Guru Granth
The Quintessential Sikh Metaphor
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v4i2.157Keywords:
Guru Granth, Body, Rituals, MetaphorAbstract
For the Sikhs, their scripture (Guru Granth) is the manifest body (deh) of their Gurus. But this quintessential Sikh metaphor has become so familiar an application that it has lost its “fundamental metaphoric quality.” We need to ask anew: what does it mean that the Guru Granth is the body of the Gurus? In their metaphorical relationship, the “text” and the “body” must maintain a dynamic tension—a simultaneous is and is not—so that the mind is forced to stretch and discover a new meaning. Using Philip Wheelwright’s framework and Gadamer’s hermeneutic lens, this paper explores the “widening experience” (Truth and Method, p. 429) brought about by the perpetual motion between the textual and the corporeal matrices. What significance does their metaphoric association have in the daily life of the Sikh community? The two areas that examined here are ritual performance and feminist ontology.
References
Cotter, Holland. “Wonders of Sikh Spirituality Come Alive.” New York Times. September 18, 2006.
Daly, Mary. 1979. Gyn-Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Deol, Jeevan. 2001. “The Eighteenth Century Khalsa Identity: Discourse, Praxis and Narrative.” In Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity, edited by Christopher Shackle, Gurharpal Singh, and Arvind-Pal Mandair, 25–46. Surrey: Curzon.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroads. Gibbs, Raymond. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gyatso, Janet, ed. 1992. In the Mirror of Memory. New York: State University of New York Press.
Jantzen, Grace. 1999. Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Myrvold, Kristina. 2007. Inside the Guru’s Gate: Ritual Uses of Texts Among the Sikhs in Varanasi. Lund University: Department of History and Anthropology.
Narayanan, Vasudha. 1986. “The Goddess Sri: Blossoming Lotus and Breast Jewel of Visnu.” In The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India, edited by John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff, 224–237. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Singh, Harbans. 1985. The Heritage of the Sikhs. New Delhi: Manohar Publications.
———. 1988. Sri Guru Granth Sahib: The Guru Eternal for the Sikhs. Academy of Sikh Religion and Culture.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
———. 1977. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. 1993. The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511557415
———. 2004. “The Body of the Gurus: Sikh Scripture from a Contemporary Feminist Perspective.” Religious Studies and Theology 23(2): 27–52.
———. 2007. “Translating Sikh Scripture into English.” Sikh Formations 3: 33–49.
———. 2009. “Female Feticide in the Punjab.” In Imagining the Fetus, 121–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talib, G.S. 1977. Japuji: The Immortal Prayer-Chant. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
Valdés, Mario J., ed. 1991. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Wheelwright, Philip. 1962. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
