A HISTORY HEWN

Sikh history will ever be in the uncut, uncouth, wild, burning words of poet-labourers and artisan-singers. The names of the Ten Gurus inspire us with life and love, and we sing their praise and live and die in a sweet, soft, continuous inebriation. God brought us here. He takes us away. Pain and pleasure are His gifts, dispensations of His love. Thinking of Him we pass. When called by Him, we give up our lives. We know not what is good, what is bad. What pleases our God is the best. The act of the Guru is the truly moral act. He is beautiful. he is truth and He fascinates our souls. We live remembering Him and ploughing and sweating and labouring and toiling as He told us. This is for us the only way to transcend the physical and be spiritual. Such is His will, such is His pleasure. The Guru is verily, verily our personal God. This indeed is the motif of Sikh history, poetry, life and death. And the Guru has saved us from the horrors of mere man-worship because his vision is of the infinite and his association is of the living God of invisible spiritual realms.
If you wish to know a Sikh, love him. There is a gleam under the shack of hay that Moses saw at Sinai. The Sikh bodypolitic is a heap of immense matter in which still scintillates the spirit.
“Profound, O Vachha, is this doctrine; recondite and difficult of comprehension, excellent and not to be reached by mere reasoning, subtle and intelligent only to the wise, it is a hard doctrine to learn for you who belong to another sect, another faith, another persuasion, another discipline and sit at the feet of another teacher.” (Quotation from Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism)
The idealism of the Khalsa is broadly based on the magic realism of the Creator. Their joy is the blossoming of their infinite pain in sympathy with life. Their pure and easy breathing of the Spirit of God is their religion. It is the life of a well-blown flower living in the great expanse of the sunlight or moonlight, elevated above all pain of goodness. The Guru-man is the personal God ‘round whom humanity is to revolve from life to life, from god to god, from mystery to mystery. The study of the Word and the lives of the Gurus, therefore, cannot but be essential for all the seekers of creative originality of human thought.
In the realm of the soul, each is to have his own measure of the Guru’s joy and sorrow and love and feeling and spiritual delight, according to his individual capacity. This will constitute the measure of the real aristocracy of each one’s genius; but bread and raiment, the barest necessities of the physical bodies, shall, in this kingdom of human love for the guru, never be denied to anyone. In the Guru’s ideal state, no one will thenceforward die of hunger and nakedness. Death can not be prevented, the difference cannot be destroyed, but physical privation will be prevented here on this earth by man himself. Let mountains be high, flowers small and grass low, but all shall be clothed with the beauty of God and fed with His abundance.