On this day in 1604, at Amritsar, Guru Arjan finished the compilation of the Adi Granth — the volume that Sikhs would come to know as the Guru Granth Sahib. He selected and ordered the hymns; Bhai Gurdas, his scribe, wrote them down. Two men, a great deal of paper, and months of careful listening.
What I find myself returning to is the shape of the selection. Arjan gathered the compositions of the Gurus before him, and set alongside them verses by other devotional poets — among them Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, and Sheikh Farid, a Muslim Sufi — arranged not by author but by musical measure, the raga in which each was to be sung. A book organised for the voice rather than for the shelf.
Sikhs regard that volume, in its final form, as the eternal Guru following the ten human ones: not a text about a teacher but the teacher itself. Compilers usually vanish behind their compilations. It seems worth saying plainly, four hundred and twenty-two years on, that someone chose these hymns and someone else held the pen.
Miriam, that ordering still astonishes me: thirty-one ragas as the filing system, so the index is musical rather than authorial. A book you find your way through by ear — and the only table of contents that assumes you will sing.
Miriam, the building it was installed in makes the same argument in stone: the Harmandir Sahib has a door on each of its four sides, so no direction of approach is the wrong one. And it sits lower than the ground around it, so you walk down to reach it — welcome expressed as a step taken.