One of the Brahmans was called Déva, and counted himself among the wise. He visited the Guru, and seated himself one day upon the bed of Bába Jév, who was the son of a Guru. The people said: “Do not sit there.” He asked: “Why not?” They answered: “This is the place of the Guru.” He said: “Is perhaps the figure of a Guru not that of a man, or have I not a rational soul manifest in me? or can I not enjoy what another eats or drinks?” This speech came to the ears of the Guru Hargovind. He called that man before him, and said: “O Déva! it is not the whole world but one being?” He replied: “It is.” The Guru pointed to an ass, and asked: “Do you know what this is?” Déva replied: “You are one with God, therefore you are also this.” The Guru laughed, and was not at all angry. Déva wished to marry his own sister; the people said: “This is forbidden.” He answered: “If it were forbidden, the junction of the sexual parts would be impossible. Thus, because it is not God’s will that we should rise up in the air, he withheld from us the faculty of flying.”
The Sikhs venerated the Guru Har-govind as a god, and believed that he has passed through six incarnations. Perah Kaivan, a Yazdanian, was moved by the reputatation of the Guru, and came to visit him.
The Guru recognised him, and showed him great respect. Upon that account Perah Kaivan left him. A week had scarcely passed after he was gone, when Har-govind died, on a Sunday, the third day of the Moherram, in the year 1055 of the Hejirah (A. D. 1645). When they had placed his corpse upon the pyre, and when the fire rose up in high flames, a ràjapút called Rájarama, who had been his servant, precipitated himself into the fire, and walked several paces in the midst of the flames, until he reached the feet of the corpse, and having laid his face upon the soles of the Guru’s feet, he did not move until he expired. After him, the son of a Jat, who was in the service of Har-govind’s son-in-law, leaped into the fire. Many other Sikhs wished to follow his example, but the Guru Har rayi forbade it. Dáulet Khan Kaksal says:
“Of a hundred sayings of my master, I remember one: The world never becomes a desert, nor the wine-house a prayer-house. What can my soul give more than my heart can bear? Whatever the soul gives, and whatever the heart bears, the one and the other is god-given.”