The Jaap Sahib is the second of the morning prayers (banis) of the Sikh daily discipline (nitnem) and the most formally demanding composition in regular Sikh use, composed by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, and preserved in the Dasam Granth. Where the Japji Sahib of Guru Nanak argues and reflects, the Jaap enumerates: its stanzas are an almost unbroken cascade of names and attributes of the divine, drawing on a vast vocabulary that mixes Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, and building its praise by heaping name upon name.
The method is itself the theology. The prayer repeatedly salutes God as beyond form, beyond caste, beyond colour and lineage, without location and without end, and its technique of negation and accumulation, naming God only to insist that no name contains Him, presses the point that the divine exceeds every category the languages of the region could supply. Recited daily and during the initiation into the Khalsa, in a demanding meter that makes it a test of concentration and breath, the Jaap Sahib exemplifies the martial and majestic register of the tenth Guru's compositions, and its determination to praise a formless God by exhausting the names for Him.
Because it draws so heavily on Persian and Sanskrit vocabulary already familiar across the multireligious environment of seventeenth century Punjab, the Jaap Sahib has often been read as a deliberate demonstration that praise of the formless God can be voiced in the shared religious language of the region rather than confined to any one tradition's vocabulary for the divine.