Nanak’s Quest For The Beloved

 It was a dark, moonless night. Suddenly there was thunder and lightning and it began to rain. The village was asleep. Only Nanak was awake and the echo of his song filled the air.
    Nanak’s mother was worried because the night was half gone and the lamp in his room was still burning. She could hear his voice as he sang. She knocked at his door, ‘‘Go to sleep now, my son. Soon it will be dawn.’’ Nanak became silent. From the darkness sounded the call of the sparrowhawk. ‘‘Piyu, piyu, piyu!’’ it called.
    ‘‘Listen, mother!’’ Nanak called out. ‘‘The sparrowhawk is calling to his beloved; how can i be silent, i will call my beloved too…i will have to sing for lives upon lives before my voice reaches Him, for He is far away.’’ Nanak resumed singing.
    Nanak practised no austerities, meditation or yoga; he only sang, and singing, he arrived. His singing became meditation – his purification and his yoga.
    Endless meditation, if halfhearted, will take you nowhere; whereas just singing a simple song with all your being merged in it, or dance a dance with the same total absorption and you will reach. The question is not what you do, but how much of yourself you involved in the act.
    Nanak’s path to supreme realisation, to godliness is scattered with song and flowers. Whatever he has said was said in verse. His path was full of melody and soft, filled with the flavour of ambrosia.
    The moonless night described at the beginning was an incident from Nanak’s life when he was about 16 years of age. When the Japuji was conceived, Nanak was 30. The Japuji was his first proclamation after the union with the beloved. The sparrowhawk had found his beloved; the call of ‘‘Piyu, piyu’’ was now over. The Japuji contains the very first words uttered by Nanak after self-realisation; therefore they are special.
    Before the birth of the Japuji, Nanak sat on the banks of the river in darkness with his friend and follower, Mardana. Suddenly, he removed his clothes and walked into the river. Mardana called after him, but Nanak plunged into the depths of the river. Mardana waited and when Nanak did not return, he became anxious. Running back to the village, he woke up everyone. It was the middle of the night, but a crowd collected at the riverside because everyone in the village loved Nanak.
Three days passed. Though everyone thought him to be dead, on the third night Nanak appeared from the river. The first words he spoke became the Japuji. So goes the story – true because it gives the essential truth; false in the sense that it is only symbolic. When Nanak disappeared in the river, the story goes that he stood before the divine.
Now, this is a story; what it symbolises must be understood. First, unless you lose yourself completely, until you die, you cannot hope to meet God. Whether you lose yourself in a river or on a mountaintop is of little consequence; but you must die. Your annihilation becomes his being. As long as you are, he cannot be. You are the obstacle, the wall that separates you. This is the symbolic meaning of drowning in the river.
    You too will have to lose yourself; you too will have to drown. The three days in Nanak’s story represent the time required for his ego to dissolve completely.