INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

TEXTUALIZING ONESELF
But humans are also given opportunities to deliberately praise the divine name and
recite divine words and thereby obtain possibilities to influence the present and future
destiny. Some religious practices in the Sikh life seem to rest on the idea that the
pre-ordained fate written by God cannot be changed but modified if God grants favours
in exchange of devotion. In the Guru Granth Sahib, the metaphor of a text is
equally much used for descriptions of human devotion to God. In one hymn, for
instance, Guru Nanak writes:
Burn emotional attachment and grind it into ink. Transform your intelligence
into the purest of paper. Make the love of the Lord your pen,
and let your consciousness be the scribe. Then, seek the Guru’s instruction,
and record these deliberations. Write the praises of the Name of
the Lord, write over and over again that He has no end or limitation. O
Baba, write such an account, that when it is asked for, it will bring the
mark of truth. 805
Devotional activities of human agents are dressed in the image of an active scribal
activity. Another gurbani hymn states that people can write the divine name and
praises of God on the canvas of the human body with the pen of their tongues and
the inkpot of their minds. 806
While God writes the fate on the human forehead, humans have the capacity to
“write” good karma into their records. Occasionally, local Sikhs make the parable
between the human interior and the space of a gurdwara. Just like a gurdwara emptied
of the Guru and divine words would cease to be a gurdwara in a true sense, so is
the spiritual centre of humans empty unless it is filled with gurbani and praises to
God. Regular recitations and reflections upon the verses in Guru Granth Sahib, repetitions
and remembrance of the divine name in simran practices, and selfless service to
the Guru, the congregation, and people in the society are the means to transform the
human inner self and collect good actions to be registered in the accounts at the divine
court. Sikh worship seems, from this perspective, to presume a performative
model according to which spiritual exercises are believed to result in some kind of
expanded sense of textuality and embodiment. Through regular engagements in the
words and teaching of Guru Granth Sahib, human worshippers make the Guru present
and textualize their interior. The practices of memorizing, reciting, and reflecting
upon the words in the mind/heart and taking the nectar-water of words into the
body, make humans embodiments of the Guru words. The term gurmukh has several
shades of signification in the Sikh teaching, but in colloquial speech it generally signifies
a guru-oriented person who scrupulously follows the Guru’s teaching to become
imbued with the words. The mind/heart of the gurmukh becomes completely shaped
805
GGS: 16.
806
GGS: 636.
490
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008