Waheguru

The Guru Granth Sahib does not begin with a narrative or a genealogy. It begins with a numeral and a word: Ik Onkar. One Being. Everything else in Sikh theology is measured against that opening, and the Mul Mantar which follows it is largely a series of refusals as much as a set of affirmations. God is satnam, whose name is truth; karta purakh, the creator; nirbhau, without fear; nirvair, without enmity; akal murat, beyond time; ajuni, not born; saibhang, self-existent; known gurprasad, by the grace of the Guru.

Two of those words do a great deal of work and are easy to pass over. Ajuni, unborn, not subject to birth, is a direct rejection of avatar doctrine. God does not descend, does not take a body, and is not born as anyone; Sikhi does not hold that Ram or Krishna were incarnations of God to be worshipped, and it does not hold that any of the ten Gurus was God either. The Gurus are teachers who transmitted the divine word; Guru Nanak said of himself that he was a servant. Nirankar, without form, rules out images. There is no picture or statue of God in Sikhi, no idol in a gurdwara, and the Sikh Rahit Maryada prohibits idol-worship in terms. What stands in a gurdwara is the scripture, and it is honoured as the Guru, not worshipped as God.

Nirbhau and nirvair are quieter and no less pointed. A being without fear has nothing to defend and can therefore not be placated; a being without enmity has no enemies and can therefore not be enlisted against anyone. Between them they dismantle a great deal of what religion is often used for, and they do it in the first line of the book.

Sikh theology holds two things about God at once, and holding both is the point rather than a tension to be resolved. God is nirguna, without attributes: unconditioned, unlimited, not describable by any quality that belongs to created things, and in that aspect beyond the reach of the mind entirely. God is also sarguna, with attributes: manifest in and through creation, pervading it, knowable in it. These are not two gods and not two stages. They are the one Reality described from outside and from within.

The consequence is a strong immanence held alongside a strong transcendence. Creation is not an illusion to be seen through and it is not separate from God; the Japji Sahib describes countless worlds and the divine order, hukam, running through all of them, and living in accordance with hukam rather than in self-will, haumai, is the whole of the spiritual task. It also explains why Sikhi is emphatically a householder tradition. There is no withdrawal from the world to find God, because God is not elsewhere; the Gurus were married, worked, and taught kirat karni, honest labour, vand chakna, sharing what one earns, and naam japna, remembrance of the Name, as one practice in three parts.

The vocabulary here overlaps with the Hindu sant poets among whom Guru Nanak moved, and some of those poets (Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev, Farid), are in the Guru Granth Sahib itself, their compositions included alongside the Gurus'. That inclusion is a real theological statement about where truth may be found. It is not an identification of the Sikh conception of God with a Hindu one, and Sikh writers have generally resisted having their scripture read as a branch of Vaishnava devotion. Where Hindu divine names appear in the Guru Granth Sahib (Ram, Hari, Gopal, Govind), they are used as names of the one formless Reality, not as references to the Puranic figures who bear them.

Waheguru is not a doctrinal term but a term of address and of remembrance, and it is the word Sikhs actually say. Its etymology is not settled: it joins an exclamation of wonder, wah, to guru, and it is rendered "Wonderful Lord", "Wondrous Enlightener" and "Praise to the Guru" among others. It appears in the Guru Granth Sahib chiefly in the swayyas of the Bhatts, the bards whose panegyrics close the scripture, and it became the gurmantar, the word given to a Sikh at initiation and repeated thereafter. Akal Purakh, the Timeless Being, is the term that does the theological work in Sikh writing; Ik Onkar is where the argument starts; Waheguru is what a person says.

The central practice is naam simran, remembrance of the Name: repeating it, holding it in mind, and singing the scripture as kirtan, which is why so much of Sikh worship is musical and why the Guru Granth Sahib is arranged by raga rather than by subject. The Mul Mantar, Japji Sahib, Jaap Sahib, Rehras Sahib, Kirtan Sohila and the Ardas are all, in the end, forms of this. The mantras and hymns in this atlas that now point at this page point at it because they address it in the second person or name it directly, not because they are Sikh in origin.

One distinction is worth stating because it is very often got wrong. The Guru Granth Sahib is the eternal Guru of the Sikhs, installed as such by Guru Gobind Singh in 1708, and it is treated with the honours due to a living Guru: it is enthroned, attended, and put to rest at night. It is not God, it is not worshipped as God, and the distinction between honouring the Guru and worshipping the one Reality the Guru points to is one Sikhs make carefully. An observer who describes the reverence given to the scripture as worship of a book has misdescribed it.

Any reference work files things under headings, and a heading imposes a shape. Where the shape does not fit, the honest course is to say so on the entry rather than quietly bend the subject, so the decisions taken here are set out.

It is not filed under the Abrahamic entry. The atlas holds a single entry for the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the ground that all three trace their worship to the God of Abraham. Sikhi does not. It arose in fifteenth-century Punjab, in conversation with Indian devotional religion and with Islam as a neighbour, and it reached its monotheism by its own route. Whether the Sikh and the Abrahamic conceptions have the same object is a real question and a contested one, and this atlas has no standing to settle it; the atlas deliberately asserts no identity in either direction.

No polarity and no archetype are assigned. The atlas normally tags a deity Yang or Yin and gives it a Jungian archetype. Both are Western esoteric overlays that this atlas imposes on its subjects, and neither is attested anywhere in Sikh thought. Yang in particular is defined here as the active, projective, "traditionally masculine" charge, and applying it here would contradict the tradition's own teaching. Both are left unset on purpose, as they are on the Abrahamic entry.

Gender is recorded as beyond gender, and that is a claim, not an evasion. Punjabi grammar and much of the scriptural language are masculine, and English translations have made God "He" for a century and a half. But God is nirankar, without form, and ajuni, not born, and neither admits a sexed body; and the Guru Granth Sahib addresses God as father and as mother, and uses at length the image of the human soul as a bride longing for her divine spouse. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh's study of that imagery is the authority cited for the property. Recording the grammar as the theology would have been the easier error.

No identification with any other deity is asserted. Not with the Hindu conceptions whose vocabulary the Gurus shared, not with Om (Sikh theology distinguishes Ik Onkar from the Hindu Om, and the identification is contested, which is why the atlas does not link the mantra Om to Sikhism either), and not with any figure in any pantheon. Sikhi is not a syncretism of Hinduism and Islam, a nineteenth-century characterisation Sikh scholarship has rejected at length, and this entry does not reintroduce it through the back door of a stray cross reference.