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As a saint who managed to infuriate and bewilder both Hindus and Muslims with his
famous proclamation, "There is no Hindu or Musalman but only lovers of God",
it is appropriate to begin Nanak's life with two incidents which show how far he
took this belief system. In Hardwar, one of the holy cites he entered the sacred
waters of the Ganga to observe pilgrims offering water to the spirits of their ancestors
in the next world while facing east. He immediately turned west and began doing
the same. When asked what he was up to he answered that he was watering his fields
in the Punjab, a good six or seven hundred miles away. Upon hearing their ridicule,
he shot back, " What is absurd in this act? If your water can reach the next world
then surely mine can reach the Punjab."
Many years later he somehow managed to reach the sacred city of Mecca and was found
by an angry mullah who castigated him for sleeping with his feet pointing towards
the shrine. "Turn my feet, oh holy man, to the place where God does not dwell."
The angry cleric did his best but whichever way he turned he somehow found himself
holding a pair of feet pointing towards the shrine.
These stories are almost certainly apocryphal. The devout faithful at both spots
would not have let such a scoffer get away alive, or at the least without a sound
beating. Nevertheless they illustrate the nature of Nanak's thought, a fiercely independent
love of god that would brook no superstitions or clergy that sought to intervene
between or interrupt a soul in communion with its Maker. Nanak was born
in 1469 and he died in 1538.it was a ripe old age in those days of turmoil. The
Mughals were invading India; bhakti poetry with its disdain for pretensions of caste
and book learning in realizing God had been well established for a while. The intellectual
atmosphere was very fluid, allowing the emergence of many strange cults and sects
alternating with the rumblings of the establishment priesthood, both Hindu and Muslim,
and an occasional state sanctioned pogrom to keep everybody on their toes. Success
and disaster were equal in measure and possibilities, and never more so than in
the field of the spirit. In these turbulent times was born Nanak, in the village
of Talwadi, by the river Ravi and about 24 miles from the city of Lahore.
 His
father, Kalu, was the village accountant and the landlord's astrologers had in the
typical Indian narrative predicted astonishing things for the boy. He had an elder
sister named Nanaki so he was named Nanak. He was a exceedingly brilliant child,
and like Jesus before the elders not shy of displaying his erudition. At
the age of seven he made his first convert a teacher who was devastated by the seemingly
vacant young man's great knowledge which showed him as a mere pedant. He immediately
resolved to renounce the world and seek that knowledge of god which gave Nanak such
earthly knowledge too as a bonus. Nanak also refused to invest himself with the
sacred thread claiming it was a meaningless ritual. He was nine years old at the
time but he managed to convince everybody somehow. In typical Indian fashion his
spiritual bent of mind alarmed mightily the family and they took recourse to that
favorite panacea of India, marriage! The poor lad was married off at the age of
14, and was made the storekeeper of the governor of the province Daulat Khan, a
position of great responsibility and offering unparalleled opportunities for graft
which he was too spiritually innocent to realize. The young man was a spectacular
success at his job and his marriage proved to be no impediment to his spiritual
life. It is sometimes forgotten that India did not only have a tradition of renunciate
spirituality but also many great sages who lived in the world with their families.
The increasing spiritual powers ascendant in him however made him chafe at the waste
of time his job was and he quit. Accompanied by his Muslim soul-friend Mardana,
Nanak set off on the first of his many pilgrimages. He was an indefegatible traveler
and turned up in the oddest places across India, including Assam, a clear thousand
miles from the Punjab. He spent twelve years in wandering and grew immensely in his
spiritual life but soon after plunged into The Dark Night of the Soul. His
constant debating, as well as his habit of showing up the spiritual pretensions
in people, may have had something to do with it. (It seems he was always prone to
periodic fits of depression characteristic of some melancholic types of genius.
In childhood he had turned upon a physician who had sought to cure him of his brooding
with words of rhythmic elegance.
Vaid bulaya, vaid ne pakad tatole bah
Bjola vaid nai jane hai dard kaleje ma
Jahu vaid ghar aapne, mere tha na ley
Hum rehtre sa appne tu kis daru de?
The doctor has come and he is tapping my pulse
The innocent man does not know this sickness is of the soul
Let the doctor be gone to his home; He who has afflicted me will cure me too.)
 In
any case he left for the Himalayas, where a combination of mountain air and private
talks with sages cleared this fog. He had his first direct experience of the 'True
One' as he called God. It is to be noted that spiritual power and knowledge and
the ability to perform miracles, all of which Nanak had in abundance, are still
not enough to bring about this Final realization. From then on he was literally
transformed and the sort of violent opposition he was wont to encounter literally
melted away in the face of such obvious holiness.
He settled down in Kartarpur as a guru of sorts who had a household and gave discourses.
He also established the Sikh custom of the 'langar' or Free Kitchen which served
food to all those in need. His renunciation of renunciation drew upon his head the
criticism of both the Muslim and Hindu holy men who were eternally suspicious of
the lures of the world. Nanak did not always answer them very politely but the gist
of his answers used to be that he was fixed enough in his realization not to wander
around and be a burden to the rest of society. The debate was really incomprehensible
because the austere life he led and propagated was not much different for renunciation.
What gave Nanak such potent power in his sayings was the fact that he was poet and
a musician and he had the knack of stating complex matters in words of great power,
set to haunting music. Never having been formally initiated he was not so
hung up on the guru phenomenon as the rest of India. There is irony in the fact
that he became the first Guru of the Sikhs, but that was by default. He had never
intended to found a new faith or sect. His verses form the tremendous opening chapters
of the scripture of the Sikhs called the Guru Granth Sahib. It was a work to which
many verses continued to be added over the years with contributions being included
solely on the criteria of spiritual merit and not on language or religious considerations.
Nanak believed in doing one's work fearlessly and without desire, with the mind
fixed upon god, as he knew the principle of the devil finding work for idle minds
and hands only too well. He was also very adamant that people should be responsible
for their actions, as Karma will operate inexorably and there is no point in repenting
at leisure.
 The
grace of god could however mollify some of the effects of past karma. Sometime in
October 1538 he knew the end was near and decided to choose a successor. Characteristically
he settled upon an expedient that disconcerted the average person. He threw his
bowl into the sewer and asked his faithful disciples, constantly promising to do
anything for him, to retrieve it. Even his sons failed him but a man named Lehna
performed the task. He was nominated as the successor and named Guru Angad.
Nanak took up his final post under a withered acacia tree. His last rites - a matter
of great personal indifference to Nanak - had become a matter of contention between
his Muslim disciples who wanted to bury the corpse and the Hindus who wanted to
cremate it. When they removed the shroud however the found only a mass of flowers
under an acacia tree that had blossomed out of season. Proving the truism that a
great man is never so misunderstood as by his disciples they buried or cremated
the flowers according to their bent. What was left was a stirring legacy of spiritual
poetry and the birth of a new religion - Sikhism.
- Rohit Arya
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