Bhagat Peepa Jiਭਗਤ ਪੀਪਾ ਜੀ

Bhagat Peepa Ji was a Rajput king of Gagron, in present day Jhalawar district of Rajasthan, who renounced his throne in search of God and became one of the Bhakti movement's early saint poets. Tradition dates his birth to about 1425. His single hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji teaches that the body itself is God's temple.

Who was Bhagat Peepa Ji?

He was one of the Bhagats, the devotional saints from different regions, faiths and walks of life whose hymns Guru Arjan Dev Ji placed alongside the Gurus' own bani when he compiled the Sikh scripture in 1604. Most of the Bhagats were working men: Bhagat Kabir Ji, a weaver, Bhagat Ravidas Ji, a cobbler, Bhagat Namdev Ji, a calico printer, and Bhagat Dhanna Ji, a farmer. Peepa came from the opposite end of society, a throne, and gave it up. He is also known as Raja Pipaji, Rao Pipa, Sant Pipaji, Pipa Bairagi and Pipanand Acharya. His life makes the same point from above that theirs makes from below: neither a crown nor a humble birth decides who finds God.

A king of Gagron in Rajasthan

Peepa was born into a Rajput royal family at Gagaraun, also written Gagron, in present day Jhalawar district of Rajasthan, and became king of Gagaraungarh. SikhiWiki describes his family as Khichi Chauhan Rajputs. His dates, though, cannot be fixed with confidence, and honest accounts say so plainly. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives his birth as about AD 1425, while Wikipedia stresses that his exact dates of birth and death are unknown and that he is believed to have lived in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Some traditions place his rule as early as 1360 to 1385, and a traditional genealogy suggests he died in 1400, dates that cannot all sit together with a birth in 1425. His birth and death are therefore best read as tradition, not record. What the sources do agree on is his early devotion: as king he worshipped the goddess Bhavani, also called Durga, whose idol was enshrined in a temple within the premises of his palace, and he is described as beginning as a follower of Shiva and of the goddess before his seeking took another turn.

What does tradition say about his turn to Ramananda?

The turning of his life is told as tradition, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism itself marks it with the words 'it is said'. The goddess Bhavani, it is said, once told him in a dream to visit Kashi, modern Varanasi, and receive initiation from Ramananda, the great Bhakti teacher based there. Peepa went to Kashi, but Ramananda refused to see him in his gaudy robes. The king cast off his royal apparel and put on a mendicant's garment, and only then was he received and initiated. He returned home and began to live like an ascetic. At his invitation Ramananda visited Gagaraun, and the raja, in a gesture the tradition loves, lent his own shoulder to the palanquin carrying his teacher in procession. In this telling Peepa stands among the disciples of Ramananda alongside Kabir Ji and others who carried the same teaching across northern India: devotion offered directly to God, without pride of caste, wealth or rank.

From Gagron to Dwarka: life after the throne

Peepa finally decided to give up his throne altogether and retire to a life of seclusion and meditation. He went to Dwarka in Gujarat, the coastal town where, in the old story, Krishna spent the last years of his life after the Mahabharata war. All twelve of his wives insisted on accompanying him, the Encyclopaedia says, but he took along only one, Sita, who was of a pious temperament. The Bhaktamal, the Bhakti movement's book of saints' lives, likewise remembers Sita as the wife who stayed with him before and after his abdication, when he had become a wandering monk. At Dwarka he chose a cave for his residence and walked daily, tradition says through a tunnel, to the temple of Krishna on the seacoast. That temple is still a place of pilgrimage, and a fair is held there every year in Peepa's memory.

After what he took to be a personal encounter with the Lord, the tradition says, he gave up idol worship altogether. He and his companion wife lived for a time in a jungle, and after a period of penance he set out roaming the country to serve ordinary people. Together they sang hymns and prayers of his own composition, collected money and distributed it among the poor, and fed travelling mendicants, treating them as God's chosen ones. The Bhakti hagiographies tell one more story of those wandering years: robbers came at night to steal the buffalo whose milk fed his companions, and Peepa, finding the theft in progress, began helping the robbers and urged them to take the calf as well. The robbers, the story says, were so moved that they gave up their ways and became his disciples. Like all such tales, it is told here as hagiography, not history, but it shows the man the tradition remembers: a king who had learned to give.

How many hymns of Bhagat Peepa Ji are in Guru Granth Sahib Ji?

One hymn of Bhagat Peepa Ji is in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, in Raag Dhanasari, on Ang 695, the same page that also carries one of Bhagat Dhanna Ji's hymns. It is a short hymn with a large teaching. Peepa begins by turning the whole apparatus of worship inward: within the body is the god, within the body is the temple, within the body are the incense, the lamps and the food offerings. He says he searched through many lands and found the nine treasures within his own body, and he sums up his discovery in the line Sikhs quote most often from him: what pervades the universe also dwells in the body, and whoever seeks Him finds Him there. He signs himself simply: Peepa prays, the Lord is the supreme essence, revealed through the True Guru. His bani therefore needs no temple building, no pilgrimage road and no priest between the seeker and God.

What his bani teaches, and his legacy

Peepa taught that God is within one's own self, and that true worship is to look within and to have reverence for God in each human being. In the language of the tradition, he travelled from saguna bhakti, worship of God in a visible form, the goddess in her palace temple, to nirguna devotion, worship of the Formless One without attributes, and scholars count him among the earliest influential sants of the fifteenth century Bhakti movement in northern India. Two collections of his sayings are known, Shri Pipaji Bani and Sarab Gutaka, both surviving in manuscript form, and Pipa Math, a monastery at Dwarka, honours his memory where tradition places his last years. Among the fifteen Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji he stands beside Baba Farid Ji, a Sufi of Pakpattan, Kabir Ji the weaver and Ravidas Ji the cobbler: a king who walked away from a palace, remembered not for the kingdom he ruled but for the one verse in which he told every seeker that the temple they are looking for is their own body.