Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar · Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sikhism

Tradition·Founded 1499 CE·est. ~26 million worldwide

Sikhism → 1 branch

Branch
Story of Sikhism

The true bargain.

His father gave him twenty rupees and told him to make a profitable trade. He spent it all feeding a party of starving faqirs and came home saying that was the profitable trade — a gurdwara stands where it happened, called Sacha Sauda.

Where it is toldThe janamsakhis — Sacha Sauda, near Chuharkana
Who appearsthe boy Nanak, his father Kalu, a company of hungry faqirs
What it teachesThe only honest trade is the one that feeds someone
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Sacha Sauda, the true bargain, is usually the first Nanak story a Punjabi child hears. His father Mehta Kalu, worried that his son had no interest in a trade, gave him twenty rupees to buy goods for resale; Nanak met a group of starving faqirs and spent the whole sum feeding them, then returned saying he had made the truest bargain there was. He was, depending on the telling, beaten for it. A gurdwara stands at the site near Chuharkana in what is now Pakistan. The story does the theological work of setting vand chhakna — sharing what you earn — before profit rather than after it, and it is the story invoked whenever a gurdwara sets up a langar at a disaster site or a protest camp. Note that the phrase has since been taken as the name of an unrelated dera whose head was convicted of rape and murder, which Sikhs find galling.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The alms round. Buddhism · rite Go deeper →
Repairing the world is human work. Judaism · core tenet Go deeper →
The tithe. Christianity · precept Go deeper →
The neighbour. Islam · precept Go deeper →
Charity is doing your job well. The New Church (Swedenborgianism) · precept Go deeper →

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