Guru Nanak (1469-1539)

A late, plural, confessional corpus

As with many religious founders of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, no contemporary independent source for Guru Nanak has survived. Most biographical knowledge comes from the Janamsakhis, “birth stories” written in Punjabi: hagiographical biographies made of anecdotes called sakhis and arranged in a roughly chronological sequence. Modern scholarship usually distinguishes three major manuscript traditions: the Puratan Janamsakhi (before 1600), the Miharban Janamsakhi, composed by Manohar Das Miharban (1581-1640) and his lineage before 1620, and the Bala Janamsakhi, whose oldest known manuscript dates from 1658.^[3] The latter cannot therefore be a direct eyewitness account, whatever later tradition sometimes claimed.^[4]

Beside these prose narratives stands an older poetic witness: the Varan of Bhai Gurdas (d. 1634), the scribe of the Guru Granth Sahib under the fifth Guru. In his first Var, he celebrates Guru Nanak’s appearance in a world darkened by spiritual confusion:

“The true Guru Nanak appeared; the mist cleared and light spread through the world.” — Bhai Gurdas, Varan, Var 1, pauri 27^[5]

Finally, Guru Nanak’s own compositions, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib under the signature Mahala 1 (“the first Guru”), are the safest source for reconstructing his theology, though they do not narrate his life.

The McLeod debate: sorting history from hagiography

The book that shaped modern discussion of Guru Nanak’s origins is William Hewat McLeod’s Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion, published by Oxford Clarendon Press in 1968.^[6] McLeod subjected 124 Janamsakhi stories to critical analysis and classified them as “possible” (30), “probable” (37), “improbable” (18), and “impossible” (39).^[7] He famously judged the Janamsakhis as “highly unsatisfactory” sources for the Guru’s life, the task being to decide how much material could be accepted as historical.^[8]

The Sikh historian Gurinder Singh Mann, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, later reassessed McLeod’s work in the Journal of Punjab Studies.^[9] Mann acknowledged McLeod’s real merit: he took the early sources seriously, translated them, and applied a systematic method to them.^[10] Yet he criticized what he saw as an overly mechanical method, in which episodes were isolated and judged one by one without always respecting the narrative sequence and logic of each recension.^[11] Mann’s discussion of the Mount Sumeru episode is telling. McLeod admitted that when Bhai Gurdas and all the Janamsakhis converge, the tradition cannot be lightly dismissed,^[12] yet rejected the episode because Mount Sumeru “exists only in legend, not in fact.”^[13] Mann argued from the Puratan Janamsakhi itself that the place is more likely an identifiable Shaiva site near Kartarpur than a mythological mountain.^[14]

The lesson is not that the Janamsakhis should be either rejected wholesale or believed naively. Rather, Guru Nanak’s biography, like that of many ancient and medieval religious founders, binds together a historical core and a hagiographical tissue. The sorting remains a scholarly task, but historians broadly accept Guru Nanak’s existence, itinerant preaching, and foundation of a real community at Kartarpur.^[15]

A life told twice

The following pages present Guru Nanak’s life as Sikh tradition transmits it, while noting where critical history sees later amplification. This is the only honest way to treat a founder whose historical and venerated figures remain closely interwoven five centuries later, as in the lives of other founders studied in this encyclopedia, such as Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha or Muhammad.

Birth and youth at Talwandi

Guru Nanak is traditionally said to have been born on 15 April 1469 in Rai Bhoi di Talvandi, now Nankana Sahib, about sixty kilometers from Lahore in present-day Pakistan.^[16] The village had been founded by Rai Bhoi, a Hindu notable who had converted to Islam, a setting that already reveals the interreligious environment in which the future Guru grew up.^[17]

His father, Kalyan Chand Das Bedi, known as Mehta Kalu, belonged to the merchant Khatri caste and served as a village revenue officer (patwari), as did Nanak’s father-in-law Mula Chona.^[18] His mother was Mata Tripta, and his elder sister Nanaki occupies an affectionate place in Sikh memory. He married Sulakhani and had two sons, Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das. For nearly a decade he worked as a storekeeper or granary official at Sultanpur Lodhi, the provincial headquarters of Daulat Khan Lodi, who would later invite Babur into the region in the 1520s.^[19] Outwardly, nothing in this married official’s life seemed to announce rupture.

The Kali Bein illumination

Around the age of thirty, while bathing in the small Kali Bein river near Sultanpur, Nanak is said to have disappeared for three days. According to the unanimous Janamsakhi tradition, he was brought into the presence of God, received a cup of ambrosia, and was given the mission to proclaim the divine Name and teach meditation, charity, and purity of life.^[20] On returning, his first words were:

“There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” — Guru Nanak, according to the Janamsakhi tradition^[21]

This formula does not mean vague religious relativism. In context, it announces that inherited religious labels do not by themselves define holiness before the one formless God. What matters is the heart turned toward the divine Name and a life transformed by that remembrance.

The four great journeys

Between his illumination and his final settlement at Kartarpur, tradition says that Guru Nanak undertook four long missionary journeys, the udasis, usually accompanied by Bhai Mardana, a Muslim musician who played the rabab.^[22] The Puratan Janamsakhi summarizes the journeys in four directions: Sindh to the south, the Himalayan foothills to the north, Mecca to the west, and the Peshawar region to the northwest.^[23] Later traditions expand the itinerary to Benares, Puri, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Ceylon.^[24] McLeod doubted the historicity of some of the most distant journeys while accepting Guru Nanak’s real preaching activity across northern India.^[25]

One famous episode places Guru Nanak at Mecca, where he debates the direction of prayer: if God is everywhere, no direction can be foreign to Him. Whether exact memory or later parable, the story captures a constant theological intention: divine transcendence cannot be confined to one ritual direction or social boundary.

Babur’s invasion and Kartarpur

After his travels toward the northwest, Guru Nanak is said to have witnessed Babur’s invasion of the Punjab and the sack of Eminabad. This episode has a direct trace in the Guru Granth Sahib: four compositions known as the Babarvani, in which Guru Nanak denounces political violence and the corruption of the powerful.^[26] Mann notes one line in which Nanak laments that when the strong fight one another, the defenseless people bear the weight of the conflict.^[27]

Around 1522, Guru Nanak settled at Kartarpur, “the City of the Creator,” on the western bank of the Ravi.^[28] Mann stresses that the Puratan Janamsakhi places this settlement after the first long journey rather than after all the later udasis.^[29] Family and local connections helped the settlement, and Guru Nanak’s hymns reveal an acute sensitivity to fertile land and abundant water.^[30]

There he spent the last seventeen years of his life. The Puratan Janamsakhi describes a daily rhythm of common prayer (kirtan), exposition of teaching (katha), and a shared meal (langar).^[31] Two institutions took shape at Kartarpur and would structure Sikhism thereafter: the sangat, the congregation gathered for prayer and teaching; and the langar, the common kitchen and meal open without caste distinction.^[32]

The system of the manjis — twenty-two seats of local authority entrusted to preachers in charge of distant congregations — is for its part the work of the third Guru, Amar Das, not of Guru Nanak.^[33]

Guru Nanak preserved his own compositions in a leather-bound collection (pothi) to be handed to his successor. The shaping of the Gurmukhi script itself — whose letters pre-existed — is attributed by Sikh tradition to his successor Guru Angad, notably on the basis of the Patti, the acrostic primer composed by Guru Nanak.^[34]

Guru Angad and the death of Nanak

Near the end of his life, Guru Nanak did not transmit leadership to either of his sons, but to the disciple Bhai Lehna, whom he renamed Angad, “a part of you.” According to the Puratan Janamsakhi, the ceremony transferred both the community’s practical affairs and its spiritual authority: coins signified the management of worldly matters, while the pothi of Nanak’s compositions signified the Guru’s teaching office.^[35] Tradition emphasizes the public character of the rite so that the succession would not be contested.^[36]

Guru Nanak died at Kartarpur on 22 September 1539, aged seventy.^[37] Sikh tradition says that the funeral hymns Alahania and the evening hymn Sohila were recited at his death.^[38] A famous legend says that Hindu and Muslim disciples disputed whether his body should be cremated or buried, but found only flowers beneath the shroud, which both communities divided.^[39] At Kartarpur today, a Muslim-style grave and a Hindu-style samadh stand in the same commemorative complex.^[40]

The Mool Mantar: the creed of the One

The beginning of the Guru Granth Sahib opens with the Mool Mantar, the root formula traditionally attributed to Guru Nanak:

“Ik Onkar, Sat Nam, Karta Purakh, Nirbhau, Nirvair, Akal Murat, Ajuni, Saibhang, Gur Prasad.” — Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 1^[41]

In ordinary English, the formula confesses: one is the Creator; His Name is Truth; He is the Creator-Person, without fear, without hatred, timeless, unborn, self-existent, known by the Guru’s grace.^[42] The first word, Ik Onkar, rejects polytheism and idolatry. God is creator of the universe and immanent in it,^[43] yet His mystery exceeds human language and cannot be exhausted by sacred books.^[44]

For Nanak, truth is not merely a doctrine possessed intellectually. The divine truth must be practiced in daily acts.^[45] Human beings must recognize the values placed in creation and conform their lives to them.^[46]

The three pillars

Later Sikh tradition summarizes Guru Nanak’s practical teaching in three pillars:

• Naam japna — remembering and repeating the divine Name;
• Kirat karo — earning one’s living by honest work;
• Vand chhako — sharing one’s goods and food with others.

These three principles explain why the community at Kartarpur was not merely a school of meditation. It was a disciplined social body: prayer, labor, and sharing were held together. Guru Nanak’s rejection of caste is rooted in the same vision: “all beings,” he teaches, belong under one divine shelter.^[47] The langar gave that doctrine a visible social form.

Karma, transmigration, and liberation

Guru Nanak also teaches within the Indian horizon of karma and transmigration. Human acts bear consequences in this life or a future birth; the soul passes through the cycle of rebirth until liberation.^[48] Yet Sikhism refuses a merely mechanical idea of salvation. God’s gracious gaze, nadar, can rescue a soul and free it from the cycle, even during earthly life.^[49]

The final liberation is usually described as the soul’s union with the divine Being, often by the image of a drop returning to the ocean.^[50] This point is one of the decisive differences with Catholic faith: the blessed soul is united to God in the beatific vision without being absorbed into an impersonal whole, and the human person is destined for the resurrection of the body.^[51]

The ten Gurus and the scripture

Guru Nanak’s personal mission became a historical religion through a succession of ten Gurus. The third Guru, Amar Das (1552-1574), and the fifth, Arjan (1581-1606), were especially important for institutional organization and scripture.^[52] Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth, completed on 29 August 1604 and installed at Amritsar on 1 September 1604.^[53] The tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa on Vaisakhi, 14 April 1699, marking initiated Sikhs with the five Ks.^[54] Shortly before his death in 1708, he ended the line of human Gurus and gave the scriptural collection, enriched by the hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the status of eternal Guru: the Guru Granth Sahib.^[55]

The Guru Granth Sahib has 1,430 angs and roughly 5,894 hymns.^[56] Its canon is striking because it includes not only Sikh Gurus but also non-Sikh saints: Farid, Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, and others.^[57] That inclusion is not religious indifference, but a deliberate claim that truth can be recognized wherever the divine Name is authentically praised.

Today Sikhism numbers roughly 25 to 30 million faithful, with major communities in India and large diasporas in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.^[58]

What the Church can esteem

Nostra Aetate does not mention Sikhism by name. It speaks explicitly of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. Still, its opening principle applies more broadly: the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions and looks with sincere respect on ways of life that often reflect a ray of the Truth.^[59]

A Catholic can therefore esteem in Guru Nanak the confession of the one God, the moral seriousness of his preaching, his critique of ritual hypocrisy, his insistence on prayer, work, and charity, and his refusal to accept caste hierarchy as a religious fact. Vatican II’s Ad Gentes speaks of “seeds of the Word,” elements of truth and goodness placed by Providence among peoples and cultures and called to be purified and fulfilled in Christ.^[60]

Since 2018, the Holy See has also issued messages for Sri Guru Nanak Prakash Diwas, the festival of Guru Nanak’s birth. The 2018 message invited Christians and Sikhs, together with believers of other traditions, to promote a “culture of tenderness.”^[61] In 2025, on the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad invited Sikhs and Christians to “sow seeds” and offer gestures of fraternity for justice, peace, moral welfare, and freedom.^[62]

Where the differences are decisive

Esteem is not confusion. Catholic faith is not a generic theism completed by ethical seriousness. It confesses the one God as Trinity, the eternal Son made flesh in Jesus Christ, the one Mediator between God and men, the forgiveness of sins through the Cross, and the resurrection of the body. These are not peripheral differences of vocabulary.

The contrast is clearest on salvation and the destiny of the person. Sikhism speaks of liberation from the cycle of rebirth and union with the divine. Catholic doctrine teaches that each spiritual soul is immediately created by God and remains immortal; it does not perish at death and is not dissolved into the divine being.^[63] The body too is destined for resurrection, not abandonment as a temporary shell. For that reason, Guru Nanak’s message can be approached with real gratitude for its religious and moral lights, while still being judged from the fullness of revelation given in Christ.

• Gurinder Singh Mann, “Guru Nanak’s Life and Legacy: An Appraisal”, Journal of Punjab Studies, 17/1-2, 2010.
• W. H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968.
• Guru Granth Sahib, especially the opening Mool Mantar and Guru Nanak’s hymns under Mahala 1.
• Bhai Gurdas, Varan, Var 1.
• Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate and Ad Gentes.