Men of God

NANAK’S LIFE-WORK

The Guru had in his travels as well as at Kartarpur often fallen into devotional trance, and sung under the compelling necessity of Divine inspiration several hymns to the Divine Father. These spontaneous compositions of poetry make references of admiration to Kabir, Nam Dev, Jaidev, Tribehan and many other devotee-saints that went before him. But unlike them, he taught by example and precept that the world must be faced and not renounced as nothing. He adopted the age-old Hindu theory of reincarnation and preached that the goal of the human soul’s journey was ‘Nirvan’, i.e., the individual consciousness merging into the Absolute or one God and taught that the main means of attaining Nirvan or Sachkhand (the land of the Real) — according to some Sikhs both are identical, according to others, not—is the singing of the Sat Nam or True Name, that the grace of the Guru was absolutely essential to possess the True Name, that true Guru was God Himself, and that since God’s light dawned in his heart Nanak was the divine Guru.

Whether Guru Nanak was King Janaka¹⁰⁷

It will be interesting to note what Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said referring to the ten Gurus of the Sikhs. “They are all incarnations of the saintly King Janaka. I have heard it said by the Sikhs that just before attaining liberation he was possessed with the idea of doing good to the world. So he was born successively as the ten Gurus of the Sikhs, and after founding the Sikh religion was united for ever with the Supreme Brahman. There is no reason to disbelieve this.”
or not according to the Sikhs, the fact remains that his Divine communion and personal spiritual experiences were the basis of his positive teachings and they were the mainspring of all his activities in propagating his faith. But he had to contend against both Hindus and Mussalmans. While his heart bled at the sight of the oppression by the Muhammadan rulers, he became almost desperate when he saw around him everywhere the unspeakable ignorance in which were steeped the classes as well as the masses of Hindus. For, while the Brahmins—themselves fallen and ritual-ridden-lived upon the credulity of the other castes, the Rajputs prided upon their privilege to marry their daughters to the Moslem ruling classes; the masses were content with their caste usages and crude worship; while the few truly religious retired to the forests convinced of the unreality or ephemeralness of the world. The Guru saw that the inelastic caste-divisions had no relation whatever to the economic or spiritual needs of the people and attacked it as the main cause of the social, religious and political degradation in the country; and in inducing a larger spiritual vision of the Godhead, he deprecated idolatry and all lower forms of worship.

But India is an impossible country; the continental magnitude of the land is perhaps an excuse; and the Guru in his attempt to bring the divergent peoples under a single spiritual banner was indeed many centuries ahead of the times.

And he bewails:

This age is a knife, kings are butchers, justice hath taken wings and fled;

In this completely dark night of falsehood the moon of truth is never seen to rise;

I have become perplexed in my search;

In the darkness I find no way.

Devoted to pride, I weep in sorrow;

How shall deliverance be obtained ?

Yet the Guru stopped not. He provided the steel which was forged into the holy sword, the Khalsa, that astonishingly novel creation of Guru Govind, as will be seen in the next chapter.