Bhakti saint
Bhagat Pipa
ਭਗਤ ਪੀਪਾ
A king of Gagron who gave up his throne. His hymn says the body itself is the temple.
Pipa was a Rajput king of Gagron in present-day Rajasthan, born in the fifteenth century, who worshipped the goddess before he became a disciple of Ramanand. He gave up his throne and wandered as a holy man with his youngest queen, Sita, singing and serving the poor.
His one hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib is a statement of a central Sikh idea: the body itself is the temple, the place of pilgrimage and the offering; whatever is in the universe is in the body, and whoever searches within finds it.
His story, of a king who chose poverty and found the divine within, is still told in Rajasthan, where his followers keep a monastery at Gagron.
