INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

For this reason the Lord sent me and I was born in this world.
Whatever the Lord said, I am repeating the same unto you.
I do not bear enmity with anyone (31).
Whosoever shall call me the Lord, shall fall into hell
Consider me as His servant and do not think of any difference between
me and the Lord (32). 250
Even though many local people maintain that it is a misdemeanour to liken the Guru
to God, the distinction between the messenger and the message is sometimes hard to
separate. As a middle-aged man said, “We will still call the Guru God (parmeshwar)
and then accept to go to hell, because he has given a lot to us.” Individuals who are
graced with divine knowledge and dedicate their whole life to devotional practices
directed to God will receive divine power. As a true disciple of God, the guru is believed
to internalize and manifest divine knowledge in his own human soul and body
to become a god-like being. Although God and guru continue to be two different
conceptual categories, the ontological nature of the two merges when the guru is
imbued with divine qualities.
In everyday speech Sikhs frequently suffix the name of Nanak and other Gurus
with the epithet dev, or “god”, to indicate their high spiritual status. More mythologically
elaborated notions on the persona of Nanak voiced by a slightly fewer number
of interlocutors will take the glorification of the Guru a step further to claim that
Nanak was indeed God manifested, an incarnation of God in the dark age of kaliyug.
By adopting material and structures from mythologies of the surrounding culture this
approach apotheosizes Nanak to the status of a Vaishnava avatar within the Hindu
pantheon and identifies the Sikh Gurus with the deity Ram in the Ramayana story.
Guru Nanak is incorporated in the larger Hindu cosmological design of the classical
concept of four progressive ages of the creation ‒ satyug, tretayug, dvaparyug and kaliyug
– in each of which lord Vishnu manifests himself through avatars to provide
spiritual guidance and remedy for humans. A young Sikh man in Varanasi explained:
God and Guru is the same. In satyug came Hari, in tretayug Ram ji, in
dvaparyug Krishna ji, and in kaliyug Guru Nanak Dev ji. All are one, but
they incarnate in different forms. The Guru ji is an incarnation of
God. 251
Like the common tendency in Hindu mythology to merge two or more deities into
one and envisage the same God holding several attributes in different eras, the avatar
of Nanak is presented as the last avatar in the degenerated age of kaliyug. “God took
250
Kohli 2003: 133.
251
This mythological interpretation of Guru Nanak finds references in the writing of the bard
Kal, included in Guru Granth Sahib, who writes that God will be recognized as Guru Nanak,
Angad and Amardas in the age of kaliyug (GGS: 1390).
120
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008