Guru Har Rai and Guru Har Krishan — the gardener and the child.
Har Rai kept a herb garden and a free dispensary that treated the emperor's own son, and disowned his elder son for altering a single line of Nanak's verse to flatter Aurangzeb. Har Krishan became Guru at five, nursed Delhi through a smallpox epidemic, and caught it himself at eight.
These two are the shortest Guruships and are usually skipped, which is a mistake. Har Rai kept a large herb garden and a free dispensary at Kiratpur, sent medicine to the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, and is remembered in Punjabi devotional literature for extreme carefulness with living things — the story of him lifting his robe so as not to damage flowers is told to children. His decision to bar his elder son Ram Rai for altering a word of scripture to please Aurangzeb is the tradition's hardest statement about textual integrity: the succession went instead to Har Krishan, who was five. Har Krishan was summoned to Delhi, refused to see the emperor, and spent his time in the sick quarters of a city in a smallpox epidemic until he caught it and died at eight. Gurdwara Bangla Sahib in Delhi stands where he stayed, and it runs one of the largest langars in India.
The same ground, other faiths
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