Sikhism

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Sikhism — Sikhī in its own tongue — is the monotheistic tradition that took shape in the Punjab around the teaching of Guru Nanak, born in 1469, and was carried forward through a line of ten human Gurus before passing, by their own direction, into the keeping of a book. The word sikh means learner or disciple; an adherent is, by name, a student.

Nanak’s teaching began from a single conviction: that there is one God, formless and beyond image, present throughout creation and reachable not by ritual or priestcraft but by inward devotion. The opening words of Sikh scripture, the Mūl Mantar, declare that being as one, true, the maker, without fear and without enmity. Against the religious order around him, Nanak set himself plainly on both sides of a divide — neither, he is reported to have said, Hindu nor Muslim — and rejected the authority of caste, the merit of pilgrimage and fasting, and the renunciant’s flight from the world. The path he laid out was a householder’s: honest work, sharing with others, and the constant remembrance of the divine name, nām. These three are still named together as the tradition’s discipline.

What followed was a succession. Nine Gurus came after Nanak, each understood by the community to carry the same inner light in a new body, and under them the movement gained an institutional shape — a sacred center at Amritsar, a written scripture, and a growing distinctness from the Mughal state, which executed two of the Gurus. In 1699 the tenth, Guru Gobind Singh, founded the Khalsa, an order of the initiated marked by the five articles of faith and by the names Singh and Kaur; this is the source of the turban and uncut hair by which Sikhs are widely recognized. At his death the line of human Gurus ended by his decree. He conferred lasting authority on the scripture, thereafter the Gurū Granth Sāhib — treated as a living Guru, enthroned, attended, and consulted, not merely read.

That scripture is itself unusual. Alongside the hymns of the Sikh Gurus it preserves the verses of earlier devotional poets, Hindu and Muslim both — among them Kabir and the low-caste saint Ravidas — gathered as kindred voices rather than rivals. The resonance with the wider bhakti devotion of medieval north India is real and was acknowledged from within; Sikh tradition holds, even so, that what Nanak taught was its own revelation and not a synthesis. Scholars have long debated where the dividing line falls between the sant poetry that fed the movement and the distinct religion it became. The community itself answers the question by practice: it gathers before the book, and sings.

→ In the library: Tagore & Underhill — Songs of Kabir (1915)

→ Related: Jainism · Gnosis