'Khalsa is the army of God'

CHENNAI, JAN. 3. The golden pages of India's glorious religious history are full of the achievements of great apostles whose message can teach our troubled world, the art of creating unity in diversity and in establishing peace through tolerance and building a society based on Truth, freedom and justice. The last of the Sikh spiritual leaders did not live to see his own ends accomplished, but he effectively roused the dormant energies of a vanquished people, filling them with a lofty longing for national ascendancy. Though his life ended at the age of 42, in an astonishing career, he has left his footprints for the posterity to follow. He stood for secularism, democratic principles and pleaded for man's rights and non-interference in his personal life. That multi-faceted personality was Guru Gobind Singh who laid at the altar of the Almighty all that he could call his own - his father, mother, his four sons and even, his life - for the freedom of everyone including those considered as his enemies. Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa Panth which insisted on open diplomacy, and shared democracy. His concept of this path was unique since he called it as his body and soul and even his very life. At his call five Sikh soldiers offered their heads in surrender and he baptised them by administering ``Amrit''. He said ``Khalsa is the army of the Lord raised by him out of His pleasure''. They who chose this path were meant to be legions of the Timeless God, commissioned to establish the rule of ``Dharma'' and uproot all evils of Khalsa's creation aimed at a well balanced combination of ``Bhakti'' and ``Sakthi'' of moral and spiritual excellence and militant valour and heroism.

In a lecture on the Guru's birthday, Sri Surjit Singh Sahney said, this prophet had the most uncommon sense which enabled him to rise above barriers of caste and convention. His Khalsa, with God's light shining within, was meant to be a global society. When requested to name his successor, he immediately placed a coin and a coconut before the Holy Granth (the sacred scripture of the Sikh faith, compiled and edited over a considerable period by the fifth Guru and took final shape in 1604 when it was installed as the presiding holy presence in Hari Mandir, the Sikh temple, now popularly known as the Golden Temple; it represents the inspired or revealed word of God) and bowed before it saying ``All my Sikhs are hereby ordered to believe the Granth as their perceptor, have faith in the Holy Granth as your Master and consider it as the visible manifestation of the Guru. He who has a pure heart will seek guidance from its sacred words''. This 10th and last Guru was a combination of all virtues.

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