Guru Nanak’s Teachings
Guru Nanak’s hymns, composed in a mixture of Old Punjabi and Old Hindi, are preserved in the Sikh scriptures. His teachings, expressed in poetry of great power and beauty, are therefore far better recorded than are the circumstances of his life.
As has been indicated, these place him as a religious thinker firmly within the Sant tradition of devotion to a non-anthropomorphic God on the one hand, but on the other, by the quality and coherence of the insights which they collectively reveal, as the founder of a new religion.At the centre of Guru Nanak’s theology lies the issue of how salvation is to be attained, given the inherent dichotomy between God the creator and the observer and controller of his creation, whose oneness and unknowability is continually underlined, and unregenerate man, whose psyche (man) is totally clouded by his false sense of a self-determined identity that can operate without reference to the will of God (called haumai, literally ‘I-me’). The fate of such a psyche-dominated man (manmukh) can only be to suffer the torments of death, hell and transmigration. The solutions offered by other religious specialists, whether Brahmins, yogis, Krishna-cultists or Muslim qazis, are totally belied by the personal corruption of their parasitic existence, to whose criticism many of Guru Nanak’s most vivid verses are dedicated.
This apparently hopeless divide can, however, be bridged. One of the most striking tributes to Guru Nanak’s quality both as religious thinker and as poet lies in his adaptation of Muslim political terminology to express theological insights. So God, conceived as the ultimate ruler whose designs are in the last resort unfathomable, does in his graciousness provide the means by which his true servants may approach him. For these to be apprehended, their fidelity must first be demonstrated both by the rejection ofidle asceticism in favour of the practical discipline of earning one’s own living honestly and sharing its fruits with others, and by the inner discipline of opening one’s heart to the inward meditation on his ‘name’ or divine qualities (nam japan, nam simran), both by private devotion and by participation in congregational worship, where fellow-aspirants to salvation join in listening to hymns with inner attention.
With these preconditions fulfilled, the devotee may be fortunate enough to be the recipient of the divine sovereign’s look of favour (nadar), also expressed as being able to hear the call (sabad) in one’s heart. In this active aspect of himself as communicator, God is usually described as the Teacher (guru) or True Teacher (satiguru). Those privileged in this way to receive the divine message, through Guru-direction (gurmukh), may apprehend the full significance of the divine order (hukatn) and attain the ultimate bliss of freedom from the cycle of birth and death so as to participate in the heavenly joys of the company of saints (satsang), who sing in eternity at the gates of God’s ineffable court the praises of his glory.
Guru Nanak’s Successors