Amrit Sarovar

The pool now known as the Amrit Sarovar traces to a plot of land Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh Guru, identified for a new settlement, which his successor Guru Ram Das began developing in the 1570s. Under Guru Ram Das the excavation of a sacred tank began in earnest, and the settlement that grew up around it took the name Ramdaspur before later becoming Amritsar, a name built directly from Amrit Sarovar, the Pool of Nectar. The fifth Guru, Arjan, completed the tank's construction and, in 1604, built the Harmandir Sahib at its center and installed the newly compiled Adi Granth, the precursor to the Guru Granth Sahib, within it, uniting the site's water, temple and scripture into the complex that remains Sikhism's most important place of pilgrimage.

Guru Arjan designed the Harmandir Sahib with doors on all four sides, open to people of any caste or background, an architectural statement of the egalitarian teaching central to Sikhism, and set the temple lower than the surrounding ground, reachable by a descending causeway across the water, so that a worshipper must walk down toward it rather than up, a deliberate rejection of the raised, hierarchical siting common to many temple traditions of the surrounding region.

Sikh devotional practice treats bathing in the Amrit Sarovar as a significant act of purification and devotion, though Sikhism explicitly rejects the idea that ritual bathing alone confers spiritual merit apart from a sincere inner state; the Guru Granth Sahib repeatedly criticizes bathing undertaken as an empty external ritual while the mind remains unreformed. Pilgrims nonetheless bathe in the tank's waters at all hours, and the causeway leading to the Harmandir Sahib carries a continuous flow of visitors, day and night, since the gurdwara complex never closes.

The Harmandir Sahib complex surrounding the pool also houses the Akal Takht, the seat of Sikh temporal authority facing the temple across the water, and the langar, the community kitchen that has served free meals to all visitors regardless of religion, caste or status since the time of the Gurus, one of the largest and most continuous charitable feeding operations connected to any single religious site in the world. The pool itself has been damaged and rebuilt more than once across Sikh history, including during Mughal era attacks and again during Ahmad Shah Durrani's eighteenth century incursions, each time restored by the Sikh community, and it remains today the geographic and devotional center from which Sikhism's most sacred complex takes its plan.