Bibi Bhani Ji was the daughter of Guru Amar Das Ji, the wife of Guru Ram Das Ji and the mother of Guru Arjan Dev Ji. She is the only person in Sikh history in all three relations.
The account most often told is that while her father was seated in meditation she saw a leg of his stool give way, and put her hand under it and held it until he finished, and did not move though her hand was cut.
She was married to Bhai Jetha, a man of no property who had been selling boiled grams as a boy, on her father's judgement of his character rather than his position.
She lived at Goindwal and then at Amritsar and was present through the founding of the town and the digging of the tank.
The succession of the guruship through her, from father to husband to son, is the one point at which lineage and merit coincide in the Sikh line, and the tradition is careful to attribute it to merit.
She was the daughter of Guru Amar Das Ji, the wife of Guru Ram Das Ji and the mother of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, which places her at the centre of the succession.
The Guruship passed through her line from that point onward, and every Guru after the fourth was a descendant.
The account of her holding the leg of a stool so that her father would not be disturbed is the one always told about her, and it is worth noticing what a tradition chooses to remember about a woman in her position.