Guru Nanak Dev Ji was born in 1469 at Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, to Mehta Kalu and Mata Tripta Ji. He worked as an accountant at Sultanpur Lodhi, married Mata Sulakhani Ji at Batala, and had two sons, Baba Sri Chand and Baba Lakhmi Das.
From about 1500 he travelled for roughly two decades on journeys the tradition calls the four udasis, with Bhai Mardana Ji, a Muslim rabab player from his own village, as his companion. The routes given in the janamsakhis reach Assam and Ceylon in the east and south, Mecca and Baghdad in the west, and Tibet in the north. What is verifiable in that itinerary and what is later devotional expansion is debated by historians and unresolved.
He settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi around 1521 and farmed there for his last eighteen years. The three principles associated with him, kirat karo, naam japo, vand chhako, honest work, remembrance, sharing what you have, were a working practice at Kartarpur before they were a doctrine.
He composed 974 hymns, which are in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji. The Japji Sahib is his. So is the Asa di Var and the Barah Maha in Tukhari.
He appointed Bhai Lehna, a follower and not his son, as successor, giving him the name Angad. That decision, succession by fitness rather than blood, set the pattern for the next hundred and seventy years and caused a schism with Baba Sri Chand's Udasis that never fully closed.
He died at Kartarpur in 1539. The account of the flowers, in which Hindus and Muslims each wished to perform their own rites and found only flowers under the sheet, is one of the most widely told stories in the Punjab and is a statement about him rather than a report.
He was born at Talwandi in 1469, worked as a storekeeper at Sultanpur, and spent about twenty years travelling before settling at Kartarpur on the Ravi for the last part of his life.
The teaching is in his own compositions rather than in an account of him: one creator, no ritual efficacy, no caste, no priesthood, and the household rather than renunciation.
He established the langar, the sangat and the practice of working, sharing and remembering, and he appointed a successor from outside his family. Every institutional decision he made was against the practice of his time.