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

Sikhism

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

Sikhism → 1 branch

Branch
Scripture of Sikhism

Anand Sahib.

Guru Amar Das wrote it in his seventies and it is what a Sikh ceremony ends with — the wedding, the funeral, the naming, the completion of a reading. The Sikh marriage rite is named after it: Anand Karaj, the act of bliss.

LanguagePunjabi in Gurmukhi
ComposedGuru Amar Das, mid sixteenth century
What it holdsForty stanzas on bliss — bliss as what happens when the Guru is found, not as good fortune
How it is usedThe first five and last stanzas close almost every Sikh ceremony, including weddings and funerals
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Anand Sahib is what closes things. Guru Amar Das wrote forty stanzas in Raag Ramkali on bliss — meaning specifically the state of having found the Guru, not good fortune — and the first five stanzas with the fortieth are recited at the end of almost every Sikh gathering, immediately before the Ardas. A Sikh will hear it at a wedding, at a funeral, at the completion of a scripture reading, at the opening of a shop. The Sikh marriage rite takes its name from it. The composition's theological weight is that bliss is presented as available now, in the ordinary condition, which fits the tradition's refusal of an afterlife-centred religion. Its liturgical weight is simpler: it is the sound of a Sikh event ending.

From the sources — the passages this rests on; concise renderings, cited

I am in bliss, O my mother, for I have found the true Guru.

Guru Amar Das, Anand Sahib, Guru Granth Sahib Ang 917 (rendered)

The first line of what every Sikh ceremony ends with.

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