Sikh & Buddhist

Soon after moonrise, Venus glistens awake to the southwest. An oil lamp is set aflame, a dim reading lamp is tugged to light. Prostrating on all fours, I touch my forehead to the cold oak floor. I stand, adjust a white chunni, or scarf, over my temples, and rest my palms together.

On another continent, within the hour, my grandmother’s body will be cremated, and the kirtan sohila will be sung. Shepherding the dead and those who outlive them through the fear of separation and pain of transmigration, the kirtan sohila is a prayer sung by Sikhs both in a funerary ritual and before winding down to sleep each night. Each verse reflects on the ultimate dissolution of the self into the unknown mystery.

The Sikh kirtan sohila cultivates protection and banishes fear, much like Zen Buddhist dharani incantations do. I lift one foot and place it down, observe the arising and passing of phenomena, my grandmother’s life and my life, and our dying. With one palm and one inhale and one step, I extend compassion to all beings in their suffering. With another palm and another exhale and the next step, I cultivate fearlessness on the path to liberation.

I was raised in the Sikhi tradition—the name practitioners use for what’s commonly called Sikhism in the West. Later, I grew into Buddhist studies and practice, and now I reckon with these two religions’ divergent paths while also reflecting on what they share in their responses to suffering, fear, and liberation. One shared response that has piqued my curiosity is the practical use of voice and song in both traditions.

Sikhi is a faith whose opening invocation calls us to meditate on “the Eternal, the True…beyond fear or faction, beyond time and birth.” Here I consider Eihei Dogen’s teachings of uji—the inseparability of being and time—and zenki—the interwoven activity of all causes and conditions. Beyond “fear or faction, beyond time and birth,” the realization of uji and zenki reveals the undivided expression of our entangled existence that crosses and transcends barriers and borders.

In the wildflower-strewn Khyber foothills and songbird-rich Punjabi watershed, the first Sikh guru Nanak Sahib Ji walked through landscapes long shaped by Gandharan Buddhism and its teachings, where he recognized that “the whole world is suffering.”

Sikhi is a richly textured, syncretic tradition practiced by nearly thirty million people across the world. Young in relation to other major religions, Sikh philosophy was taught by Guru Nanak between 1487 and 1507. Born in 1469 to an accountant father and a devout Hindu mother in a village outside cosmopolitan Lahore, Nanak is said to have turned away from religious affiliation and casteist mores in his youth. After witnessing years of violence inflicted on the peoples of the Punjab region—spanning today’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and northwestern India—by raiding Mughal forces and local civil and spiritual leaders alike, Nanak was filled with unsettling questions about spirituality: It seemed avarice, suspicion, and empty ritual had been substituted for journeys into the heart of truth. Nanak, an earnest linguist, maintained a meditation practice and sang daily hymnals, building on interfaith approaches from saint-poets who had come before him such as Kabir, Namdev, and Ravidas.

Building on mystic poet Kabir’s philosophy that “god’s first resource is to illuminate compassion in any situation,” Nanak uttered Sikhi’s first words: “No one is a Hindu, no one is a Muslim.” All humans, Nanak understood, have the capacity to experience god directly, without ritual or singularly affiliated priest. This direct experience of the divine is a unifying principle, dissolving barriers such as religious identity or affiliation, language, caste position, or gender.

Nanak asserted that a direct experience of god can be accessed most immediately through sound, song, and music. In this lineage, the mystic sonic qualities of the Sikhi’s ultimate guru, the holy book Sri Guru Granth Sahib, are of inestimable significance. The text of Sri Guru Granth Sahib is a compilation of hymnals and divine poetry cast in raga meter. Through singing or recitation, the naad (“unheard sound of the cosmos”) may resonate in the practitioner’s mind-body, opening the practitioner to a spiritual wellspring of divine oneness.

Buddhism, unlike Sikhi, has not consolidated or shaped its cosmology around a singular Lord or God. Even so, I feel the “unheard sound” of an imminent divine in Sikhi corresponds to Buddhist notions of emptiness and the selfless manifestation of all phenomena. In my multi-spiritual practice, I’m reminded of Buddhist teacher Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, who reflects on chanting with sangha in the Nichiren tradition. For Manuel, chanting and merging many voices into one sound offers a powerful experience of oneness and interrelationship.

The heart of Sikhi as Nanak practiced it is oriented toward cultivating fearlessness in the face of both oppression and mortal transmigration (sansaar, or samsara), with the goal of benefitting and relieving the suffering (dukhiya, or dukkha) of all beings. Nanak, like the Buddha, sought to cultivate the conditions in which we can recognize both our shared suffering and our shared potential for the sacred, rooted in the realization that this sacredness is ever-present and ever-luminous.

In my own Sikh-Buddhist practice, kinhin (walking meditation), singing shabads (sacred hymns), and engaging in interfaith discourse form a spiritual ecosystem that nurtures liberation in both the body and the imagination. When I meditate on these foundational concepts, I hear the fifth Sikh guru Arjun Dev’s peace offering: “No one is my enemy, none a stranger and everyone is my friend.” I hear Kaz Tanahashi’s reminder, in his book Zen Chants, that “we are one mind, one heart, one life…with all awakened beings from the past, present, and future, everywhere in the world.” I hear Taizan Maezumi’s encouragement to “close the gap between yourself and Yourself.” I hear Nanak’s challenge: “Turn my feet in a direction in which god is not.”

As a multi-spiritual practitioner, I embrace the ever-turning direction of my echoing footfalls. I embrace the tangled paths. With palms together, the phenomena that materializes in these two traditions, Sikhi and Buddhism, empty themselves of inherent existence and emerge interdependent.