Page:The Sikhs (Gordon).djvu/38

18 He died at his home in 1538, at the age of seventy-one.

He was a contemporary of Luther, and, like the German Reformer, he preached no new faith, but contended that religion had become obscured and transformed during the course of centuries. One of the stories told of him in his crusade against the superstitious ceremonies and forms of the priesthood is that on one occasion seeing some Brahmans at their morning devotions by a stream baling out water with their hands facing the east, going through the ceremony of quenching the thirst of dead clients in another world, he, on the opposite bank, began to do the same facing the west. The Brahmans, thinking him a fakir out of his senses, remonstrated with him, saying that all his labours were in vain, and that he could not hope to relieve the thirst of the departed by such heretical actions. Nanak replied, "I am not giving water to my dead, but irrigating my fields in Kartarpur to prevent them drying up