IB World Religions 7.4.2. Statements of Belief: the Living Guru and the Rahit Maryada Notes

7.4.2. Statements of Belief: The Living Guru and the Rahit Maryada

Where belief is stated

1. Sikhism has no creed recited at worship and no council that has issued doctrinal definitions. Sikhs find their statements of belief in the Guru Granth Sahib itself.
2. The scripture states belief as hymns rather than as articles. A Sikh asked what Sikhs believe will usually quote or sing a line rather than cite a numbered clause.
3. The Mool Mantra, the opening lines of the volume, is the nearest thing Sikhs have to a summary statement. Sikhs treat it as settling who God is before any other question is raised.
4. Belief and practice are stated together in the text. The scripture does not separate what a Sikh should hold from what a Sikh should do about it.
5. Alongside the scripture Sikhs have one agreed code of conduct, the Rahit Maryada. It regulates behaviour and ceremony rather than defining doctrine about God.
6. The two documents work differently. The Guru Granth Sahib is held to be revealed and unalterable, while the Rahit Maryada was written by Sikhs and could in principle be revised.
7. Between them they answer the two questions a newcomer usually asks. The scripture says what Sikhs hold about God, and the code says what a Sikh does about it.

The living Guru

1. The central Sikh statement about the scripture is that it is a living Guru. Sikhs hold that the living presence of God is among God's people in the Guru Granth Sahib.
2. The claim is not about paper and ink. Sikhs locate the presence in the shabad, the Word, which the printed volume carries.
3. The belief is visible in how the volume is kept. It is seated on a raised platform, the manji sahib, under a canopy, attended with a chaur, and put to rest at night in a room of its own.
4. Sikhs describe these as the courtesies owed to a living Guru. The same honours were given to the ten human Gurus during their lifetimes.
5. The belief also decides what counts as a gurdwara. Any place where the Guru Granth Sahib is installed is a gurdwara, and a room in an ordinary house qualifies if the volume is properly housed.
6. It shapes decisions as well as buildings. Sikhs take a vaak, a reading opened at random, at weddings, namings and moments of difficulty, on the belief that the Guru is present and can be consulted.
7. Congregations sit on the floor below the volume, and nothing is placed higher than it. The arrangement states the belief physically before a word is spoken.

Origins of the rahit

1. Rahit means the way of life required of a Sikh. Sikhs date the idea to Guru Gobind Singh, who set out obligations for the Khalsa, the initiated community, when he founded it in 1699.
2. The earliest written statements of it are the rahit-namas, texts compiled from the eighteenth century onwards and attributed to Sikhs who had been close to the tenth Guru.
3. They do not agree with one another. The surviving rahit-namas differ over dress, diet and discipline, and later Sikhs judged some of their material to have been inserted.
4. That inconsistency became a practical problem. By the nineteenth century gurdwaras across Punjab followed different customs, and no agreed text settled which of them were Sikh.
5. Reform movements pressed for one code. The Singh Sabha movement, from the 1870s, argued that Sikh practice had absorbed customs that did not belong to it.
6. The demand was for clarity rather than for new doctrine. Reformers wanted the practice of the Panth stated once, in a form any gurdwara could follow.
7. That project produced the twentieth century Rahit Maryada. Its authority rests on agreement across the Panth rather than on revelation.

The Rahit Maryada

1. The Sikh Rahit Maryada is the agreed code of Sikh conduct. A committee of spiritual and learned Sikhs drafted it, and the work took about twenty years.
2. The committee was convened by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee at Amritsar. Drafting began in 1931, the final text was approved in 1945, and the SGPC published it in 1950.
3. Its authority came from consultation. Successive drafts went out to scholars, gurdwaras and Sikh bodies, and objections were worked through before the wording was settled.
4. Sikhs are careful about its status. It is a human document, and it states of itself that it must agree with the Guru Granth Sahib.
5. It is short and practical. It reads as a manual of procedure rather than as a theological treatise, and much of it consists of plain instructions.
6. It is the reference point when practice is disputed. If two gurdwaras disagree over how a ceremony should run, the code is what both of them cite.
7. It carries no force of law. Sikhs follow it by agreement, and there is no priesthood with power to impose it.

What the code covers

1. The code opens by defining a Sikh. A Sikh is anyone who believes in one God, the ten Gurus, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Gurus' teaching and the initiation given by the tenth Guru, and who owes allegiance to no other religion.
2. It then sets out personal discipline. A Sikh should rise before dawn, bathe, and recite the prescribed prayers in the morning, in the evening and before sleep.
3. A long section governs the gurdwara. It covers installing and closing the scripture, who may read it, the conduct of kirtan and katha, and the running of the langar, the free kitchen.
4. Rites of passage are given in order. The code supplies procedures for the naming ceremony, the anand karaj marriage, the amrit sanskar and Sikh funerals.
5. It also states prohibitions. Sikhs are told not to keep idols, not to observe caste, not to consult astrology, and not to treat any living person as a Guru.
6. For initiated Sikhs it names four kurahits, the breaches that require re-initiation. These are cutting the hair, eating meat slaughtered in the Muslim manner, adultery and using tobacco.
7. Much of the text is written as procedure. It fixes the order of a ceremony, who stands where and what is recited, so that a gurdwara anywhere can follow it without local invention.

Range of observance

1. Sikhs differ in how far they keep the code. Those who have taken amrit are amritdhari Sikhs, and they promise to follow the Rahit Maryada daily.
2. Keshdhari Sikhs keep uncut hair and the outward discipline without having taken amrit. Sahajdhari Sikhs follow the teaching while not keeping the full external form.
3. Sikhs do not treat these as grades of membership. All are Sikhs, and the code itself defines a Sikh by belief and allegiance rather than by initiation alone.
4. Diaspora communities have raised questions the code did not anticipate. Whether chairs and tables may be used in the langar has divided gurdwaras in Britain, Canada and elsewhere.
5. Calendar reform has been contested in the same way. The Nanakshahi calendar, adopted in 1999 and revised since, is followed by some Sikh bodies and rejected by others.
6. Some groups keep stricter disciplines alongside it. Nihang orders and the Damdami Taksal follow older or tighter rules on particular points, especially on dress and diet.
7. Sikhs generally treat these as disagreements about practice rather than about belief. The statements of belief in the Guru Granth Sahib are not in dispute between them.