IB World Religions 7.3.2. Collation and Development: Adi Granth, Dasam Granth and the Janam Sakhis Notes

7.3.2. Collation and Development: Adi Granth, Dasam Granth and the Janam Sakhis

The Adi Granth

1. The Adi Granth, the Primary Collection, is the name Sikhs give to the first authorised gathering of their scripture, completed in 1604. It is the volume from which the present Guru Granth Sahib grew.
2. Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, ordered the collation and dictated it to Bhai Gurdas, who wrote it out beside the pool at Ramsar in Amritsar. Sikhs describe the work as preserving revealed word, not composing new material.
3. The collection gathered the hymns of the first five Gurus: Guru Nanak, Guru Angad, Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das and Guru Arjan himself. Guru Arjan's own contribution is the largest of the five.
4. Sikhs give a practical reason for the timing. Rival manuscripts were circulating with hymns falsely attributed to the Gurus, and an authorised text settled which words the community could trust.
5. The finished volume was installed in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar in 1604, with the elderly Baba Buddha appointed as its first reader. Sikhs mark this as the point at which the community acquired a fixed text of its own.
6. The contents are arranged by raag, the musical measure a hymn is sung in, rather than by author or by date. Hymns written a century apart therefore sit side by side under the same melody.

Bhagats and Pirs

1. The Adi Granth is not made only of the Gurus' words. Guru Arjan also included compositions by Hindu bhagats, devotees, and Muslim Pirs, Sufi teachers, whose hymns he judged to agree with what the Gurus taught.
2. The most fully represented is Kabir, a weaver from Banaras, with several hundred hymns and couplets in the text. Sikhs hold that he pointed to the same formless God the Gurus pointed to.
3. Other bhagats include Namdev, a calico printer from Maharashtra, Ravidas, a leatherworker, and Dhanna, a farmer. Their trades matter to Sikhs, since several came from castes Indian society then treated as untouchable.
4. The Muslim voice most often named is Sheikh Farid, the Punjabi Sufi whose verses the Sikh tradition preserved. In places a Guru has written a reply directly beneath one of his couplets, so the two are read together.
5. Sikhs read the inclusion doctrinally. If God's Word can be uttered through a Hindu weaver and a Muslim Sufi, then the Word belongs to no single community.
6. The included hymns are set in the same raags and sung in the same services as the Gurus' own. A worshipper hearing kirtan, the singing of scripture, is not told to receive them any differently.

Guru Tegh Bahadur's hymns

1. Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru, was executed in Delhi in 1675 on the order of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Sikhs remember him as dying for the right of Kashmiri Hindus to keep a religion not his own.
2. He left a body of compositions, mostly shabads, hymns, and saloks, couplets. They are unusually plain about fear, ageing, death and the emptiness of what people cling to.
3. The Adi Granth had been sealed in 1604, so his work was not in it. His son, Guru Gobind Singh, added it to produce the text Sikhs read today.
4. The tenth Guru dictated the enlarged volume at Damdama Sahib in Talwandi Sabo, with Bhai Mani Singh writing. The recension is often called the Damdama Bir.
5. Guru Gobind Singh added none of his own compositions to the volume. Sikhs read this as evidence that the volume was made to hold the revealed Word, not to honour its compiler.
6. The ninth Guru's saloks now stand near the close of the scripture. They are among the passages most often read at Sikh funerals, where their subject matter is hardest to avoid.

The Dasam Granth

1. The Dasam Granth, the Collection of the Tenth Guru, is a separate book associated with Guru Gobind Singh. Sikhs read it alongside the Guru Granth Sahib and never as part of it.
2. It was assembled after the tenth Guru's death, and Bhai Mani Singh is traditionally named as the compiler. The work of gathering it took several decades.
3. Its contents are varied. They include devotional hymns, retellings of Hindu mythological narrative, martial poetry and a letter in Persian verse addressed to Aurangzeb.
4. Several of its compositions are in daily use. Jaap Sahib, Tav Prasad Savaiye and Benti Chaupai belong to the prescribed daily prayers, and passages from it are recited at the amrit sanskar, the initiation ceremony.
5. The Zafarnama, the Persian letter to Aurangzeb, is the best known of its historical pieces. Sikhs read it as the tenth Guru's account of why armed resistance had become justified.
6. Its authorship is debated within the Panth, the worldwide Sikh community. Some Sikhs hold the whole collection to be Guru Gobind Singh's, while others accept only part as his and attribute the rest to court poets.

The Janam Sakhis

1. The Janam Sakhis, life evidences, are collections of narratives about Guru Nanak. They are the tradition's principal source for what the first Guru is said to have done.
2. Four bodies of them are usually distinguished: the Bala, Puratan, Miharban and Gyan Ratanavali traditions. They overlap heavily, but they order episodes differently and disagree over detail.
3. Their form is episodic. Each sakhi is a short story built around a hymn, setting out the situation in which Guru Nanak is held to have uttered it.
4. Familiar episodes include his disappearance into the river at Sultanpur, from which Sikhs hold he emerged with his commission, and the udasis, the long journeys said to have reached Mecca, Baghdad and the Himalaya.
5. They are devotional literature rather than chronicle. Compilation began at least a century after Guru Nanak's death in 1539, and they carry miracles that historians treat with caution.
6. Sikhs use them for teaching rather than for doctrine. Doctrine is drawn from the Guru Granth Sahib, while the Janam Sakhis supply the stories told to children and the scenes painted on gurdwara walls.

Installation as final Guru

1. In 1708, dying of his wounds at Nanded in the Deccan, Guru Gobind Singh conferred the office of Guru on the scripture itself. Sikhs date the authority of the Guru Granth Sahib as Guru from that moment.
2. The instruction survives in the couplet recited after Ardas, the congregational prayer. It tells Sikhs that the Guru is the Granth, and that whoever seeks God should search its Word.
3. The act closed the line of human Gurus. Sikhs hold that no further human Guru will come, and the mainstream Panth holds that movements claiming one, such as the Namdhari, have stepped outside it.
4. Sikhs describe the change as a completion rather than a break. Every Guru had already taught that the shabad, the Word, was the true Guru and that the human body carrying it was only a vehicle.
5. The anniversary is kept as Guru Gaddi Divas, the day the volume took the Guru's seat. It falls in October and is observed at Nanded and in gurdwaras worldwide.
6. The consequence is visible in any gurdwara. The volume is carried, seated under a canopy, fanned and put to rest at night as a living Guru would be.
7. Sikhs trace those honours to the installation rather than to the age of the manuscript. A newly printed copy receives exactly what a centuries old one receives, because the office belongs to the Word and not to the paper.