Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar · Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

Sikhism

Tradition·Founded 1499 CE·est. ~26 million worldwide

Sikhism → 1 branch

Branch
Core tenet of Sikhism

Countless worlds, and nobody has counted them.

Asked how many earths and heavens there are, Japji refuses the question: there are lakhs upon lakhs, and searching for the limit exhausts the searcher. Punjabi commentators have made a great deal of this since the Hubble images; it was written around 1500.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The relevant stanzas of Japji answer cosmological questions by refusing the accounting: there are worlds beyond worlds, and those who try to count them wear out counting. Punjabi commentators, particularly since the mid twentieth century, cite this constantly against the fixed cosmologies of the Puranas and sometimes against Genesis, and the enthusiasm can run ahead of the text — a fifteenth-century poem is not an astronomy paper. What is genuinely notable is the epistemic posture: the scripture repeatedly says that the extent of creation is not knowable and that claiming otherwise is vanity. Sikh writers use the same passage to argue against any claim of complete revelation, including their own. It is one of the few places where a scripture builds in a limit on what it says it knows.

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