Parkash (illumination, the making manifest) is the morning ceremony in which the Guru Granth Sahib is installed for the day, performed at the start of each day in every gurdwara. The scripture, which had been laid to rest overnight, is carried with honour to its throned place (takht) beneath a canopy, ceremonially opened, and a reading is taken from the page at which it falls open (a hukamnama, or command of the day), which is understood as guidance for the community. The ceremony reflects the central Sikh conviction, established when Guru Gobind Singh conferred guruship on the scripture itself in 1708, that the Guru Granth Sahib is the living Guru, present and to be treated with the respect due to a sovereign teacher, enthroned, attended, waved over with a whisk (chaur), and consulted each morning as one would attend upon a living master.
The scripture being installed each morning has its own compilation history: Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, first compiled the Adi Granth in 1604 at Amritsar, and Guru Gobind Singh later added the compositions of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, before formally investing the completed text with Guruship at Nanded in 1708. The scholar Gurinder Singh Mann, among others who have studied the text's manuscript history, has traced how successive recensions were standardized before print technology fixed the text in the form used today, a textual history the daily Parkash ceremony treats not as a historical curiosity but as the living installation, each morning, of the Guru the community continues to consult.