INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

divine. Simultaneously they approach the scripture as a text to read and semantically
comprehend for pursuing spiritual knowledge and guidance in life. To Sikhs the
Guru Granth Sahib is the Guru perpetually alive and embodied in the body of a book
which reveals divine knowledge to everyone who knows how to perceive it.
HUMAN MESSENGERS OF DIVINE WORDS
Unlike secular historiography which frequently translates the person and life of Guru
Nanak from the socio-cultural and political contexts in which the Guru operated and
borrowed ideas from other mystics, believing Sikhs would rather emphasize the
uniqueness of Nanak as the liberated bard who was entrusted by God to convey
knowledge directly from a transcendence source. Many local Sikhs would underline
that Nanak did not have any personal guru himself, but they exclusively reserve the
term “guru” for shabad, the primordial Word made manifest in the world through
gurbani, or the utterances and instructions of human preceptors. In essence, the Word
is believed to be of a divine nature or even an aspect of the formless God. Anyone
who is internally immersed in remembrance of the divine name (Nam), submits to the
will of God, and continually reads and listens to the true Guru of the Word may receive
divine knowledge, virtues, and qualities, and eventually pursue liberation from
the cycle of birth and death. Although Sikhs do make an epistemological distinction
between the Word of God (shabad) and the utterances of human messengers (gurbani)
the ontological difference remains more subtle and involves merely a process of progression
of divine words, from subtle to material form, which can be perceived with
the human senses. The words and teaching of Guru Nanak and the following Gurus,
transmitted in sound through “the mouth of the Guru” (Gurmukhi) and later committed
to writing, emanated from the shabad and shared the same divine essence. The
Guru Granth Sahib is therefore believed to enshrine the economy and agency of the
Shabad-Guru – the divine Word which descended to mankind through the personal
voices of human messengers.
Sikhs communicating in an English vernacular frequently make use of the
theological term “revelation” when they describe the divine intervention through
Guru Nanak. The Sikh understanding of this foreign term engenders a dynamic process
of hearing and speaking ‒ a discourse through which the formless God in sound
discloses words and knowledge to Guru Nanak without any secondary means. Revelation
in the Sikh understanding is thus an experience of truth through a dialogue
revelation, or a phonetic experience that is mystically and intuitively imparted to the
Guru by the will of God. Divine words are believed to have descended to Nanak who
was set in an immediate state of meditation and started to sing. In the exegetical tradition
of the Sikhs, presented and represented by contemporary Sikh scholars, passages
from the Guru Granth Sahib are often cited to support the argument that Guru
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008