Guru Gobind Singh Declares the Guru Granth Sahib the Eternal Guru

On 6 October 1708, at Nanded in the Deccan, on the bank of the Godavari River, Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru of the Sikhs, ended the line of personal Guruship that had run from Guru Nanak, decades after his own founding of the Khalsa at Anandpur Sahib in 1699, already recorded here. Mortally wounded by an assassin's dagger weeks before, he called the Sikh community together and conferred the Guruship on the Adi Granth, the scripture Guru Arjan had compiled and Bhai Gurdas had scribed, walking around the volume five times and bowing before it, and declared that Sikhs would henceforth regard no living person as Guru but the scripture itself, installed as the Guru Granth Sahib. He died the next day, 7 October 1708, and no eleventh human Guru was named; the Guru Granth Sahib alone has carried the Guruship since, consulted, bowed to, and ceremonially put to rest each night in every gurdwara exactly as a living Guru would be, well before the Sikh Empire's founding in Punjab in 1799, already recorded here. The site of his death and of the declaration became Takhat Sachkhand Sri Hazur Sahib, one of Sikhism's five Takhts, the seats of the faith's temporal authority, still standing on the Godavari's bank and still administering the tradition today.