No tobacco or intoxicants

Sikhs of the Khalsa affirm the prohibition of tobacco and intoxicants. The use of tobacco is one of the four cardinal prohibitions (kurahits) that an initiated Sikh must never breach, and the tradition's emphasis on a clear, disciplined mind and a pure body extends the concern to alcohol and other intoxicants. The Gurus taught that the true intoxication is absorption in the divine Name (Naam), by contrast with which substances that cloud the mind are rejected as obstacles to devotion and self-mastery.

Tobacco was a genuine novelty in Guru Gobind Singh's own lifetime, introduced to South Asia by European traders only in the early seventeenth century, and its prohibition among the newly formed Khalsa in 1699 is counted by historians among the earliest organized religious responses to the substance anywhere in the world; several hukamnamas, letters of command attributed to the Guru, single out tobacco by name as absolutely forbidden to initiated Sikhs in a way that later practice has never relaxed, in contrast to alcohol, which, though also prohibited by the Rahit, is treated by many lay Sikhs today as a matter of personal failing rather than a line of equally strict communal enforcement.

The prohibition belongs to the Rahit, the code taken on at initiation into the Khalsa, alongside the bans on cutting the hair, on kutha meat, and on adultery. It expresses the Sikh ideal of the saint-soldier who keeps body and mind fit for service and remembrance, and it distinguishes the disciplined life of the Khalsa. While tobacco is singled out as an absolute prohibition, the broader rejection of intoxicants reflects the Gurus' consistent teaching that clarity of mind is essential to the devotional life.

The Sikh prohibition finds an interesting parallel, arrived at independently, in the Word of Wisdom of the Latter Day Saint movement, which likewise forbids tobacco and alcohol as substances incompatible with bodily and spiritual discipline; historians of religion sometimes group such rules together as instances of a recurring pattern in which a tradition marks its members' bodies as instruments dedicated to religious discipline, though the Sikh and Mormon prohibitions developed in entirely separate centuries and contexts with no documented historical connection between them. The prohibition's absence from the earliest Sikh scripture has a simple historical explanation: tobacco reached India only in the early seventeenth century, brought by Portuguese traders, decades after Guru Nanak's death in 1539, so the plant was simply unknown to the founder of the faith and could only be addressed by the later Gurus and by the Rahit that took shape around Guru Gobind Singh's Khalsa.