IB World Religions 7.3.1. the Guru Granth Sahib: Revelation and Composition Notes

7.3.1. The Guru Granth Sahib: Revelation and Composition

Bani and shabad

1. Sikh accounts of scripture begin with a claim about speech. Sikhs hold that God is nirguna, without form or attribute and so not to be seen, but that God can be heard, because God utters a Word.
2. That Word carries two names in Sikh usage. Bani is the Word as spoken or sung, and shabad is the Word as fixed and written, though Sikhs use the pair loosely and often interchangeably.
3. Shabad is also the ordinary word for a single hymn in the scripture, so a Sikh who says they sang two shabads means two hymns rather than two doctrines.
4. The Word is not treated as information about God. Sikhs describe it as God's own self-expression, so attending to it closely is a form of contact rather than a lesson learned.
5. This is why Sikh worship consists overwhelmingly of recitation and singing. There is no sacrifice and no image, because on this account it is the Word uttered that makes God present.
6. Guru Ram Das states the identification at its strongest in a line Sikhs quote constantly: the bani is the Guru and the Guru is the bani.

Gurbani and divine origin

1. The Word as it reached the Gurus is gurbani, the Guru's bani, and Sikhs hold it to be divinely revealed rather than humanly composed.
2. The tradition's own phrase for its source is dhur ki bani, the bani from the primal origin. Guru Arjan writes that the bani has come from that source and has dissolved all anxiety.
3. Guru Nanak describes the process in the first person while speaking to Bhai Lalo: as the Word of the Lord comes to me, so I make it known.
4. The grammar of that line matters to Sikhs. Nanak claims to be transmitting rather than inventing, which is why the Gurus are called receivers and speakers of the Word rather than its authors.
5. Sikhs distinguish this from trance or possession. The Gurus are held to have been fully themselves while speaking, and the tradition records no dictating angel and no ecstatic seizure.
6. Because the source is held to be divine, the text is not edited, abridged or paraphrased for use. What is read in the gurdwara is what is written, and a translation is offered alongside the original rather than in place of it.

The Gurus as receivers

1. Six of the ten Gurus contributed hymns to the scripture: Nanak, Angad, Amar Das, Ram Das, Arjan and Tegh Bahadur.
2. All six sign with the same name. Every hymn by a Guru is attributed to Nanak, whatever the Guru's own name, because Sikhs hold that one light passed down the line from body to body.
3. The compositions are told apart by a number instead. The heading Mahalla with a numeral records which Guru spoke a hymn, so Mahalla 1 is Guru Nanak and Mahalla 5 is Guru Arjan.
4. Sikhs describe the succession as one jot, one light, in ten bodies. The ten Gurus are therefore treated as successive bearers of a single Guruship rather than as ten teachers with ten doctrines.
5. The claim is doctrinal rather than stylistic. Sikh scholars readily identify differences of voice and vocabulary between the Gurus while holding that the light they carried was the same.
6. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, included none of his own compositions in the volume, which Sikhs read as a statement about what the book is and what it is for.

Raga, ang and arrangement

1. The Guru Granth Sahib is arranged for singing. Its main body is ordered by raga, the melodic framework a hymn is to be sung in, rather than by author or by subject.
2. Thirty one ragas organise the volume, running from Siri Raga near the beginning to Jaijaivanti at the end, and within each raga the hymns are ordered by Guru and by poetic form.
3. The consequence is practical. A hymn is located by its tune, so anyone opening the volume is opening a hymnal laid out in performance order.
4. Pages are called angs, limbs, rather than pages, and every printed copy has exactly 1430 of them with identical pagination, so one reference falls in the same place in every gurdwara in the world.
5. The volume opens outside the ragas with the Japji Sahib of Guru Nanak, and closes after the last raga with a series of shorter collections.
6. The final item, the Ragmala, a listing of musical modes, is not accepted by all Sikhs as part of the revealed text, and gurdwaras differ over whether it is read at the end of a complete reading.
7. The fixed order and fixed pagination are what allow practices like the Akhand Path and the daily hukamnama to work identically wherever Sikhs are.

The form of the compositions

1. Within each raga the hymns are grouped by poetic form, and the forms are worth naming because Sikhs refer to compositions by them rather than by page.
2. A shabad in this sense is a short hymn of a few stanzas, and it is the ordinary unit sung in kirtan.
3. An ashtapadi is a longer composition in eight stanzas. Guru Arjan's Sukhmani is built from twenty four of them in sequence.
4. A var is a ballad form taken from Punjabi heroic poetry, made of pauris, stanzas, with saloks, short couplets, set before each one. Asa ki Var is the best known.
5. Many hymns carry a rahao line, marked in the text, which states the central point and is returned to as the refrain whenever the hymn is sung.
6. The whole volume is verse. It contains no narrative, no law code and no biography, and every composition in it is metrical.
7. Sikhs draw a consequence from that. Revelation reached them as poetry made to be sung, so the sung performance is the text in its proper state rather than a decoration added to it.

Revelation in daily practice

1. The doctrine of revelation shows itself in what Sikhs do with the volume rather than only in what they say about it.
2. The daily prayers are drawn from it. Nitnem opens with the Japji Sahib, so a Sikh's morning is spent reciting revealed text rather than praying in words of their own devising.
3. Kirtan sets those hymns to the ragas prescribed with them, so the singing is understood as the performance of revelation in the form it was given.
4. A hukamnama is taken by opening the volume at random, on the ground that the Word can address a particular congregation on a particular morning.
5. The physical honours follow from the same claim. The volume is installed, canopied, attended and put to rest as a presence rather than shelved as a text.
6. Sikhs hold that gurbani ended with the Gurus. Hymns written since by Sikhs, however admired, are not added to the volume and are not read in its place.
7. The result is that a Sikh's contact with God is understood to run through a fixed body of words that is the same everywhere, sung to the same measures and read from the same angs.