Guru Amar Das

Guru Amar Das (1479-1574) became the third Guru in 1552 at the age of seventy-three, and lived to a hundred, guiding the community for more than two decades. He had spent much of his life as a devout Vaishnava, making repeated pilgrimages to the Ganges, before hearing his niece-in-law sing a hymn of Nanak and seeking out Guru Angad, whom he served with a famous devotion despite his own advanced age.

As Guru he gave the growing Panth an administrative shape. He divided the community's territory into some twenty-two preaching seats, the manji system, each under an appointed local leader, and is said to have entrusted parallel piri charges to women, an early delegation of religious authority across a wide geography. He made Goindval on the Beas his centre and built there a baoli, a stepwell of eighty-four steps that became a place of pilgrimage.

The reforms turned a devotional following into an ordered institution with its own leadership, its own gathering-places, and its own rhythms, the practical scaffolding on which the later Gurus would build a city and a scripture.

Amar Das pressed the social edge of Nanak's teaching harder than any Guru before him. He made the langar a condition of audience: none could see the Guru who had not first sat in its single row and eaten with all castes together. Tradition holds that even the emperor Akbar, visiting Goindval, took his meal in the common line before meeting him, a story that, whatever its literal accuracy, expresses the point exactly.

He spoke against sati, the burning of widows, and against purdah, the veiling and seclusion of women, and permitted the remarriage of widows, positions sharply at odds with the surrounding society. He composed the Anand Sahib, the "song of bliss" still recited at Sikh ceremonies and at the close of worship.

He also began to give the Panth a distinct religious calendar, encouraging the community to gather at its own festivals rather than at Hindu observances, a step toward the institutional separateness that later Gurus would complete. His own hymns entered the Guru Granth Sahib, and with him the succession passed to his son-in-law, Ram Das.