Articles
The True Meaning of Guru Nanak Day
The True Meaning of Guru Nanak Day (Sikh) Nov. 21.
Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh Faith, was born in Nankana Sahib near Lahore now in Pakistan in 1469 and breathed his last in 1539 at the age of 70. He was endowed with extra-ordinary spiritual powers from a very young age. The biographies on his life are replete with strange episodes of these miraculous occurrences.
As with many other universally known Prophets, he did not undergo any set formal education. On the very first day of his admission into the village school, he expounded a beautifully worded revelation in verse and set to a classical musical measure (raga) describing the various stages of life, interposed with a plethora of poignant Divine directions, every stanza starting with each letter of the Hindi language alphabet. The teacher then went over to his father and told him that instead of teaching Nanak, he had received through his noble young son, a profound lesson from God; on how best he the teacher could function better. This was remarkable indeed.
Through Guru Nanak's own genius and the spiritual illumination that came from his long spells of Meditation, there shaped the character of the creed that he was to proclaim to the world and which became the basis and foundation of the Sikh religion.
There were 9 other gurus (Prophets) that consecutively followed his lineage, all receiving Divine revelations but only under his name NANAK without attributing any such revelatory passages to their own names. This culminated in the 11th the last and eternal Guruship bestowed on the Sri Guru Granth Sahib (SGGS), which has been called the Mona, meaning the silent Guru, being in book form, as recorded in the ancient Hindu and other such contemporary resources, the VEDAS. This thus has a millennial dimension that will come to light in the pages that follow.
Guru NANAK was one of the few, if not the only prophet who travelled widely outside the country of his birth, throughout the then known world. It is recorded in some detail of the four marathon trips mostly on foot, which he embarked upon in the four cardinal directions, the North, South, East and the West. To the North he scaled the Himalayan Ranges to enter deep into the Tibetan regions. To the East he went all the way into Burma now known as Myanmar, and to the South right down to the tip of the Indian sub-continent and on into Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and lastly to the West through Afghanistan and Iraq into Saudi Arabia entering Mecca and beyond into parts of Turkestan and the southern reaches of Russia. He left behind rare relics and other such signs, which have now been uncovered to prove the authenticity of his far-flung travels.
Before he died he is credited to have made millions of followers within the ranks of the Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists and those with no previous religious leanings. On his demise there was a tussle between his Muslim and Hindu devotees, as to who should claim his body for the usual burial and other such rites. It is recorded that the two parties agreed on a simple formula, to place a row of fresh flowers on either side of his body, one to belong to the Muslims and the other to the Hindus, and that whichever side the flowers would remain the fresher the next day, that side party would be eligible to claim his remains. When the following day arrived, the flowers on both sides were as fresh as ever, but the body had disappeared to merge into and become one with the elements!
