ABSTRACT
A distinctive feature of Sikhism, as the religion is lived and practiced today, is the supreme authority that Sikhs attribute to their scripture the Gurū Granth Sāhib and the central role the sacred text plays in their religious life. Wherever the Sikhs have settled in the world, their scripture is staged at the core of devotional congregations. The Sikh place of worship, the gurdwārā or the “door,” “abode,” or “seat” of the guru, is a place defined by the presence of the Gurū Granth Sāhib (Myrvold 2007: 153ff.). According to commonly acknowledged perceptions among the Sikhs, the scripture is a holy text that enfolds words of divine origin and a teaching attributed to human gurus in history, while being the living guru with spiritual authority. Although the formless God should be the final target of devotion in Sikh worship, the Gurū Granth Sāhib is an object of worship because the text is the guru as a person invested with agency to mediate a spiritual teaching and minimize the ontological gap between humans and the divine. In the daily liturgy of the gurdwārā, the physical manifestation of the text in a book form is treated like worldly royalty granting an audience: the Sikhs present the scripture with prayers, food, clothes, and offerings to be blessed; they put it to sleep in a human bed at night; and they recite and listen to its words as if a living guru continued to give verbal instructions (see Figure 9.1).
