Sikhism as a World Religion: Parallels and Interco

[Guest learner singh]

The author owes grateful thanks to Dr. Sarjeet Singh Sandhu of Chandigarh, now living in the United States; and to Sardar Gurmit Singh, earlier of Papua New Guinea, and now living in Australia, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of the paper. I am specially grateful for the several references to the text of Guru Granth Sahib that they provided relating to the topics of "revelation" and "independent religious identity" of Sikhism.

Doubtless Sikhism is an independent relgion. But it is also

true that Sikhism has intimate connection with Hinduism and Islam. This is part of the dynamics and development of religious and socio movements within frameworks of history. Indeed, religious movements (like all other socio-historical movements) have no razor-sharp, clear-cut beginnings; they all start in the "middle" of what may have preceded them. Indeed, the coming into being of social and religious movements is often noticed, marked and proclaimed decades, and sometimes centuries, after the fact. Christianity did not begin with Christ, nor did Christ himself know that he was starting a new religion called Christianity. For a long time it was difficult to separate Christianity from Judaism. Even Islam, which in popular imagination is seen as worlds apart from Christianity, borrowed heavily from the Judeo – Christian tradition, including their prophets. Western theologians do indeed lump Judaism, Christianity, and Islam together, categorizing them as the three Abrahmic religions.

Withing Christianity, Martin Luther (who was a contemporary of Guru Nanak) protested against the claim of the Roman Catholic Church that salvation was only available through the sacraments

of the Church, and objected to the commercialization of salvation through sale of indulgences. Over the years, Protestantism came to raise voices against conformity and two-tiered spirituality; and began to preach of salvation through faith alone, scriptures as the only authoritative source, and priesthood of all believers. It also gave authority of interpretation to individuals as they read the Bible written in the vernacular. This divergent group of people later created Protestantism with multiple denominations within itself. [F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (eds.): The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997, pp. 1338-1340]. Protestants do look at themselves as a separate religion, but they do not say that they have no connection with Christianity or with Roman Catholicism. They have strong relationships – though of resistance and rejection!]

Nearer home in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism cannot be separated in watertight compartments and to say that they have got nothing to do with each other is quite naïve. In turn, Sikhism was born as a "protest" against Hinduism as practiced in India at the time. Over a period of some two hundred years, Sikhism developed into a new religion in its own right. But that does not mean that it has no connection with Hinduism and Islam. While Sikhism is today a separate religion, with its own history, integrity, holy scriptures and liturgy, it cut its teeth in the lap of Hinduism and as a playmate of Sufi’ism. Our Gurus were born and married in Hindu families. Even as they preached the existence of one God, they all used the Hindu spiritual idiom to imagine, to understand, and to explain human existence and its purpose in the universe. They retained the Hindu beliefs in Karma, in the transmigration of the soul, of the Heavenly court, and of nirvana – the release from the cycle of birth and death. What is different about Sikhism is its monotheism – One God above all religions – and its reform message regarding caste, clas

s, and gender. It is reasonable to say that in a historical sociological sense, Sikhism is to Hinduism what Protestantism was to Roman Catholicism: each "protested" against the dominant religion of the time; and each became a distinctly separate religion. In terms of theology, Sikhism is closest to Unitarianism, yet another tradition of Christianity.

Sikhism: Born of a Great Mind and a Soul Sublime

After reading the statement that Sikhism is a "revealed religion" and revealed scriptures, with "ten prophets" in tow, I wondered a lot. Where did these ideas come from? This rhetorical question brought help from two readers of an earlier draft of the paper (see note at the end of the paper). They pointed out that the issues of both the revelation of the scriptures and of separate religious identity of the Sikhs had been echoed in several places in Guru Granth Sahib (See Pages 566, 628, 673, 722, 763, 875, 1000, 1136; and Japji Pauri 17). A careful and dispassionate reading and review of these references, as a social scientist, does not justify the positions presented in the recent discourses on Sikhism in America.

Religious devotees may not accept but historians and anthropologists of religions have told us that, knowingly or unknowingly, propagators of different religious throughout history have been engaged in theological campetition, each with the other, as they have tried to mystify, to sanctify their own chosen gods and their own particular traditions. Is it possible that in representing and explaining Sikhism to the Americans, we have misappropriated the Christian discourse of revelation and promoted our Gurus from just teachers, or wise seers, to prophets? We all need to think about it.

I firmly believe that those who have made these statements in question are intelligent and well-intentioned people. With that assumption, the most charitable explanation I can suggest for their assertions about "evelation" is that the problem may have been of the trickery of metaphor (meaning that the

poetic and the metaphorical in the scriptures was read literally). There may also have been the related problem arising from the treachery of translation from one language to the other (in this case from Gurmukhi to English).

Regarding the trickery of metaphor, we should be mindful of the fact that the Sikh scriptures are written in poetry, and are set in tune with the Indian classical Ragas. The language of the Scriptures is full of "imaginative constructions of reality" and inspirational descriptions; and are full of similes and metaphors that touch the heart and elevate the spirit. But if the reader misses the metaphor and gets caught in the literal and over-determined meanings of words, then the results can be highly misleading.

The second problem alluded to above is regarding the treachery of translation which arises from the confusion between dictionary meanings of terms and their attributed meanings which are embedded in the context of their use in a new discourse. In trying to explain Sikhism to a predominantly Christian audiences around America, the writers of the text quoted above perhaps borrowed the Christian language of discourse of "revelation" and "prophets" to whom, it is believed, God had spoken to reveal the truth. There is, of course, a difference in the "dictionary" meanings of words and "contextualized" meanings of words as placed in particular discourses, in this case a theological discourse. In the dictionary meanings of the term, revelation means disclosure, and uncovering, etc. In the course of growing up in Amritsar, I did hear it being said that Guru Nanak had at one time disappeared from his village and had returned quite a few days later to tell his devotees that he had some experience of reflection which in English we can translate as "enlightenment". But this need not be considered supernatural and indeed should be seen to be located in the human realm. I always found, in this story, an echo of the Buddha, and thought of it as a mental-spiritual event in the conscious

ness of Guru Nanak, during a period of deep reflection, constituting a spiritual episode. I do not think it has ever been claimed to be a "revelation" as that term is understood in the context of Judeo-Christian and Islamic discourses. It should be useful to remind the readers that the Torah of the Jews, the Christian Bible, and the Koran of the Muslims are all claimed to be revealed books: they are believed to have come as revelations from God or Allah. [Catechism of the Catholic Church, Liguori Publications, Liguori, MO, USA, 1994].

Quoting from the Formal Discourse on Revelation:

In Christian theology, the term "revelation" implies communication of divine truth, especially by divine agency or supernatural means. Two descriptions and definitions of revelation are included below for the Sikh readers who may not have come across such materials:

"In Christian theology the word [revelation] is used both of the corpus of truth about Himself which God discloses to us and of the process by which His communication of it takes place." [F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (eds.). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 1392].

"Two essential features of the idea of revelation emerge from these observations; first, revelation is considered as an unveiling of what was already true, whether as enduring reality, as past event, or as foreordained future; second, although whatever is being revealed was true all along, it was previously concealed or unknown. [Paul J. Achtemeier (general ed.), Harper’s Bible Dictionary, Harper and Row, New York, 1985, p. 867].

Recollecting our phrase the ‘treachery of translation’ used above, we should add that in borrowing words contexturalized in a discourse, we unknowingly may borrow also the assumptions of the discourse itself. For instance, with the term ‘Revelation’ also comes the idea of "truth about Himself which God disclosed to us". Therein lie some important assumptions and indeed a particular envisioning o

f God. None of that seems to resonate to the experience of Guru Nanak and to Sikhism.

Gurus, not Prophets:

The exact same argument can be repeated in regards to Gurus not being prophets. In the dictionary meanings of the word prophet, any intelligent social scientist may turn out to be prophetic. In Christian Science (a particular group among Christians), prophet is no more than a "wise seer". But in most Christian traditions, Prophet means one who delivers divine messages or interprets the divine will. Some divine appointment is implied or directly claimed. Judeo-Christian traditions have had many prophets, among them, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and others. Islam had its own Prophet in Mohammed who claimed to be the only true Prophet. We do not need prophets in Sikhism, thank you! We should be satisfied with word "Gurus" which indeed has been accepted as is in all the important world languages.

How to Represent Essential Sikhism:

In representing Sikhism to those who do not know anything about it, we have to communicate the following essentials. Sikhism is a comparatively young religion. Its founder, Guru (Teacher, Wise Seer) Nanak Dev was born in 1469. The Tenth and the last of the Sikh Gurus, Guru Gobind Singh was born in 1666 and died in 1708 at the hands of two Afghan assassins hired by the Mughal King of the time. Guru Gobind Singh had lived and died fighting against religious persecution by the Mughal Kings. It was a historical necessity that had lead Guru Gobind Singh to re-create the Sikhs as the Khalsa – the Pure, the totally committed, Soldier – Saints who, to be distinguished from others, would wear turbans and unshorn hair and beards. Those who can read the cultural and semiotic cues of the Sikh persona, will find the Sikh turban and beard to be quite different from the Arab or Afghan beard and turban.

Guru Gobind Singh before his death had also asked the Sikhs to terminate the tradition of Guruship and asked that the Guru Granth Sahib, the Holy Boo

k of Sikh Scriptures should be the perennial Guru to which Sikhs should go for spiritual guidance, and direction for moral conduct. The Guru Granth Sahib is a collection of the philosophic and devotional utterances of the Sikh Gurus. It is all written in poetry and is attuned to the Indian Ragas. As the world-known British historian Toynbee points out, no other book in human histoy and experience has practiced such broad acceptance of utterances of men practicing other religions, in this case, Hindu Bhagats and Muslim Sufi’s.

The essence of Sikh ontology-theology is given by Guru Nanak as follows:

Ik-Oamkar Sat(I) Nam(u) Karata Purukh(u) Nirbhau(u) Nirvair(u) Akala Murat(I) Ajuni Saibhan Gurprasad(I).

In English meaning: The One Universal Being: The Real; The Spirit; The Creator; The Controller and Enjoyer; Beyond restraint, the Spontaneous; Beyond any internal antagonisms, the Harmonious; The Timeless; The Embodied; And yet not subject to generation and cessation; The Self-existing One; whom we can attune ourselves through the Guru’s Grace. [The translation in English is from Sohan Singh, The Seeker’s Path (Being an Interpretation of Guru Nanak’s Japji), Orient Longmans, New Delhi, 1959].

As should be clear from the above, Sikhism is monotheistic. It talks of One God above all Religions. Sikhism is not self-righteous, but believes that there is more than one righteous path to salvation. Sikhism is both a religious movement joined with social reform. Guru Nanak asked his followers to worship one God, and pray for God’s Grace, for the descent of the Divine in their lives, giving them God-consciousness. He told them that while walking in the shadow of God’s Grace, they should stay in the world, doing their doty (dharma) as farmers, artisans, and householders: earning an honest living, with dedication to work; sharing generously with those who are helpless or are in need; relating with others, men and women, as equals before God and Man; to speak up against injustice and immorality; and s

tand up for their conscience and convictions.

It is around this core set of values that Sikhism as a religious tradition and as a culture has grown, responding, with a deep sense of the moral, to the forces of history and to the politics of the time, over the last 500 and more years; asking for God’s blessings for all humanity; Sarbat da Bhalla!

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[Sarbloh Soulja]

Waheguroo Jee Ka Khalsa!

Waheguroo Jee Kee Fateh!!

[Uncrowned Warrior]

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good nice posts!

Waheguroo Jee Ka Khalsa!

Waheguroo Jee Kee Fateh!!