Guru Nanak

About this figure

Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, in the Punjab region of what was then the Delhi Sultanate and is now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. Sikh tradition dates his birth to a full-moon day, though sources differ on which month, with older accounts favoring the autumn month of Kartik and the modern Nanakshahi calendar placing his birth anniversary in the spring month of Vaisakh instead; the year 1469 itself is well established. Raised in a Hindu family in a region where Hindu and Muslim communities lived closely together, he showed an early inclination toward contemplation and is said to have had a transformative spiritual experience in young adulthood, after which he began teaching that there was one formless God beyond the specific claims of any single religious tradition.

Nanak spent much of his adult life traveling widely, in journeys traditionally called udasis, reaching across much of the Indian subcontinent and, according to tradition, as far as Mecca, Baghdad, and other centers to the west, engaging in dialogue with Hindu ascetics, Muslim scholars, and other religious figures along the way. His teaching rejected caste distinctions, ritualism, and asceticism for its own sake, emphasizing instead the recitation of God's name, honest work, and sharing with others as the path to spiritual liberation. Toward the end of his life he settled at Kartarpur, on the banks of the Ravi River, where he established a community organized around communal worship and a shared kitchen open to people of all backgrounds, a practice, later known as langar, that remains central to Sikh religious life.

Nanak composed a large body of devotional hymns in Punjabi, including the Japji, a foundational morning prayer that opens the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, with a meditation on the nature of the divine. Before his death in 1539, he designated a disciple as his successor, establishing the line of Gurus that would continue to shape and lead the Sikh community for two more centuries.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.