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.
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 ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.
