The battle of Anandpur was brutal. The Mughal forces and the hill rajas had besieged the Khalsa and the fighting was hand to hand, the casualties on both sides severe. In the middle of the battle, soldiers from the Khalsa side noticed something extraordinary: a Sikh was moving through the wounded enemy soldiers with a water vessel, giving them water.
Bhai Kanhaiya — a devoted Sikh who had spent years in the practice of selfless service — was tending to the wounded Mughal soldiers with the same care and attention he would have given to wounded Khalsa soldiers. The surviving enemy fighters were receiving water. Some were recovering enough to pick up their weapons and fight again.
This was, by any conventional military logic, an act of treason. He was brought before Guru Gobind Singh.
The Guru asked: did you give water to our enemies?
Bhai Kanhaiya said: I gave water to wounded men. I see no enemy on this battlefield. In every face I saw I saw your face. I could not leave your face lying in the dust without water.
The Guru looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned to the assembled Sikhs and said: this man has understood my teaching. Not partially — fully. Then he turned back to Bhai Kanhaiya and gave him ointment to add to the water. For the wounds. Both sides.
The Sikh concept of Sewa — selfless service — is not a social programme. It is a recognition about the nature of reality: that the face you are serving is not ultimately different from the face you are wearing. That the suffering you are addressing is not located in the other — it is located in the field of consciousness that you and the other both inhabit and both are. Bhai Kanhaiya had not lost his wits. He had lost the boundary that made the enemy's face different from the Guru's face. The Guru — rather than punishing him for undermining the military effort — recognized immediately that Bhai Kanhaiya had arrived at the destination the whole teaching was pointing toward. And he added ointment. Practical. Specific. If you see everyone as the Guru's face, tend to everyone as the Guru's wound.
Bhai Kanhaiya is considered the father of the Red Cross tradition in South Asia — the founder of the principle of tending to all wounded regardless of which side they fought for. The tradition that became the International Red Cross in 1863 had been practised on the battlefields of Anandpur in 1700 by a man who was doing it not from international law but from the recognition that in every face he saw one face.
The water he carried was ordinary water. The ointment was ordinary ointment. The recognition that made him give them to the enemy was not ordinary. It was the specific clarity of a person who had taken the teaching seriously enough to apply it in the situation where it was hardest to apply.
Which is the only situation where taking a teaching seriously actually means anything.