“Guru Nanak’s environmentalism upholds the ethical objectives of contemporary eco-theologians—their concern with justice based on care pertaining to our present lives. We cannot be waiting for the future ‘kingdom’ of God, caution feminist scholars. The love of life extends to our immediate families, to our primary communities, and to other species. Guru Nanak’s profound verses have the potential to generate ‘a new synthesis, a new creation in which human nature and nonhuman nature become friends in creating of a livable and sustainable cosmos’.”
With the earth’s climate changing faster than ever and the oceans getting hotter and more acidic, we face the gravest environmental challenges today. Guru Nanak would not have been privy to our daily news reports about unprecedented hurricanes, floods, wildfires, health threats, depletion of agriculture, extinction of plant and animal species, and other such hazards. Nevertheless, his open-ended sublime melodies have a profound impact as they move us out from our narrow selves towards appreciating nature’s rhythms, earth’s abundant gifts and the cosmic beauty surrounding us. Guru Nanak’s reverence for our planet is infectious. The more we read and hear him, the more we question our economic, profit-making, capitalist attitude.
Even the few biographical facts we have about Guru Nanak’s life underscore his consanguineous relationship with nature. Apparently, as a youngster, he did not like the confines of school, and opted to commune with nature. The Janamsakhis repeatedly illustrate his at-homeness in nature. We even see young Nanak grazing cows, and when he falls asleep, a cobra shades him while the sun smiles from above; in another narrative, the shade of the tree stands still while he is asleep. The terrestrial and the celestial, the spheres human, animal and vegetation, are all integrated into a harmonious whole. The Guru travelled to many different places and acquired a deep knowledge of and appreciation for the abundant diversity of flora and fauna. As we know, the first Sikh community developed in Kartarpur, the village he founded by the rippling river Ravi. Men and women who gathered around the Guru to hear and recite his hymns were in sync with the soil and spirit of its natural landscape. Planting, irrigating, ploughing, harvesting, rotating crops, cooking and cleaning—all with their own hands—were their daily practices. This fundamental nature orientation subsequently led to the Sikh institutions of seva (service for the larger community), langar (eating together without social segregations) and sangat (sense of fellowship)
An enchanting plurality of trees, plants, flowers, animals, birds and elements forms the script of Guru Nanak’s literary repertoire. It is very much with them, in them, that Guru Nanak rejoices inthe wondrous presence of the divine One in this very world of ours. His hymns like ‘BarahMah’, ‘Pahare’ and ‘Thiti’ manifest the correlation between cosmic and human rhythms, physical and spiritual currents. Guru Nanak’s theology does not posit ‘God’ above or apart from the cosmos: the sole infinite Creator creates everything, is present in everything, watches over each and all with care and joy. All of natural phenomena is the Divine’s household (eco from the Greek word for household: ekos). Guru Nanak reveals this very cosmos as the dwelling place of the divine One and our life together with fellow beings, biotic or abiotic, in an interlinking web. He approves of neither Western anthropocentricism nor an instrumentalist attitude to nature. We must absorb his lyrics so we value the natural world and work together to sustain its precious wealth for future generations.
In heartwarming ways, Guru Nanak establishes a familial relationship with the environment:
Air is our guru, water is known as our father
The unifying womb, our mother earth
Night and day are the two male and female nurses
This is how You keep the play of the world playing.
—GGS: 1021
Indeed, this wholistic scenario holds enormous import in Sikh scripture as it appears with slight variation in the epilogue of the Japji. The elements are our parents, without whom we would not even be here. Earth is the mother, the matrix from which we all originate, and the father is water which is approximately 80 per cent of our bodies. The air we breathe every second is our teacher from whom we learn about our utter reliance on the infinite One, who keeps up the momentum of worldly play. Night and day are our male and female nurses who look after us. Thus, all planetary beings are children belonging to the same family. The verb ‘playing’ (khelai) intimates our delightful movements in the rhythmic lap of night and day—with the awareness of the infinite One each moment as we breathe (air is our guru!).
In a host of images Guru Nanak solidly situates the divine One in this world. He exuberantly says, ‘All that exists exists in You—jetihaitetitudhandar’(GGS: 1034). A short passage celebrates the immediacy of the infinite One in nature and its elements. It connects and affirms human architectural, domestic and economic activities as well.
Your room above in four directions
Has land on one side, water on the other
This whole world is a coin
Minted with Your face alone.
—GGS: 596
The architectural construction (caubara) indicates an airy space on the roof of a double-storey house. Its location between the land and the waters evokes the traditional hand mill that women used to grind corn and grains till very recent times. Guru Nanak’s Punjabi term for ‘side,’ puṛ,refers to the two sides of a chakki (hand mill), which brings to mind Sufi devotional songs (chakki-namahs) sung by mothers as their hand spun around grinding flour while their babies slept in their laps. And the whole universe (sagal bhavan) for the Sikh Guru is a single coin imprinted with the face of the transcendent One. If only our society would see the world through Guru Nanak’s eyes! Would we be so money-centric? Would we be so self-indulgent? Economic wealth belongs to all of us equally. How can we have such massive disparities in our global world? How can billions of our siblings be denied access to basic food, health, education and sanitation standards?
Guru Nanak’s environmentalism upholds the ethical objectives of contemporary eco-theologians—their concern with justice based on care pertaining to our present lives. We cannot be waiting for the future ‘kingdom’ of God, caution feminist scholars. The love of life extends to our immediate families, to our primary communities, and to other species. Guru Nanak’s profound verses have the potential to generate “a new synthesis, a new creation in which human nature and nonhuman nature become friends in creating of a livable and sustainable cosmos.”
(Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is Chair of the Department &Crawford Family Professor of Religious Studies, Colby College, Waterville, ME.http://www.colby.edu/directory_cs/nksingh/)