INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

mated and reduced to the relics which were enshrined throughout the
Buddhist world, the latter lives on, so to speak, in the teaching of Buddhism.
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After the death of the living Buddha, the “form body” was manifested in his relics
contained in stupas and images of the Buddha which became objects of worship,
while the “body of Dharma” came to signify canonical scriptures that embodied his
teaching which Buddhist followers were to study, recite and interpret. Historical and
iconographic data indicates a co-presence of Buddha’s dual legacy in the Buddhist
world which is tangibly illustrated in religious practices of preserving Dharma texts
in special containers or place them inside Buddha statues.
Sikh conceptions about the Guru Granth Sahib are rooted in a somewhat similar
theory about the Guru’s embodiment ‒ the eternal teaching being manifested in
physical form of the human Gurus and later in the form of a text. The transfer of
authority moved the divine words ‒ the true shabad-Guru revealed in sound ‒ to the
visual centre of a written text and the book continues to manifest the eternal words in
the world. Unlike the Buddhist model, however, the Sikh tradition proclaims the
scripture has continued a succession line and office of a worldly preceptor after the
human Gurus. In the Sikh case the Guru Granth Sahib does not merely manifest a
“dharma body” of the eternal Guru, but the physical book (and not relics of the human
Gurus) is also the worldly manifestation of the Guru’s “form body”, which
should be venerated in the same manner as the bodily manifestations of the human
preceptors once were. The Buddhist analogy still highlights the significant implications
which religious theoretical models about external and internal embodiments
might have on worship and ritual practices. The Sikh distinction between the book
form of the Guru and the “spirit” within its pages makes it possible, at least on an
analytical level, to distinguish between religious practices that primarily aim to honor
the physical manifestations of a Guru communicating a spiritual teaching in a historical
time and space, and religious practices that serves to establish interactions with
the divine messages it enshrines. In other words, there are practices to and for the
external “form” or body of the Guru Granth Sahib, as well as worship acts by which
devotees activate and engage in the interior spiritual teaching of the text. The distinction
between the two categories of practices becomes quite significant if we are to
understand the form and function of the careful ministration Sikhs are offering to
their Guru-scripture.
A consequence of attributing the Guru Granth Sahib the same agency and authority
as of ten human predecessors is that the exterior life of scripture comes to
assume anthropomorphic qualities ‒ a phenomenon articulated metaphorically on a
discursive level and which becomes tangible in ritual enactments and behaviours of
the Sikhs. A number of anthropological studies from different parts of the world have
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Gray 2005. On representation and worship of images of physical books in medieval Buddhist
iconography and literature, see also Kinnard 1999, 2006.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008