Inception:
The perfect man has many foes. It is only natural that an enlightened Sikh will attract their own fair share of detractors who will continually multiply over time. The reason for this can be traced to the semiotic fact that perfectness is a state of being sans ignorance. Ignorance is a delusional entrapment which disallows escape from its snares once someone is enthralled within them. The conflict which ensues is one of ultimate survival between the polar opposites of self-centredness and perspicacity in which vice wars with virtue until only one emerges triumphant. At an individual level, this same antagonism plays out within a Sikh prior to them attaining the quintessential state of Gurmukh. Once this state is attained, the Sikh is well versed in battling for survival and consequently dominance in the exterior world.
The World:
The tides of history have rendered great alterations within the Sikh praxis which the children of the Guru are only now undoing under the guidance of the Guru Granth. This is illustrated by the disparity within the Sikh past and present. The collective fraternity of Sikhs-the Khalsa-battled for survival and dominance in the 18th century Punjab. What made them so unbearable to the contemporary Hindu and Islamic powers that their very lives were declared forfeited upon the eve of their professing Sikhi and adopting the faith’s distinct physicality? The reason for this, to paraphrase S. Jagjit Singh (IOSS), was their zeal for perfecting themselves and subsequently the world around them. Guru Nanak seeded within them the desire to continually strive to perfect themselves and their sociopolitical/religiopolitical environs by immersing themselves in the wisdom of the Shabad. This same desire was made an awesome inferno by his successors who harmonized with his vision that his society of perfect Sikhs, the Khalsa, be ever prepared to protect and preserve their perfection and leave no detractor untouched.
The current Sikh praxis which consists of worldly renouncement is not the pristine Sikhi of centuries past which opposed asceticism and renunciation. For Guru Nanak the empirical world was not a fount of misery as Vedism and subsequent belief systems held it to be. The world was not to be renounced but the vices prevalent therein which stemmed from an ignorance of reality (Hukam) and what it entails. Foremost among these vices, the most elementary which could trip the individual, is ਮੋਹੁ or obsession.
ਮੋਹੁ ਕੁਟੰਬੁ ਮੋਹੁ ਸਭ ਕਾਰ ॥
ਮੋਹੁ ਤੁਮ ਤਜਹੁ ਸਗਲ ਵੇਕਾਰ ॥੧॥
ਮੋਹੁ ਅਰੁ ਭਰਮੁ ਤਜਹੁ ਤੁਮ੍ਹ੍ਹ ਬੀਰ ॥
“Your obsessions with your family and your works; renounce these obsessions for they corrupt you. Renounce your obsessions and doubts my sibling.”
-Guru Granth, 356.
Our current anglophonic renderings of the Guru Granth propose ਮੋਹੁ to be attachment. The term attachment, however, is context neutral while obsession is more context specific. In this light then obsession with the world is to be renounced as it orients one on the path of corruption while attachment to a degree can be fostered given that the hedonistic ways of the world and not the world itself are to be renounced. It is in the operating paradigm of the world that the Khalsa is to acquire perfection and act as an emulative template for the heights of perfectness which humanity can aspire to and acquire.
Fearless & Incorruptible:
Sikhi’s fundamental approach to life and the world acknowledged above, it becomes more easy for us to comprehend several facets of the Guru Granth:
-The canon is Guru ad perpetuum.
-It conveys a timeless message. This evinces that the battle between immorality and morality will continue to be waged for all time to come with the Khalsa acting as a disciplined warrior who is perfect in thought and deed.
-The overt and excessive spiritual undertones borrowed from pre-Sikh faiths do injustice to Sikhi’s own brand of spiritualism which is neither labyrinthine nor subject to exterior influence.
With these facts in mind let us consider the incorruptibility of the Khalsa as a fraternity and the Gurmukh Sikh at an individual level. It should be remembered that corruption as a vice hinges primarily on hedonism-that the culprit seeks an effortless route to sensuous/non-sensuous pleasure at the expense of ethicality and self-integrity. Fear, contrastingly, becomes another cause for vice and is a vice itself. It is either utilized by the undisciplined mind against a weak intellect or by an exterior individual against their fearful counterpart. Both vices, hedonism as corruption and fear, have been historically used to impose tyranny over humankind. The Gurmukh as the enlightened Sikh is expected by the Gurus to be above all vices. The lure of pleasure and the fear of pain are to be trivial for them; to the point they consider them as being of no consequence in their undertakings.
ਤੈਸਾ ਹਰਖੁ ਤੈਸਾ ਉਸੁ ਸੋਗੁ ॥ ਸਦਾ ਅਨੰਦੁ ਤਹ ਨਹੀ ਬਿਓਗੁ ॥
“As is pain so is pleasure. Understand this and be forever at peace.”
Guru Granth, 275.
Now imagine this particular verse in its original light and contrast it with how its balefully extolled today. In its pristine context it empowers the Sikh with the wisdom that both pain and pleasure are inconsequential in the greater scheme of things i.e. both can be negated by the enlightened and virtuous being in pursuit of a greater cause. This explains why our forefathers were subject to merciless holocausts by the powers of their day. Which functioning power, political or religious, can tolerate an incorruptible citizen-a perfect citizen so to say- unable to be swayed by either pain or pleasure? And that too one who is at peace with this fact and in mental equipoise as a result? Compare this empowering stance of the verse with how the Pujaris reiterate it from their stages with tearful eyes: that the only way to peace is to make pain and pleasure one by renouncing the entire Creation? Is there any wonder then that a world of difference exists between us and our ancestors?
Postscript:
Several Sikh histories recount that the enslaved Punjabi masses came to the Khalsa in the mid-18th century begging that the Sikhs become their rulers. This was the culmination of a clever stratagem organized by Nawab Kapur Singh who had witnessed Baba Banda Singh’s earlier campaigns. The Khalsa could only ensure its survival through dominance which implied the total acquirement of sovereignty. But what would differentiate Khalsa sovereignty from its counterparts?
Foremost, it would be Sikh-centric and ensure the reciprocal protection of its citizenry in return for their total loyalty to the Khalsa with a pre-requisite being that they only convert to Sikhi out of genuine loyalty to the faith or otherwise they could retain their ancestral beliefs and customs as long as they did not interfere with Sikh doctrines (caste and Sharia). This would be a guarantee enshrined in the very fabric of Khalsa statehood; a stunning dissimilarity when compared with contemporary sovereignties. What’s more, this trek to political perfectness was not Utopian. Vice and Virtue would forever be in conflict with humans exemplifying their personifications. However the Gurmukh Sikhs would trivialize the pangs of both pain and pleasure by likening them to one another and refusing to concede ground to either. In face of corruptibility and fear they would retain their equipoise. They and their ensuing generations.
What a glorious legacy those early Sikhs left us. What an astounding understanding of the Guru Granth they retained! And tragically enough if their rise was meteoric, equally cataclysmic is our fall today. Our avoidance of pain out of fear only nullifies the perfect legacy of the generations before us. Will we ever succeed to their mantle? We can barely lift a weapon today in defense of ourselves; our predecessors oppositely retained arms and the know-how of how to use them given that to defend peace and perfection force is a necessity. Neither hedonism nor panic gripped them; even in the face of certain death. They were the true Gurmukhs. We are but insignificant shadows.