The Sky Is the Platter

The third song is the most famous poem in the Sohila, and one of the most famous in all of Sikh scripture: Guru Nanak's Arti. The kathakars set the scene at Jagannath Puri, the great temple city on the eastern sea. Evening falls; the priests bring out the arti of the deity — a golden platter ringed with little flames, incense, flowers, pearls laid out on silk, drums and bells and waving whisks. It is magnificent. And the visiting Guru does not stand up for it. Challenged — why do you disrespect the worship? — Guru Nanak answers with this song: you have made a platter for the Lord of the universe; come outside and see the platter He has already made.

Every item of the temple arti is here — and every one has been traded up. The priests' platter is gold; the Guru's is the sky. Their lamps hold a night's worth of ghee; his burn without oil or wick and have never gone out. Their pearls were fetched from the sea; his are the star-fields. Their incense is a stick of sandalwood; his is the wind that has blown through the sandal forests of the Malaya hills and carries the scent of a whole mountain range. Their whisk is waved by a tiring arm; his by the wind itself. Their flowers were plucked this morning and are already wilting; his are every forest on earth, blooming where they stand. The teachers of the Prof Sahib Singh school linger on the little word mai — 'the sky as platter' — the whole cosmos not merely compared to worship but caught in the act of it. Nothing needs to be added to creation for creation to be an offering. It already is one; we simply were not standing where it could be seen.

Sant Gurbachan Singh, in his larivaar katha, gives each image a second, inner reading — the old teeka tradition, the classic line-by-line commentaries, at its finest. The two lamps, he says, are the two kinds of knowing: the moon of indirect knowledge, what we learn by report and scripture, and the sun of direct knowledge, what we finally see for ourselves. The pearls are the shining virtues of souls who have grown detached and clear. The incense is praise itself — devotion rising the way sandal-smoke rises. The whisk is every breath drawn clean of vice and spent in remembrance; the blossoming forests are a body in which every pore has flowered into the thought of God. Read this way, the Arti is not only what the universe is doing around you — it is what a human being becomes when the same worship happens inside.

The rahau names God with a title chosen for the night prayer: Bhav Khandana, the one who breaks bhav — the long fear, the round of birth and death itself. And in place of the temple drums, the anhad shabad: the unstruck sound. Every sound we know is made by striking — drumskin, bell-metal, vocal cords. The saints speak of a music underneath all of it that nothing strikes and nothing can silence, the hum of the Creator's presence in creation. Sant Gurbachan Singh locates it simply: it is the sounding of the conscious power in every living thing. The temple's drums must be beaten, and stop when the arm stops. This bheri plays on — through the night, through the cremation ground, through everything the fearful heart is afraid of. That is why this verse belongs to the Sohila: the music does not end when the lights are put out.

Here the Guru turns from the sky to the mystery behind it, in lines that say two opposite things at once and mean both. Sant Gurbachan Singh unfolds them with the classical keys: sargun and nirgun, God-with-form and God-beyond-form. Through every eye in creation, He is looking — a thousand eyes, a million; and yet He Himself has no eye, no body, no face that could be painted or carved. Every form is His robe; He has no form. This is the gentle answer to the idol on its throne at Puri: not mockery, but correction by enlargement. You have given Him one form — He has all of them, and none. And the verse does not end in philosophy; it ends in love: iv chalat mohi — 'this play of Yours has bewitched me.' The paradox is not a puzzle to be solved. It is, the kathakars say, the thing that finally makes the seeker fall in love — a Beloved who is everywhere to be seen and nowhere to be captured.

Now the poem's centre of gravity: the lamp is not out there. The same Light burns in everything that shines — sun, moon, mind, and the reader of this page. But a lamp inside a covered vessel lights nothing, and so the third line gives the whole path in four words: gur sakhi — by the Guru's testimony, the inner Light is uncovered and stands revealed. Then the line the kathakars call the summit of the shabad: jo tis bhavai su arti hoi — whatever pleases Him, that is His arti. Sant Gurbachan Singh opens it wide: kingdoms rise and fall, seasons turn, the poor are raised and the mighty brought low — the whole moving world, unfolding in His pleasure, is the ceremony. To live inside His pleasure — to make your own will lie down inside His — is to become, yourself, one of the lamps on the platter. After this line there is nothing left for a priest to wave.

And then, having out-sung every temple in India, the Guru ends on his knees. The final verse drops from the cosmic to the creaturely: Nanak is the sarang, the little rain-bird of Punjabi poetry which — the villagers say — will not drink from puddle or pond, but waits with open beak, through whole seasons of thirst, for the one drop that falls from the cloud. Rivers of ordinary water flow past it; it wants only rain. So the soul, once it has seen the sky-arti, can no longer be satisfied by anything smaller: only the kirpa jal, the water of grace, straight from the Giver's own cloud. The kathakars love that the Arti ends here — not in triumph but in thirst. The greatest worship in the Guru Granth Sahib closes with a beggar's cupped hands. That, they say, is the posture in which to fall asleep: the whole universe performing the ceremony around you, and you, small and thirsty and expectant, waiting under the open sky of His mercy.