Hymns of the Gurus Read online

  HYMNS OF THE GURUS

  Translated by

  Khushwant Singh

  Contents

  Introduction

  Guru Nanak

  Japji—the Morning Prayer

  Bara Maha or the Twelve Months

  Guru Angad Dev

  Guru Angad Dev (1504-1552)

  Guru Amar Das

  Guru Amar Das (1479-1574)

  Guru Ram Das

  Guru Ram Das (1534-1581)

  Guru Arjan Dev

  Guru Arjan Dev (1563-1606)

  Guru Tegh Bahadur

  Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621-1675)

  Guru Gobind Singh

  Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708)

  Footnotes

  Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621-1675)

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Sikh religion, a synthesis of Hinduism and Islam, is among the youngest of the Subcontinent’s major religions. The word Sikh is derived from the Sanskrit shishya or the Pali sikkha, meaning disciple. The Sikhs are the disciples of their ten Gurus and worship the Granth Sahib (or Adi Granth), which is a compilation of hymns composed by the Gurus and other saints of India, both Hindus and Muslims. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act defines a Sikh as ‘one who believes in the ten Gurus and the Granth Sahib’, which definition, though not exhaustive, applies to a vast majority of the Sikhs.

  A striking feature of the Sikh religion is its emphasis on prayer. The form of the prayer is usually the repetition of the name of God and the chanting of hymns in God’s praise. Most of these hymns are contained in the Granth Sahib, and the remaining few, also included in rituals and prayers, are to be found in the Dasam Granth of the tenth and the last guru, Guru Gobind Singh. The hymns were composed by Hindu Bhaktas and Muslim Sufis like Farid, Namdev and Kabir, and by the Gurus themselves (except the sixth, seventh and eighth Gurus, who did not write any) who were poets of great sensitivity. In this book I have put together a selection of hymns by the first five Gurus and the ninth and the tenth Gurus. Together, they communicate the essence of Sikhism.

  * * *

  The Sikh faith was founded by Nanak (1469–1539), the first guru of the Sikhs. He was born in a village about forty miles from Lahore (now in Pakistan). His parents were Hindus belonging to a Kshatriya subsect known as Bedis, i.e. ‘those who know the Vedas’. Nanak was taught a little Arabic, Persian, some Sanskrit, Hindi and accounting. But his mind was never in his work. He spent his time meditating and seeking the company of wandering hermits. His parents found a wife for him. The couple had two sons. But Nanak soon lost interest in his family and once again reverted to meditating and wandering. A Muslim rebeck-player, Mardana, joined him, becoming his first disciple. Nanak began to compose hymns, Mardana set them to music, and the two began to organise community hymn-singing.

  In the year 1499, when Nanak was thirty years old, he had a mystic experience. One morning while bathing in a stream, he disappeared under the water. According to his biographers, he found himself in the presence of God who spoke to him thus:

  ‘Nanak, I am with thee. Through thee will my Name be magnified. Go into the world to pray and teach mankind how to pray. But be not sullied by the ways of the world. Let your life be one of praise of the Word (Nam), of charity (dan), ablution (ishnan), service (seva) and prayer (simran).’

  Nanak was missing for three days and nights. When he came back, the first thing he said to the people who thronged to greet him was, ‘There is no Hindu; there is no Mussalman.’

  Nanak took to preaching. Accompanied by Mardana, he travelled extensively in India and abroad. He visited many holy cities of the Hindus and the Muslims, pointing out the folly of meaningless ritual and emphasising the common aspects of the two faiths. He spent his last years in a town called Kartarpur— meaning ‘The abode of the Creator’—preaching and composing and singing hymns. He died in 1539 at the age of seventy. He was acclaimed by both the Hindus and the Muslims as the king of holy men.

  Nanak’s teaching reveals the influence of Hinduism and Islam. By the fifteenth century these religious systems had evolved some beliefs which had much in common. It was from the teachings of the Muslim Sufis, notably Sheikh Farid, and the Bhaktas, primarily Kabir, that Nanak drew his inspiration. From Islam, Nanak took its unqualified monotheism, rejection of idolatry and the caste system. From Hinduism, he borrowed the metaphysics of the Upanishads and the Gita. He elevated reality (sat) to the position of the One Supreme God. He accepted the theory of karma and transmigration of souls. The path he advocated was of bhakti, emphasising the worship of the name of God (Nam-marga). He rejected asceticism and propagated the grihastha-dharma (religion for the householder) and advocated the necessity of taking on a guru and keeping company with holy men (saadh sangat). Nanak also set great store by community hymn-singing (kirtan). He advised his followers to rise before dawn and listen to religious music, for he believed that in the stillness of the ambrosial hours (amritvela), one is best able to commune with God.

  When Nanak died he left behind him a small community of Hindus and Muslims who described themselves as Nanak-panthis—followers of Nanak’s way. They could at best be described as a group dissenting from both Hinduism and Islam. It was left to Nanak’s successors to mould this group into a community with its own language and literature, religious beliefs and institutions, traditions and conventions.

  Nanak was followed by nine other Gurus. Succession was not determined by the prevailing laws of inheritance, but with the object of finding a teacher most fit to safeguard and develop the spiritual legacy left by Nanak. It provided for two centuries a remarkable continuity in the functions of leadership, when one Guru succeeded the other ‘as one lamp lights another’. Of the ten Gurus, the second, fourth, fifth, sixth and tenth were chiefly responsible for measures which fostered communal consciousness and welded the Sikhs into an independent community.

  The second Guru, Angad (1504–52), was a disciple of Nanak and was chosen by him as his successor in preference to his own sons. The third Guru, Amar Das (1479–1574), was in similar fashion chosen from among the disciples. Angad developed the Gurmukhi script by combining the scripts current in northern India. He then proceeded to collect the writings of Nanak and added some of his own to the compilation. Angad established centres (manjis) for the propagation of Nanak’s teachings. These manjis became meeting places for Sikhs, and later on temples (Gurdwaras) sprang up in their place. Amar Das consolidated Angad’s work by increasing the number of manjis and introducing innovations to give Sikhism an identity distinct from Brahminical Hinduism. He preached against the seclusion of women, advocated monogamy, encouraged inter-caste alliances and forbade sati.

  The fourth Guru, Ram Das (1534–81), laid the foundation of the temple at Amritsar. This temple was elevated into the Holy of Holies by his successor, Arjan (1563–1606), who also took definite steps towards organising the Sikh community. What Angad had started, he completed. He, along with his chief disciple Gurdas (1559–1637), continued the compilation started by the second Guru, and incorporated in it the writings of Hindu and Muslim saints. This became the Adi Granth or Granth Sahib, the holy scripture of the Sikhs. He was also responsible for the construction of temples at Taran Taran, Amritsar and Kartarpur, which became places of pilgrimage. Guru Arjan’s organising activities attracted the notice of the Muslim rulers. He was arrested and, after considerable torture, executed at Lahore. He became the first and the most important martyr in Sikh history.

  After the death of Arjan, Sikhism went through a transformation. It is said that the last message Arjan sent to his son and successor was: ‘Let him sit fully armed on his throne and maintain an army to the best of his ability.’ Hargobind (1606–45) accepted his father’s advice and decided to tra
in his followers in the art of defence. He girded himself with two swords, one signifying the spiritual and the other temporal leadership. By the time of his death, the Sikhs had already become a fighting force of considerable importance in the hill tracts and won several engagements against Hindu chieftains and local Muslim militia. Hargobind was followed by his grandson Har Rai (1630–61), a man of peace who adhered strictly to the routine of the life of prayer exhorted by Nanak; and Hari Krishen (1656–64), Har Rai’s youngest son, who died of smallpox when barely eight years old.

  The final transformation of the Sikhs into a militant sect came with the last of the ten Gurus, Gobind Singh. In the autumn of 1675, Gobind’s father, the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur (1621–75), was summoned to Delhi by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and ordered to accept conversion to Islam. The legend goes that he refused and volunteered to perform a miracle whereby the executioner’s sword would fail to sever his head from his body. He wrote some words on a piece of paper and tied it round his neck with a thread like a charm. When he was decapitated the message on the paper was seen to read: ‘Sirr diya, pur sirrar na diya’—‘I gave my head but not my faith’. It is also said that Tegh Bahadur repeated Arjan’s advice to his son about arming the Sikhs.

  Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708) assumed the leadership of the Sikh community when he was only ten years of age. He spent the first few years in studying Persian, Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures, and preparing himself for his mission. He realised that if his followers were to be saved from extinction, they had not only to be taught the use of arms but also convinced of the morality of the use of force. ‘When all other means have failed, it is righteous to draw the sword,’ he said. Even the conception of God became a militant one. He was timeless as death. His symbol was steel. Armed with these mental concepts, Gobind Singh set about ‘training the sparrow to hunt the hawk and one man to fight a legion’.

  On the Hindu New Year’s Day in 1699, Gobind Singh assembled his followers and initiated five of them, known as Punj Piyaras, the Five Beloved, into a new fraternity which he named the Khalsa or ‘the pure’. Of these five, one was a Kshatriya, and the other four belonged to the lower castes. They were made to drink out of the same bowl and given new names with the suffix ‘Singh’ (lion) attached to them. They swore to observe the ‘Five K’s’, namely, to wear their hair and beard unshorn (kesh); to carry a comb in the hair (kungha); to wear a pair of shorts (kuchha); to wear a steel bangle on the right wrist (kara); and to carry a sword (kirpan). Gobind Singh further bade the initiates rid themselves of their family ties, their professions, their creed and ritual, and have no loyalties except to the new fraternity. After baptising the five, he had himself baptised by them. At the end of the ceremony, he hailed the five with the new greeting—‘Wah guru ji ka khalsa—Wah guruji ki Fateh—: ‘The Khalsa are the chosen of God—Victory be to our God.’

  A significant step Gobind took was to declare the line of Gurus at an end. He did this while all his four sons were alive. He divided the concept of Guruship into three, viz. personal, religious and temporal. The first he said would end with him. The second would subsist for ever in the scriptures, and the Granth Sahib was henceforth to be considered as the symbolic representation of the ten Gurus. Temporal leadership he vested in the community, so that all decisions taken by the majority of a representative assembly became binding on the rest as if it were the order of the Guru himself (gurumat).

  * * *

  The Sikhs believe in the unity of God and equate God with truth. Although Sikh monotheism has an abstract quality, there is nothing vague about it. The preamble to the morning prayer, Japji, which is recited as an introduction to all religious ceremonial and is known as the Mool Mantra, the basic belief, states:

  There is one God.

  He is the supreme truth.

  He, the creator,

  Is without fear and without hate.

  He, the omnipresent,

  Pervades the universe.

  He is not born,

  Nor does He die to be born again.

  (Nanak)

  There was a change of emphasis in the conception of God in the writing of the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh. To him, although God was still one, the aspect of timelessness and of the power to destroy was more important than the creative. He described God as Akal Purukh (timeless):

  Time is the only God,

  The primal and the final,

  The creator and the destroyer.

  How can words describe Him?

  The attitude of the two Gurus which seems at first sight to be divergent is not really so. The basic factors in the conception of God were oneness and truth. Other attributes, such as omnipresence, omniscience, formlessness, timelessness, and the power to destroy evil, were complementary and also referred to frequently by Nanak. Guru Gobind gave them prominence by constant emphasis.

  Although God has no form (nirankar) or substance and is beyond human comprehension, by righteous living one can invoke His grace. In the first verse of the morning prayer, Nanak said:

  Not by thought alone

  Can He be known,

  Tho’ one think a hundred thousand times...

  How then shall Truth be known?

  How the veil of false illusion torn?

  O Nanak, thus runneth the writ divine:

  The righteous path, let it be thine.

  The Sikh emphasis on action as a means to salvation is a departure from the predestination, and consequent passiveness, of the Hindu belief. Nanak, who was fond of using rural similes, wrote:

  As a team of oxen are we driven

  By the ploughman, our teacher.

  By the furrows made are thus writ

  Our actions—on the earth, our paper.

  The sweat of labour is as beads

  Falling by the ploughman as seeds sown,

  We reap according to our measure

  Some for ourselves to keep, some to others give.

  O Nanak, this is the way to truly live.

  Although Sikhism accepts the Hindu theory of karma and life hereafter, it escapes the maze in which life, death and rebirth go on, independent, as it were, of human volition. The Sikh religion states categorically that the first form given to life is the human (‘Thou has the body of man, now is thy turn to meet God’— Arjan). Human actions determine the subsequent forms of life to be assumed after death. It also believes that by righteous living and grace it is possible to escape the vicious circle of life and death and attain salvation.

  The Sikh religion, believing as it does in the unity and formlessness of God, expressly forbids, in no uncertain terms, the worship of idols and emblems. Guru Nanak, while attending the evening service at a Hindu temple where a salver full of small oil lamps and incense was being waved in front of the idol, composed this verse:

  The firmament is Thy salver,

  The sun and moon Thy lamps,

  The galaxy of stars

  Are as pearls scattered.

  The woods of sandal are Thine incense,

  The forests Thy flowers,

  But what worship is this

  O Destroyer of Fear?

  God being an abstraction, godliness is conceived as an attribute. The way of acquiring godliness or salvation is to obey the will of God. The means of ascertaining God’s will are, as in other theological systems, unspecified and subject to human speculation. They are largely rules of moral conduct which are the basis of human society. Sikhism advocates association with men of religion for guidance. Hence the importance of the guru or the teacher and institution of discipleship.

  The Sikhs do not worship human beings as incarnations of God. The Sikh Gurus themselves insisted that they were human like other human beings and were on no account to be worshipped. Guru Nanak constantly referred to himself as the slave and servant of God. Guru Gobind Singh, who was the author of most of the Sikh practice and ritual, was conscious of the danger of having divinity imposed on him by his followers. He explained his mission in life:

>   For though my thoughts were lost in prayer

  At the feet of Almighty God,

  I was ordained to establish a sect and lay down its rules.

  But whosoever regards me as Lord

  Shall be damned and destroyed.

  I am—and of this let there be no doubt—

  I am but the slave of God, as other men are,

  A beholder of the wonders of creation.

  Godliness being the aim of human endeavour, the lives and teachings of the Gurus are looked upon as aids towards its attainment. ‘On meeting a true Guru,’ said Nanak, ‘doubt is dispelled and wanderings of the mind restrained.’

  * * *

  The compositions of the Gurus were always considered sacred by their followers. Guru Nanak said that in his hymns ‘the True Guru manifested Himself, because they were composed at His orders and heard by Him’. The fourth Guru, Ram Das, said: ‘Look upon the words of the True Guru as the supreme truth, for God and the Creator hath made him utter the words.’ When Arjan formally installed the Granth Sahib in the Harimandir at Amritsar, he ordered his followers to treat it with the same reverence as they treated their gurus. By the time of Guru Gobind Singh, copies of the Granth had been installed in most Gurdwaras. Quite naturally, when he declared the line of succession of Gurus ended, he asked his followers to turn to the Granth for guidance and look upon it as the symbolic representation of the ten Gurus. (His own Dasam Granth is read with reverence but does not form part of rituals, except at the ceremony of baptism.)

  The Granth Sahib contains the writings of the first five Gurus, the ninth Guru, and a couplet by Guru Gobind Singh. A large part of the book consists of the writings of Hindu and Muslim saints of the time, chiefly those of Kabir, who, like Nanak, was claimed by both Hindus and Muslims as their saint. The compositions of the bards who accompanied the different Gurus are also incorporated in the Granth.

  The language used by the Sikh Gurus was Punjabi of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Other writings are in old Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi and other dialects of northern India. The entire work is set to measures of classical Indian music. The hymns are not arranged by authors or subject matter but divided into thirty-one ragas in which they are meant to be sung. Within the ragas, the compositions of the Gurus intermingle and are followed by those of the Bhaktas and the Sufis.