guru in preference to his own sons.

Throughout his life, Nānak regularly recorded his observations about life in poetical compositions that over time added up to a large volume. These compositions, or hymns, articulate with intense feeling Nānak’s views on theology and ethics, and on social, political, and economic issues. Used as recitations for prayer from the very time of their creation, Nānak’s hymns comprise the nucleus to which the verses of the later Sikh gurus and other saints were added to make the Sikh scripture, the Ādi Granth. Nānak’s verses contain the essence of the Sikh religion. They are gathered in various sequences. Most important among these sequences is the Japji, meaning recitation, the daily morning prayer. Its recitation is also central to prayers for many other occasions. In a sense, Japji contains the gist of the whole scripture. The root mantra of the Sikh religion is Japji’s opening verse. Because of its quintessential character, the verse is also a complete prayer by itself and figures at the start of other major compositions. It reads,

There is one GodWhose name is TruthHe is the CreatorDevoid of fearWithout rancourOf eternal formBeyond birth and death.Self-existent,By the Guru’s grace He is obtained.

The root mantra has its further summation in “There is one God” (Ek Onkar) oneness including all other attributes of divinity. In Nānak’s teachings, as Creator, the divine Self produces creation from within Itself. Creation, therefore, is part of the divine reality, emerging from and merging back into the eternal oneness of Being. There is no duality between the Creator and the created. As creatures, however, human beings suffer from the illusion that they have an existence of their own as separate individuals. This separateness from the source, regardless of whether they know it, causes grief and suffering for them. The state of being an all-encompassing unity is alone a state of unqualified happiness. God is that state; God is perfect bliss.

Nānak explained that to free themselves from the sorrows of the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, human beings must regain union with God. One cannot achieve this goal only by the performance of outward acts of piety or by learning. Spiritual realization requires sincere devotion to God and detachment from worldly desires. One must bring to this devotion complete self-surrender to God’s will and a total renunciation of the ego. Nānak often described the relation between God and the human soul as one between the bride and the bridegroom. He prescribes the recitation (simran) of God’s name (nam) as a necessary means for expressing as well as winning the love of God. Nam comprehends all compositions (bani), such as Nānak’s hymns, so that simran involves not mere mechanical repetition of words but concentration on their meaning and application of this meaning in one’s daily conduct.

The process by which, with simran, one overcomes the ego, achieves mental calm, and becomes disciplined in action is slow and gentle (sahaj). Nānak rejected extreme asceticism as a means to spiritual development. He rather recommended a life of moderation one that includes normal worldly activities but shuns attachment to the world. One should be like the lotus, which stays dry amid water. Progress on this path of spiritual growth requires personal guidance by a teacher (guru), the true guru being one who has realized truth. Also necessary for progress is the company (sangat) of others who are on the same quest. Sangat not only provides mutual mental reinforcement but also is the arena for right social action, without which there can be no spiritual life. It represents the equality, community, and mutual interdependence of all humanity. In Nānak’s teaching, God, guru, and humans are one. The road to God realization lies squarely in the human world. A loving acceptance of this world fills Nānak’s compositions with such enchanting poetry and music as make the face of the earth a window on the divine.

Significance

Nānak’s teaching was part of the religious reform that swept India during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By that time, Muslims had ruled the country for about three hundred years and made a deep impact on it. On one hand, Islam and its social egalitarianism had spread widely, but on the other, the strictly defined character of the Muslim religion and the Muslim state’s discriminatory policy toward Hindus caused extreme religious conflicts and social strife. Communal antagonism bred bigotry and an excessive preoccupation with the external forms of religion, leading to frequent oppression of non-Muslims. That tended to tear asunder the fabric of society. There was a dire need for a resolution of this conflict, for the creation of unity and harmony.

Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who emphasized love of God instead of works of religion, many of whom were active in India, helped prepare the way toward such a resolution. The full answer to the problem came with the rise of the bhakti movement, which spontaneously overwhelmed India on all sides toward the fifteenth century. Bhakti, which means love of God, rejected all outward forms of religion and found the universal meaning of religion in intense devotion to God. It considered the love of God inseparable from the love of humanity and the rest of creation, thus combining the quest for the divine with active involvement in the world.

Indian Sufism and the bhakti movement reached a culmination in Nānak’s teaching. He preached a universal religion based on the oneness of God and the sameness of human beings everywhere. Because of the force his message had for unifying people of widely divergent backgrounds, he left a deep imprint on Indian civilization. His picture, which shows him with a long, white, perfectly rounded beard, with large eyes half closed in quiet bliss, and with his whole aspect exuding a deep friendliness and tranquillity, hangs prominently in the homes of Indians, and his image lives in their minds.

Bibliography

Anand, Balwant Singh. Guru Nānak: His Life Was His Message. New Delhi, India: Guru Nānak Foundation, 1983. A lucid biographical account.

Banerjee, Anil Chandra. Guru Nānak and His Times. Patiala, India: Punjabi University, 1971. About half of the volume is devoted to the historical context of Nānak’s life and work.

McLeod, W. H. Guru Nānak and the Sikh Religion. Reprinted in Sikhs and Sikhism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A major work by a non-Indian. The focus of this volume is on Nānak rather than on Sikhism as a whole, but three other volumes explore the religion itself in greater detail. The book has aroused some controversy.

Nānak. Hymns of Guru Nānak. Translated by Khushwant Singh. New Delhi, India: Orient Longmans, 1969. A judicious selection of hymns from Nānak’s works. Translated with literary sensitivity.

Nānak. Hymns of Guru Nānak. Translated by S. Manmohan Singh. Patiala, India: Language Department, Punjab, 1972. Contains all of Nānak’s compositions. Gives the original in Punjabi, an English translation, and an explanation of the meaning in Punjabi prose.

Ralhan, O. P., ed. Guru Nanak Dev. Vol. 1 in Great Gurus of the Sikhs. New Delhi, India: Anmol, 1998. Combines a biography of Nānak with social, theological, political, and economic analysis of his career and teachings.

Singh, Daljeet, and Kharak Singh, eds. Sikhism: Its Philosophy and History. Introduction by Choor Singh. Chandigarh, India: Institute of Sikh Studies, 1997. Comprehensive anthology of essays on all aspects of Sikhism; delves into the history of the religion and the role of Nānak in its founding. Includes color illustrations and bibliographic references.

Singh, Ganda, ed. Sources of the Life and Teachings of Guru Nānak. Patiala, India: Punjabi University, Department of Punjab Historical Studies, 1969. Compiled by a foremost scholar of Sikh history, it is a basic work.

Singh, Harbans. Guru Nānak and Origins of the Sikh Faith. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1969. Examines Nānak’s work as the foundation of Sikhism.

Singh, Kartar. Guru Nānak Dev: Life and Teachings. Ludhiana, India: Lahore Book Shop, 1969. Tells the story of the guru’s life and concludes with a review of his teachings.

Singh, Trilochan. Guru Nānak, Founder of Sikhism: A Biography. Delhi, India: Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, 1969. This book is a standard, well-documented work.

Talib, Gurbachan Singh. Guru Nānak: His Personality and Vision. Delhi, India: Gur Das Kapur, 1969. A comprehensive and analytical survey of Nānak’s thought.