Guru Har Krishan's dying instruction, Baba Bakala, named only a village, not a person, and the ambiguity that followed shows how much authority rested on the child Guru's final words alone. In the vacuum after his death in 1664, some twenty-two different claimants set themselves up at Bakala, each declaring himself the true ninth Guru and gathering followers and donations on the strength of the dying boy's cryptic phrase. The true successor, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was living quietly among them and made no claim of his own.
He was identified, according to the tradition recorded by later Sikh chroniclers, through a specific test devised by a merchant named Makhan Shah Lubana, who had once vowed a large sum of gold to whichever Guru saved his storm-threatened ship at sea. Visiting each of the twenty-two claimants at Bakala in turn and offering a small coin to each, he received only blessings in return until he reached Tegh Bahadur, who alone named the full amount originally vowed without being told it, prompting Makhan Shah to run through the town proclaiming that he had found the Guru. The episode, however it is weighed as history, is the traditional account of how the community moved from a five-year-old's dying word to a settled ninth Guru.