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ABSTRACT
Religion and aesthetics are demarcated as two different avenues with ‘God’ and ‘Beauty’ as their respective goals. Opposite of anesthetic, aesthetics is clearly the heightening of the senses. But religion with its focus on God dwelling in a world beyond ours mandates a negation of those very senses. Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, overturns such an antithesis. My paper focuses on Guru Nanak’s Japji, the foremost devotional hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib, to explore the way in which aesthetics and religion merge together in the unitary experience of a sensuous metaphysics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Bhai Gurdas (Citation1977), Var I: 38.
2. Since Guru Nanak does not specify the gender of the goldsmith, I have taken the liberty of using both male and female pronouns through the course of this article.
3. For instance, the earliest and most influential translator of the Japji, Macauliffe (Citation1909, 217).
4. Republic, Book X, 606.