your bridge home
Saints and Poets
He would not receive anyone, not a merchant, not a landholder, not the emperor, who had not first sat on the floor and eaten.
Amar Das came to it late. That is the first thing to know about him.
Amar Das was born in 1479 at Basarke, into a Bhalla Khatri family. He traded, and he farmed. He was a devout Vaishnava, and for close to twenty years he walked every year to Haridwar, on the Ganga, to bathe.
Twenty years. A whole adult religious life, taken seriously, inside the tradition he was born into.
Amar Das was coming home from one of those journeys when he heard a woman singing. The hymn was Guru Nanak's. The singer was Bibi Amro, married into his own family.
He asked where the words came from. She took him to Guru Angad at Khadur, a man twenty-five years younger than he was.
Amar Das was sixty. He became his disciple.
Then he served for thirteen years. The accounts describe an old man walking to the river before dawn every day, in every season, to carry water for his teacher's household. He held no position. He was waiting for nothing.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.