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Stories:
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| Guru Nanak....becomes a teacher |
A young man named Nanak lived in India many years ago. He was born in the 1469 to be precise, in a village in Punjab called Talwandi. His father kept the accounts of the chief man of the village and trained Nanak for the same occupation.
Nanak was very devout. He spent long hours in meditation and had little interest in business matters. His father sent him to live with his sister Nanaki and her husband some miles away in the hope that he might improve! There he looked after the accounts of the village headman, carefully but with very little interest. He did not feel that this was to be his life's work. A happy marriage, soon blessed with two sons, did little to curb his unsettled spirit.
One day Nanak had an experience which changed his life and the lives of many other people. Early every morning Nanak bathed in the river near the village. One day he didn't return home. His family and friends feared the worst. He must have drowned. The headman ordered a careful search to be made. The river was dragged but no trace of Nanak could be found. After three days he reappeared looking as if nothing had happened to him. Everyone was still worried, though, because he spoke to no one, not even his sister. Eventually he broke his silence but his words bewildered the villagers and his family even more. He said:
There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, so whose path shall I follow? I will follow God's path. God is neither Hindu not Muslim.
This was a strange thing to say. The village had Hindu and Muslim inhabitants. He then told everyone that he had been taken to the heavenly court where God had commanded him to become God's messenger. From the day he began teaching he was always called Guru Nanak.. A Guru is a person who helps people to know God for themselves. He taught them that God is present in everyone and that if they meditated they could discover the truth of this message for themselves. God was one and was neither male nor female but had created all life, men and women, animals and plants. There were no important people who deserved to be honoured and no people who should be despised. Everyone was equal. God lived in every heart, in the Hindu and the Muslim. God was not limited to being the God of any particular religion.
Guru Nanak had a friend called Mardana. He was a good musician but was very poor and had no instrument. Guru Nanak's sister, Nanaki, gave Mardana a rebeck. It was similar to a lute. It had strings which Mardana plucked with his fingers.
Guru Nanak and his friend set out on a number of long journeys which took them even beyond the frontiers of India. Wherever they went Guru Nanak would put his message into poetry and Mardana would play a tune. This way people could easily memorise what Guru Nanak taught them. Many people followed Guru Nanak, rich and poor, good and bad. The good, kind people followed him because they wanted to know God themselves. Other people followed him because they were discontented with the kind of lives they had been living.
Eventually, when Guru Nanak and his friend were too old to continue their journeys they settled in a small town which Guru Nanak built. He called it Kartarpur, the city of the Creator. People now came to him and many lived near him in the town.
These men and women who followed Guru Nanak's teachings came to be called Sikhs, the word in Punjabi for Disciple. Today there are sixteen million Sikhs world-wide.
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