Japji is the composition a Sikh is most likely to know by heart, and reciting it before dawn is the minimum daily practice. It opens with the Mool Mantar — the root formula naming the One as true, creator, without fear, without enmity, beyond time, unborn, self-existent, known by grace — which is written at the head of the scripture and repeated at the head of its major sections. The thirty-eight stanzas move from hukam through the futility of ritual purity to the five khands, the stages of the disciplined mind. It is recited rather than sung, because unlike almost everything else in the book it carries no raag. In practice the whole thing takes fifteen to twenty minutes, which is why the discipline is realistic and why it is the bani that lapsed Sikhs return to first.