The founding settled more than discipline. It also settled, in effect, the question of succession, which every religion built around a living teacher eventually faces.
Guru Gobind Singh was the tenth and last Guru in the line of persons. Before his death at Nanded in 1708 he conferred the Guruship on the scripture, thereafter the Guru Granth Sahib, and Sikh tradition holds that authority in the community rests with the scripture together with the assembled Khalsa. There is no successor to be disputed, no office to be captured and no lineage to be claimed, and the tradition has been notably free of the succession crises that have divided other movements.
The consequences are visible in Sikh practice. The scripture is treated with the honours due to a living Guru: installed on a throne under a canopy, attended, put to rest at night, and consulted for guidance by reading the passage at which it opens. A gurdwara is defined by the presence of the volume rather than by any consecration of the building. Decisions binding on the community are taken by the Khalsa in assembly before the scripture.
That a religion should transfer the authority of a person to a text is not unique. That it should do so deliberately, in one act, with the reasoning recorded, and that the arrangement should hold for three centuries, is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.