All Gurus

Teachers from whom a pupil receives something that cannot be got from a book, in traditions where transmission runs person to person. The Sikh line dominates the heading: ten Gurus from Nanak to Gobind Singh, an office that passed by appointment rather than by descent, with Nanak naming Angad over his own sons. Sikhs hold the line of human Gurus closed in 1708, when Guru Gobind Singh vested it in the scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, and in the Khalsa. Other Indic traditions use the word for a living teacher at the head of a lineage, and a figure filed here from one of those is a guru in that sense and not in the Sikh one. Each entry says which sense applies to it.