Songs of the Saints from the Adi GranthThis complete and accessible translation of the songs of the saints from the Sikh holy book, the Adi Granth, provides access to the hymns written by Hindu and Muslim devotional writers of north India, who flourished from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. The songs of the saints hold a unique position in Sikhism in that they provide the faith with a prehistory that reaches back to the dawn of north Indian Bhakti and Sant traditions. These works provided a ground upon which Sikh gurus laid the foundations of their faith. The songs also mark the earliest beginnings of Hindi literature. Although the literary output of these saints comes down to us in various stages of corruption, the works which appeared in the Adi Granth are unchanged since their inclusion in that work in the early 1600s. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Adi Granth Ahlaya ambrosia Beloved Bithal bliss body Brahma Brahmins breath brother caste crane death Delhi devotion Dhanna Divine elephant epithet for Krishna evil forever forsake Gita Gobind Singh God's gods Gopal gracious guru Guru Amar Guru Arjan Dev Guru Nanak guru's Hari Hari's heart Hindu holy human hymn incarnation India Indra Jayadeva Kabir Kamsa Kauravas king Krishna lamp lives Lord lotus lust Madho Mahabharata Maya meditation milk Mukand Muslim Namdeva Namdeva says Narayana Pandavas Panjab poison Prahlada praise prehistory Primal Raga Ram Chandra Ram's name Ramananda Ramayana Ravana Ravi Dass says religious Rest Rig Veda rituals river sacred Sadhna sage Sain saints salvation santbhasha Say Ravi Shastra Sheikh Farid Shiva shrine Sikh Gurus Sikhism slave sloka songs soul swan Tenth Door things three worlds traditional Trilochan University Press verse Vishnu wander wife wisdom woman words World Ocean worship Yadavas Yama Yoga Yogi Yogic
Popular passages
Page 7 - The engendering of the perpetual signifier within the field of the text should not be identified with an organic process of maturation or a hermeneutic process of deepening, but rather with a serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, and variations.
Page 7 - Texts don't have meanings, except in their relations to other texts, so that there is something uneasily dialectical about literary meaning. A single text has only part of a meaning; it is itself a synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts. A text is a relational event, and not a substance to be analyzed.
Page 17 - Gurinder Singh Mann, The Goindval Pothis: The Earliest Extant Source of the Sikh Canon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.
Page 7 - Lord, if You will not break with me, then I will not break with You. For, if I were to break with You, with whom would I then join? | | / | | Pause | | If You are the lamp, then I am the wick. If You are the sacred place of pilgrimage, then I am the pilgrim.
Page 17 - Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 106. 18. Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed.
Page 12 - a simple unity, without any mode, without time or space, without before or after, without desire or possession, without light or darkness. He is a perpetual now, the bottomless abyss, the darkness of silence, the desert wilderness," etc.1 In reality, the negative path, by setting God above all conceivable limitations, ends in the dissolution of Deity.