The First Sikh by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh

Author:Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh [Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057107
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Unlike Hindu, Buddhist or Jain texts, the Guru does not elaborate on what happens after death. For instance, the Gita explains the paths of light (devayana) and darkness (pitriyana) that the atman can take upon death: if it takes the path of daylight, the bright fortnight, and the northward course of the sun, it merges with Brahman and does not return; if on the other hand it goes through night, the dark fortnight, and the six months of the southward course of the sun, the individual returns to the mortal world (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 8: 24–25). The First Sikh claims no such knowledge. He expresses the utter enigma of the divine One’s doing: ‘When Yama seizes and drags us away, nobody knows Hari’s secret.’ Tellingly, he discloses the thin line between life and death: ‘in an instant we turn strangers’ (GGS: 74–75). Instead of death and reincarnation, the Guru impinges on us to think about the actions we must do in this brief span we have. The above passage estimating the countless possibilities of our past births—as trees, animals, birds—is actually prefaced by his quintessential question: What is the purpose of life? Why are we born? What are the actions we came to perform in this world—kahe kam upae? These are directed towards personality development. Bad actions keep us bound, and the ideal is to free ourselves from the circle of ‘come and go—ava gavan’, to use the typical Nanakian phrase for reincarnation.

In Raga Gauri, he identifies forces ‘two’ and ‘three’ as the cause. By ‘two’ he means dualistic actions done by the blind egocentric; ‘the ignorant dualists talk of two, they come and go in death and divisions’ (GGS: 223). Likewise, the numeral ‘three’ represents the three ‘gunas’ of Samkhya philosophy: sattva, rajas and tamas—truth, passion and inertia. Everything in this world, be it physical, emotional, social or religious, is composed of different ratios of these three basic strands, and the ignorant blind do not recognize the universal Reality in its myriad appearances. The king of death, Yamaraja, hovers over these deluded egomaniacs. Seduced by the dazzling illusion of the three strands, they commit error after error. The First Sikh gives a graphic description of how our sentinels of thought and action get caught: ‘Death in its net catches tongues and eyes, and our ears as we hear toxic lies’ (GGS: 227).

But heroes do not fall prey to the ‘two’ and ‘three’. They are not beguiled by kam, krodha, lobh, moh or ahankar—lust, anger, greed, attachment and arrogance (GGS: 600). These thieves take away the precious moral singular divine endowment of beings. They put us out of joint; each of these emotions hurts a person psychologically and physiologically. These are the toxins that put social cohesion and cosmic integration into jeopardy. They rob individuals of the underlying unity of humanity, and brutally destroy social relations and cosmic wholeness. Obsessed with pride and arrogance, the individual is divided from the One Reality. Duality (dubida) comes into play. The selfish ego asserts itself in opposition to others.

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