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Sikh Theology
Founder of a World Religion
by Sirdar Kapur Singh
There is an apocryphal
hadith, a saying of Prophet Mohammed, that five kinds
of men go to hell without being asked any previous reckoning
: the rulers because of their injustice; the Arabs because
of their racial fanaticism; the peasants because of their
arrogance; the merchants because of their lies; and scholars
because of their mental confusion and envy. It is, therefore,
prudent to define one’s terms before attempting to say something
on them.
Herein, what follows,
the term “founder” means not a follower, exegetist, syncretist,
a metaphysician or a philosopher, but one who, while in
direct contact with what Otto Rudolph in his Idea of
the Holy calls “Numenon”, and compulsively impelled
by it proclaims, formulates and preaches a way to such a
contact by others. A ‘religion’ is neither ethics, nor metaphysics,
neither mystical awareness nor magic, neither theism nor
worship of a deity or even the Deity; it is that which moves
man to the depth of his being and yet has not its origin
in the depths of human soul but moves it from outside. Just
as the central concept in art is ‘beauty’, in ethics ‘goodness’,
so in religion it is ‘holiness’, an intimate contact or
union with which is felt as utterly necessary for complete
satisfaction and wholeness of man. A ‘world religion’ is
that way of life on which all mankind may walk without the
apartheid of race, color, sex, age, caste, class, country
and clan.
It
is intended here to give, first, a briefest possible life-sketch
of the historical man Nanak, who became Guru Nanak, the
World Teacher, a short account of the nature of his prophetic
claim and a bare outline of his teachings and their relevance
to the modern human situation. Nanak was born on 15th April,
A.D. 1469 in the North-West of India in a village, now called
Nankana Sahib—the Holy Birthplace of Nanak—situated in Pakistan
from where the Sikhs, his followers, were expelled, almost
to a man, in 1947, when the outgoing Britishers divided
India into the two separate countries by drawing a pencil
line on the map of an indivisible India. As might be expected,
Nanak, the son of a petty high caste revenue official, was,
from the beginning, of an unworldly turn of mind, and many
attempts of his parents to engage him in some gainful occupation,
each time, ended in disaster, till he was persuaded to accept
the gainful and important post of the Chief Supplies Master
of a nearby Muslim Principality. The turning point in his
life came when he was twentyseven years old. During these
days, he would, while performing his duties, pass out into
reveries, frequently becoming trances. On one such occasion,
while supervising weighment of grain stores, he stopped
dead at the count of measure thirteen, which in Punjabi
language is the word tera, also meaning, “I am thine’',
and he went on counting tera, tera, while
measure after measure of stores was being passed out. As
was to be expected, the government took a serious notice
of it and an enquiry into his gross negligence was ordered
against him. While the enquiry was still in progress, Nanak,
as was his routine, went one early morning for his dip in
the neighboring stream and disappeared into the bed of the
river for full three days, when he was presumed drowned
and a search for his body proved fruitless. All these days,
he had sat, what in ancient texts on Yoga is called jalastambhasamadhi
‘trance-in-water’, a skill acquirable through prescribed
techniques and practices and also available to gifted individuals
from birth. There are many who possess this skill in India
even today. On the fourth day he emerged from the depths
of the waters and uttered the following words: “There is
no Hindu, no Mussalman”. [1] Whether he meant that deep
down in the substratum of Aryan and Semitic religions there
is an identity of base or whether he intended to convey
that the truth of both had been obscured and lost to practitioners
of both these faiths on account of verbal formulae and empty
rituals, it was a fit formula for the commencement of his
divine mission that demands acceptance of genuine dialogue
rather than conversion as the goal of transcending particularisms
or contending cultures and feuding religions, with a view
to discover a universal concept, not synthesis or synthetic
amalgam, but deeper penetration of one’s own religion in
thought, devotion and action, and thus to arrive at the
realisation that in every living religion there is a point
at which the religion itself loses its importance and that
to which it points, breaks through its particularity elevating
it to spiritual freedom and with it to a vision of spiritual
presence in other expressions of the ultimate meanings of
human existence. This is not the doctrine of the so-called
‘fundamental unity of all religions’, for such a claim has
its limitations. Given fundamental differences in conceptions
of Reality and attitudes towards the world, no real synthesis
can be expected, there being incompatible elements in the
cores of various religions. None of these religions can
draw closer to the others, for each must claim itself to
be the way and the truth for its own believers, even if
not for all men. No world religion can seriously consider
abandoning its own absolutistic claim, for if it did, it
would scarcely have the right to call itself a religion,
much less a world religion. But a sort of reconciliation,
mutual understanding and respect is possible, generating
civilised tolerance and growing co-operation. It seems more
likely that this is the true intent and meaning of what
Nanak uttered on this occasion.
The genre of pious
Sikh literature called Janamsakhis, “The Testaments
of the Life of Nanak”, almost unanimously describe the experience
of Nanak during his ‘trance-in-water’:
"As
God willed, Nanak, His devotee, was escorted to His Presence.
Then a cup filled with Liquid of Immortality was given
accompanied by the command : ‘Nanak, pay attention ! This
is the cup of Holy Adoration of My Name. Drink it . .
. I am with thee and thee do I bless and exalt. Go, rejoice
in My Name and preach to others to do the same . . . Let
this be thy calling."
[2]
Nanak
himself refers to this assignment with deep gratitude: “I,
a jobless minstrel, was assigned a rewarding task”. [3]
Nanak,
now, had been exalted as the Guru Nanak, Nanak the World
Teacher, and after resigning his government post, he set
out upon four long and arduous missionary journeys on foot
into the four corners of the then accessible parts of the
world to him, India, Inner Himalayas, Ceylon, Afghanistan,
Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Turkey and Arabia, which
lasted from the year 1497 to the year 1521, when he permanently
returned to India to found a religious commune-town, Kartarpur,
where he passed away on September 22,1539. These journeys
have been held and described in Sikh pious literature as
having been undertaken to purify and divinise the entire
mankind on all parts of the globe.
[4]
Guru
Nanak had nine successor World Teachers who, through precept
and practice, fulfilled and applied the teachings of Nanak,
the First Guru, to the changing and growing politico-social
situations of the day, and in their own independent revelations
and testaments explained and exegetised the contents’ implications
of Guru Nanak’s revelations which they themselves compiled
and recorded as the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth. The
Tenth Nanak, Guru Gobind (1666-1708) was the last manifestation
of Nanak who passed on the preaching and practice of Sikhism
as world religion to the Collective corpus of all the believers
inspired and guided by the Word, as revealed and recorded
in the Sikh scripture. Ever since, the central focus of
all Sikh congregations and the body of the non-institutional
Sikh Church is comprised of the collectivity of all the
believers in Sikhism, and is called the Panth, ‘the Way
of Life’. Nanak the Tenth further ordained (1699) the Order
of the Khalsa to establish, to perpetuate and to legitimatise
the social pattern amongst governments, societies and states
of the world, wherein the Sikh values of life— truthfulness,
honesty, mutual trust and loyalty, productive labour and
communal sharing, gratitude and integrity of conduct, authentic
living, and, above all, spiritual transformations that raise
man to what St. Teresa of Avila, the Christian mystic, refers
to as “spiritual marriage”—prevail and wherein a God filled
man returns to society for its service and edification.
[5] These are the Sikhs
whom one might meet in all parts of the world, bearded,
unshorn and turbaned, symbolising natural, spontaneous,
unmanufactured or fashioned pristine integrity of man. It
is to this Order of the Khalsa that Arnold Toynbee, in his
History points as the true prototype of the elan of the
Communist party of Lenin, while rejecting the latter’s claim
that his Communist Party was a unique phenomenon in the
history of the societies of mankind.
[6]
Nanak
is the first born in India who claims that the religion
he preaches is a revealed religion. “I am completely dumb
as I am and I speak as I am made to, by God.” “I utter and
preach the Word just as it comes to me.”
[7] Our knowledge of the
psychological character of the religious experience and
its matrix is so minimal that it is not possible for us
to make positive statements about divine revelation. Quranic
revelation is not a living experience between God and man,
a happening into which God Himself enters, but it is a book.
The first word of Mohammad’s revelation is, “read” and the
page of a book is shown to him, the book that the angel
has brought down from heaven. Islam was a book-religion
from the first moment on. Jesus left no written word to
his followers and is merely reported as having claimed full
authority of his Father, God, for what he was preaching.
Moses, like a much earlier Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar,
received a material, an inscribed tablet of laws, through
the agency of a burning bush and from the sun-god on high,
shams, respectively. The seers, rishis of
Vedas, grasped, without necessarily comprehending, eternal
sounds, sruti, and then passed them on to future
generations in mnemonic formulae and, therefore, the text
of Vedas are apauruseya and eternal, co-existent
with the beginning of existence, anadi. The “voices”
heard by extraordinary men, throughout the ages, such as
Socrates and Joan of Arc in the West, have been known to
be of obscure origin, proven unreliability and dubious authenticity.
Mysticism is a variety of human experience that might be
interpreted, but in itself is non-sensory, non-intellectual
and altogether non-verbal and ineffable. Guru Nanak claims
direct contact with suprasensuous Truth and the Divine Person
which is sensory, intellectual and verbal, experienced with
an immediacy and simultaneity that carries with it its own
authenticity and which is, sui generis, fashioned
into a mould of poetry and song. Bergson has well pointed
out that “before intellection, properly so-called, there
is the perception of structure and rhythm.” The nature of
Guru Nanak’s revelation is, thus, shown as unique and mysterious
in character and origin.
Prophets of religion,
like other men, are also rooted in time and place. The teachings
of a prophet may amount to unique contributions of enduring
value to the thought of their age and they may say that
it is a class by itself, without a precursor, without a
successor, logically untraceable to antecedents, yet thereby
a prophet does not cease to belong to his age; just as he
is arising most above it, he is truly rooted in it. This
is true of Guru Nanak also.
The central teachings
of Guru Nanak may be briefly summed up as follows:
1.
He teaches that it is not the intellectual
formula or verbal assent to it that liberates man, but the
deed and his quality of living. “Truth is higher than everything
but higher still is truthful living.”
[8]
2.
Self-alienation is the most profound affliction, not only
of the modern man but it has been so ever since man began
to look within. In the most ancient recorded thought of
man—the Veda— this self-alienation, kilvis, the primal
fission where the One became many, is pinpointed as the
basic problem of the human psyche, and the ritual technique
of yajna is recommended for re-gaining this lost
unity, and this is the beginning of the prestigious Hindu
contribution of the techniques and systems of Yoga to the
insights into the psychologies and religious practices of
mankind. Religion always proceeds from an existential dichotomy
between man and the world, between man and God, and man
longs to overcome this dichotomy to achieve a wholeness
which appears to him as necessary for a satisfying and authentic
living. Pascal describes the point well by observing that
“all man’s troubles stem from the fact that he cannot bear
to stay in a room alone with himself”. Each one of us, more
or less, encounters a sense of despair, when he is forced
to compromise his inner vision with the realities of a world
he must share with others. It is one of the terms of a social
being as it is the predicament of a lonely person and, therefore,
part of adult life, particularly of the intellectual, whom
Albert Camus describes as “someone whose mind watches itself”,
and in whom this disease of self-alienation is apt to run
rampant. In the whole of the Sikh scripture, as in the revelations
of Guru Nanak himself, there are repeated references to
this great wrench in human psyche and the cure is declared
as a spiritual system and discipline based on the fundamental
psychological insights of the Yoga and its adaptation to
a secular, social life, thus discarding the necessity of
turning one’s back on the world, and full social participation
in it in search for annulment of man’s self-alienation.
This system and way of life is the Nam-Yoga of Sikhism that
constitutes the greatest contribution of Guru Nanak to the
Religion wherein the secular and the spiritual are indissolubly
married. This Yoga of the Name is the core of the ‘Religion
of the Name’ which Sikhism is and which God commanded Guru
Nanak to practise and preach to the world.
3.
The third Central teaching of Guru Nanak
is that the fully integrated person, the liberated individual,
the deified man, must revert to the world and society to
participate in its activities to guide and assist it in
striving for achieving a situation in which human mind is
free, hymn psyche is made whole, authentic living is facilitated
and individuals may evolve into “deified men.” When Guru
Nanak travelled deep into the Inner Himalayas crossing Nepal
and some portions of Western Tibet, reaching the legendary
Kailash Mountain and the celestial Mansarovar lake, the
snowy and inaccessible abode of the perfected yogis who
were amazed to see a mere mortal reach there, “How does
the news go with the world of the mortals?,” they asked
Guru Nanak. “The society is rotten to its core”, replied
Guru Nanak, and then raised an accusing finger at these
yogis adding, “And sires, you are guilty ones, for, it is
men of high culture and sensitivity who alone can guide
and sustain society, but you have chosen to be self-indulgent
escapees ?”
[9]
4.
When asked as to what power and competence there was for
lifting society out of its incurable morass, Guru Nanak
has gone on record as saying: “The two levers, that of organised
confrontation with and opposition to evil and the right
idea that must inspire it.”
Thus, this fourth teaching of Guru Nanak
furnishes the Sikh reply to the questions: “Must the carriers
of grace rise like lions or die like lambs? What is the
relation of exemplary violence to exemplary martyrdom ?
Whether one person stands for all or all for one or a small
pioneering elite act as stand-ins for the rest ? Whether
the elite withdraw into an enclave or into a wilderness
to bear witness or act as leaven to the lump ? How is a
balance to be struck between ‘being’ and ‘doing’, ‘wisdom’
and ‘inner certitude’?”
Paper
read in a Seminar of Asian and Slavonic Studies, Faculty
of British Columbia University, Vancouver, Canada, on October
17,1974. It was later published in the Journal of Sikh Studies
(Vol.II.1) of Guru Nanak Dev University in February 1975,
and also in Sikh Review's February-March 1975 issue.
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