INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

It is noteworthy that more than one third of my interlocutors utilized the image
of a school or classroom situation when they verbally depicted their personal
relationship to Guru Granth Sahib. A shorter excerpt from a conversation with a
young Sikh man may exemplify:
If you are going to school everyday... only to see the face of your
teacher... then you will not pass your exam. You have to listen and learn
from your teacher. His teaching is important. In the same way the
Guru’s teaching is gurbani. The Guru knows God and provides inspiration
and instructions on how to reach that treasure. In each hymn there
are answers to all your questions. If you follow that it will change your
life. There is no benefit of just reading.... you have to follow the teaching.
Attending school is a cultural experience shared by many people. The image includes
the social aspect of getting together as students in a corporative social order which
provides a clear differentiation between the subordinate students and the superior
teacher and teaching. The individual student will have to accept the forms of authority
and commit to disciplined routines in order to learn and be socialized in a teaching.
Through punctual attendance and attentiveness to the teaching the student may
transform his or her actions, personal dispositions, and cultivate the inner self. The
schooling experience implicates a process of maturation, during which hard and
sincere work in the “classroom” will be rewarded. “If we are attentive to the Guru’s
teaching we will pass the exam,” another interlocutor said. God will reward all those
devotees who fully give themselves over to the instructions of the much higher teaching
and discipline of the Guru.
To create links with the invisible divine being Sikh devotees must firstly build
up positive relationships to the present Guru – the teaching in Guru Granth Sahib –
and venerate the physical scripture for what it contains and mediates. The character
of these relationships are both didactical and social, in the sense that Sikh devotees
should attentively read, comprehend, and follow the teaching, and serve the Guru
personified in the sacred text. The normative stance of disciples is submission to the
superior Guru and the binding force between disciples and the Guru is devotion. This
power relation is not considered to be a compromise with individual freedom, but
rather it is a way to cultivate humility that will grant merits and protection. The disciples
surrender and attentively create relatedness to the Guru as they approach the
physical body of Guru Granth Sahib and engage in its words.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008