Guru Nanak

Guru Nanak was born on 15 April 1469 at Talwandi, near Lahore in the Punjab region of the Delhi Sultanate (today Nankana Sahib in Pakistan), into a Hindu Khatri merchant family. The subcontinent at this time stood on the edge of the Mughal era; Hindu devotional Bhakti currents, Islamic teaching and Sufi mysticism interpenetrated each other across Punjab, producing both religious tension and unusual cross-fertilization. According to early biographies known as janamsakhis, Nanak was a contemplative child with notable gifts in poetry, learning Sanskrit, Persian and the basics of commerce. He married, fathered two sons, served as a regional revenue official, and combined ordinary household life with prolonged meditation. Around 1499, after bathing in a river, he disappeared for three days and returned to declare, "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim—only God." The phrase marks the conventional start of his public teaching ministry. Nanak then undertook four long missionary journeys, the udasis, said to have taken him north to Tibet, east to Sri Lanka, and west as far as Mecca and Medina. He engaged Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains and yogis in dialogue, teaching the doctrine of Ik Onkar: one formless yet personal God present in all beings and not the property of any single tradition. He moved between Hindu and Muslim dress to challenge the visible boundaries between communities. He settled at Kartarpur in Punjab and organized a community around three duties: nam japna (remembrance), kirat karni (honest livelihood), and vand chakna (sharing). The langar kitchen seated everyone of every caste, religion and gender on the same floor, a low-conflict critique of caste hierarchy. In 1539 he chose his disciple Lehna (Guru Angad), not his own sons, as successor, establishing succession by spiritual merit. He died on 22 September 1539; his 974 hymns survive in the Guru Granth Sahib, and Sikhism today is the world's fifth-largest religion.