Dhanasri holds the composition known as the aarti, one of the most frequently sung passages in the Guru Granth Sahib, and one of the clearest examples of what the Gurus did with the religious material around them.
An aarti is a lamp ceremony. A tray is prepared with lamps, incense and flowers, and it is circled before an image while a hymn is sung. The composition in this section takes the whole apparatus and relocates it: the sky becomes the tray, the sun and moon the lamps, the stars the scattered pearls, the wind the fan, the forests the flowers. Nothing is denounced. The ceremony is not called false; it is called too small, and the imagery of the rite is used to describe a rite already being performed continuously by everything that exists.
The move is more effective than a prohibition would have been, and it is repeated throughout the volume: the sacred thread, the pilgrimage, the fast and the ritual bath are each taken up in the same way, granted their meaning and then relocated into conduct.
The section is also notable for the presence of Ravidas, a poet of the leather-working community whose social position placed him outside the reach of the religious institutions of his time, and whose compositions the Granth carries without qualification. His voice in this rag, addressing God directly and without an intermediary, is part of why the section is read the way it is.