Guru Nanak rose with tumultuous moral indignation, but unperturbed himself. And he rose as a new genius of Heaven, a spontaneous ‘Buddha-personality – the Handicraft of Creation. In this mind, there is at last no kafir, there is none who stands in need of anything but God’s mercy. The Guru says that Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh all are in great need of becoming true men. All the need of the great sympathy of that one cosmic spirit which pervades this creative Nature and Nature’s creation is He in person, whom we can touch flesh to flesh, and not a dead machine that merely revolves.
Guru Nanak condemns false creeds and crooked politics and the unjust social order. He condemns the hollow scriptures and isms of the times; he condemns barren pieties, asceticism’s, trances, sound-hearing yoga’s, bead-telling, namaze’s fasts, and all the formal vagaries of religious and political hypocrisies. He condemns them without sparing any, for it was all darkness in the world and men.
True Islam had declined long ago – a great spiritual momentum has already produced a communal cohesion of a great mass of men who did and thought as they chose, mostly like the old conquering Aryans and Brahmins. Islam then established in India as a religion had become a tyranny. It was just lip-profession as in the case of the Hindu and Christian. Lip-profession covers the bestiality of man in his social of political tyranny.
Guru Nanak takes up, like a giant, the long-rooted conventions of Hindu and Muslim on the palm of his hand and pitches them into the sea. Off with cant. Away with nonsense. Down with lies.
This calmness of Guru Nanak is superhuman; this is the power of the New Presence of God revealed through him.
Luther’s melodrama of burning the papal bulls is the wrath of a mere man, it is the small theatrical show, of an extraordinary human power. The true power of the Infinite is, never agitated like that. It never seems so extraordinary, so out of the way, so theatrical. It is the powerful calf of unfathomable depths.
Here, in the Punjab, was the wholesale destruction of all such systems in a glace, in a smile, in a presence. Down with the dead form and the evil minded social order. Down with false Islam, and false Hinduism; take to the true creeds. He filled the people with Himself.
The people forgot their past errors. Here was a man at last, their friend, their God, on whom they, like animals in distress, had been used to call in their distress and sorrow, as taught by those rare hidden nameless wanderers that came and sat under their trees with them, who were inexplicably happy and begged food at their poor doors.
God came to them suddenly from nowhere. And he was so human, yet inscrutable in his strange, wondrous miraculous “natural super naturalness.” And they were face to face with Him on whom they used to call as “Hari, Krishna”, “Krishna”, “Rama”, but here was He a man !
Great was the joy of the people, They merged all other names in Him, all scriptures in His speech. The soul of a whole people suddenly rose to its inner sovereignty. Pundits and scholars may now read the word of the Guru, as their learned treatises might assist them, but to the seekers of truth, the people, then and now it is as simple as the rising of the sun on their mud huts. It was the cure for their suffering. It is the end of their dark night. And His Word on their lips can mean only one thing-it is the Guru, His love, His Mercy, His Help. To the disciples of the Buddha of Kapilvastu, all scriptures were resumed in the name Buddha. To the disciples of the Christ, the whole of human history gathered in and shone before their loving gaze in ‘Christ’. The Sikhs of the Punjab forgot all the past in the new light that flooded their hearths and homes, that illuminated them; they saw it was God’s Universe. Death is not the goal; the body of flesh and its dead rotten finalities are not the end. The people understood this one thing-call on Him when are in difficulty, as the child calls on the mother and the Guru comes to your aid. There is He.
This is all the meaning of the Guru’s song to the people. To sing His praise, to love Him – this is essential, what else is needed ?
Jesus Christ, the Buddha of Palestine, had added the Pasion to the Nirvana of the Buddha of Kapilvastu, and Guru Nanak, The Apostle of Nankana, added to the Nirvana and Passion the love of men, Sadh Sangat in which there was no ‘Kafir’ and no castes. Man and his God are one. In Guru Nanak all the former prophets are fulfilled and completed.
Guru Nanak, The Apostle of Nankana, added to the Nirvana and Passion the love of men, Sadh Sangat in which there was no ‘Kafir’ and no castes. Man and his God are one. In Guru Nanak all the former prophets are fulfilled and completed.
The Name “Guru” the teacher, or the Dispeller of Darkness, “The Logos-in-body”, “The Infinite-in-person”, he passed on to his successor. He could not live without the people, the disciples. He must sing and there was his minstrel, Mardana. He must gather crowds of angles around him, he was happy seeing great congregations happy and free in that great inner love which no one can name, and no one can say he knows it not, as Goethe puts it. He added simple home life to the individual, freedom to man and made him responsible to a society of gods. Man was made out of his inner goodness, spontaneously responsible of Love. Happily responsible to himself and not to the legislature ! In the society of man, conceived by Guru Nanak, came the resurrection of the individual as well as his sweet death.
"God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys,
Myself each traitor to myself.
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My cog wherever I go,
Yet one there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me,
Break off the yoke and set me free.
The soul ripens in the company of the Guru’s devotes. He has become now multitudes.
Guru Gobind Singh – In Him, Guru Nanak’s sword in unsheathed. The Buddha had stood between the doe and the huntsman, the Christ between the people and the tyrants, the rulers, the kings. It is here too the same mercy, the same compassion. The tore humanity into no sects. Hindus and Muslims met round him as Disciples. The work ‘Sikh’ means learner.
And the feeling of every new Buddha exhausts the one patterns of its expression forever. With the Guru, Heaven unsheathed its sword to save the people from both religious and political oppression-the fanatic, savage oppression of the oppressors. This feeling has yet to work in spontaneous progress of man till Humanity ripens, and the visible proof of His sword being the sword of self-sacrifice, as was the Cross of the Christ, and being but the symbol of his compassion, is marked on the face of his people, these Sikhs, his disciples. Far away, separated from the Guru, for more than two centuries, after Guru Gobind Singh’s time persecuted, hunted, tortured-the Sikh, humanly speaking, has borne untold suffering, Yet here he is, When, in 1923, he was mercilessly beaten by the iron-shod, blind lathis of the police at Guru-ka-Bagh, near Amritsar, beaten unconscious and felled, he again rose and went towards the “Door of the Guru” ; again he was beaten unconscious, he fell and rose again with the same direction in his soul, the Sikh in him still unbeaten. There shone the light of the Guru on his face. It is same if we Sikhs blame the oppressors. Blaming is the way of cowards, those gone degenerate.
In the times of Guru Gobind Singh there shone the same light on the horseback of the Khalsa. No! The Sikh did not end in the barrack-room, as says Tagore, the poet who is not intimate with the inner animal in the Sikh, the animal that lifts its dumb eyes to his Guru, his God. They certainly do not know him, who say so.
If the Guru and his disciples took up sword, it was not with the hands of a Lenin or a Napoleon; it was rather as a Joan’ d Arc or like the wives of the Inca, when caught unawares by the barbarous Spaniards. Mere cries of a blind history should not be able to hide the sun of Truth; that Guru Gobind Singh waged war is a myth.
The Sikh when beaten at Guru ka Bagh was not alone; he was not an individual, he was like his Guru, whole multitudes; he was the people, even as today.
There were women on the roadside chanting the name of Guru and giving their brothers the milk of affection to sip before they went onwards to be beaten to death. No victor was received with greater honours, no king was ever given a more sincere welcome. This is the Sadh Sangat of the Guru, there is a spirit of self-sacrifice for the people, infused forever into a whole people. If the Sikh is still ignorant of the great Sikh consciousness. If the Sikh is still ignorant of the great humanity of his Guru, if he gets small and miserable at times, and is ferocious like the lion, it is the exhibition of his own vexation, not the Guru. All evil about him is thick darkness; but great is the spark that shines therein. It is only the spark that we should see. Darkness is every where in this world-a wholly unsatisfactory world-if the spark is lacking.
Guru Gobind Singh’s noble feeling is as divine as of the Buddha, as passionate as of the Christ, and as intensely human as of Muhammad. And he is the Guru, the God-personality which as a myriad facets.
He did not save his sons, nor his wife or mother or father. He lived and died as one who gave his all to the people. He sacrificed the propagation of his religion too, if the people could be saved. He did not call the people to any kingdom-he called them to death, to affliction. It is the summons of the Guru that still calls the people and they die hearing his voice. This intense love of the people for him is an expression of his feeling for them, not so much of their feeling for Him.
Not that Guru Gobind Singh felt not the pangs of a man and a father; he felt as the Buddha felt when Rahula asked him for his patrimony. See Guru Gobind Singh in Lakhi jungle after Chamkaur when he asks, in the extreme poignancy of that human feeling, that someone should go and get the news of his other two sons whod had gone to Sirhind side; two were lost before his eyes in the battle of Chamkaur from where he came to Lakhi jungle. The messenger had gone; Sirhind is many miles away and he asks them. “Has he returned, what news ? ” “No, Sire ! not yet” , they say. “Ah ! go and get on a high tree and look out; he must be coming.” Such is the father in Guru Gobind Singh. This man of keen, affectionate feeling as a man, a son, a father, a husband gives away his all for those whom he loves so intensely-in the service of the people; and he loves the people as no one every before him did. He calls them of his own blood, The Khalsa, the Beloved child of Guru Gobind Singh. The disciples become the children of God, of his Blood. There is the feeling of Buddha in the breast of Guru Gobind Singh, the same renunciation, the same Nirvana, the same good will for all living beings, and yet it no more wears the “Yellow Robe”. A wholly new shape, long tresses knotted on the crown of his head, a soldier’s dress, a sword by the side, and riding on his bay charger. He librates the slaves of centuries from the horrors of persecution and the idle speculation of metaphysics; puts the strength of gods into their muscles, makes them men, and they despise death and go riding like kings , these very grass cutters, howers of wood and drawers of water. And he asks soldiers to die to make human misery less and human happiness more. In vain does his disciple breathe who does not live and die for His great divine pain for his fellow beings.
Religion was purified by the compassion of the Thathagata, the Buddha; human love by the mercy of Jesus Christ, and it is the Guru’s great love of the people that is now filling all the noble tendencies of mankind. Now is needed the compassion of the Buddha, the love of Jesus the Christ. Now appears in addition the divine brotherhood of Sadh Sangat of the Guru, and all the previous Buddhas fulfilled in the Guru. All religions must take it up, all political creeds must bow down to it, science must work for it, so hath the Guru willed. Modern politics has been purified by the Guru and social reconstruction ushered in, which shall be now the universal tendency of the whole future struggle of man. The law of love is to dominate all spheres of human activity. False justification of human tyranny as the law of Karma is to be extinguished by the Law of forgiveness.
The Buddha of Nankana and Anandpur has risen and He is to be fulfilled in every individual man as the past Buddhas and in one Universal Human Society in a lyrical divine fellowship with its face towards God1. In Guru Nanak, in Guru Gobind Singh the true democracy of humanity is to be realized. All previous tiger-history is to be put away and all nations have to open their bibles and read the sweetness of human love in their soul and heart, their speech and service. Such is the new future of man, to be realized in the Guru’s City of Joy.2
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