Do Sikhs believe in heaven and hell?

The short version: the Sikh scripture names heaven and hell, but it does not make them the goal. Its picture of what happens after death is the Indian one of rebirth, and what it seeks is release from the round of births by God’s grace (Sikhism §2).^[1]​^[2]​^[3] Consensus The hymns keep the old images of judgement and of hell, and set heaven and hell below that release.^[4]​^[5]​^[6]​^[7] Majority What follows sets out what the hymns say, in whose words, and where readers still divide.

For Sikhs the hymns are the Guru’s word, and what they teach about death is a matter of faith. A historian can say what the texts say and how they have been read, not whether they are true (How We Know). Consensus

Rebirth first

Guru Nānak (1469–1539) inherited the Indian picture of rebirth and its vocabulary.^[1]​^[7] Consensus In his hymns what binds a person to rebirth is haumai, “I-me”, the self-centredness that keeps a person from God.^[1]​^[2]​^[3] Consensus Deeds bear fruit, within the hukam, the divine order: “you yourself sow and you yourself eat; Nānak, by the order we come and go.”^[8] Consensus on the text.

The round is counted the Indian way, as lakh chaurāsīh, eighty-four lakh (8.4 million) forms of life. Guru Nānak puts the self-willed on “the round of eighty-four lakh” (Paṭṭī, aṅg 434), and in Guru Amar Dās (1552–1574) and Guru Arjan (1581–1606) the phrase is frequent. Guru Arjan lists the births, as worm and moth, elephant, fish and deer, and tells the hearer that after wandering through eighty-four lakh “you have obtained this birth so hard to gain”.^[9]​^[10]​^[11] Consensus on the texts.

What passes from life to life is not defined in a system. The hymns speak of the jīu or jīa, the ātmā and, above all, the man, which W. H. McLeod found to be mind, heart and soul at once: the part of a person “which does not perish with physical death” and must be carried across the ocean of existence, to merge at last, like light in light, with God.^[1]​^[7] Majority How the major traditions compare on rebirth is the subject of What religions believe in reincarnation?

Judgement: Dharamrāj, Jam, Chitr and Gupt

The hymns use the figures of death and judgement that the Sant poets used.^[1] The salok that closes the Japjī, the poem that opens the scripture, brings in the judge: “Good deeds and bad, Dharam reads them out in the presence; by their own deeds some are near and some far.”^[12] Consensus on the text. Dharamrāj has his scribes, Chitr and Gupt; one without the Name goes bound to the city of Jam (Yama); and the hymns name hell, narak.^[13]​^[12]​^[1] Consensus on the texts.

McLeod read these figures as images of one thing: the separation from God, which is death, that haumai earns by keeping a person in the round of births. Hell, in his word, is “demythologized”.^[1] Majority

Heaven and hell, set below release

As goals, heaven and hell count for little in the hymns, though the images stay. The scripture uses both the Indian words, narak and surag, and the Persian ones, dojak (Persian dozakh) and bhisat.^[4] In the Āsā dī Vār the dead man “goes naked to hell” (dojaki).^[14] Consensus on the text. The other texts push them down, one after another:^[15]​^[4]​^[5]​^[16]​^[6] Consensus on the texts.

• Guru Nānak, Sāraṅg kī Vār. “The Veda proclaims that merit and sin are the seed of heaven and hell”; Guru Nānak answers that whoever sows truth finds a place in the court (dargah) of God. A salok of Guru Aṅgad (1539–1552) beside it says that the Veda’s tales of sin and merit keep people born “into hell and heaven”.^[15]
• Guru Nānak, Mārū. In a hymn on the time before creation there was “no hell and no paradise” (dojaku bhisatu) and “no hell and no heaven” (naraku suragu), and no birth or death: both are part of the created order.^[4]​^[1]
• Guru Arjan, the Sukhmanī. One who does penance in pride is born “into hell and heaven, again and again”: heaven and hell are stations on the round of rebirth.^[5]
• Guru Arjan, Devgandhārī. He asks for neither rule nor mukti, only love of the Lord’s lotus feet.^[16]
• Kabīr, in the scripture. “What is hell, what is heaven? The saints reject both.”^[6]

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s entry on karma puts the modern reading plainly: “Sikhism does not stipulate heaven or hell wherein good and bad actions of men are rewarded or punished.”^[7] Majority

The hymns do speak of a world beyond, and of what does not count there: “Recognise the light; do not ask about caste: in the world beyond there is no caste.”^[17] Consensus on the text. The scripture also keeps Ravidās’s song of Begampurā, a city “without sorrow”, with no land tax and no second or third rank.^[18] Consensus on the text.

The goal: release by grace

What the hymns seek instead is mukti, release from the round. The remedy for haumai is to remember the divine Name (nām simaran), and nothing is attained without nadar, grace, the glance of God’s favour.^[1]​^[2]​^[3] Consensus Ritual does not reach God: the first stanza of the Japjī says that bathing a hundred thousand times does not make one clean, and that the way is to walk in the hukam.^[19]​^[2] Consensus on the text; translators divide on whether its first line means purity or thought. Majority on the reading. Nor does leaving the world. In the Siddh Goshṭ, a dialogue with the Nāth yogīs, one crosses “the ocean of existence” by fixing the mind on the Word and repeating the Name, like a lotus that stays untouched in the water.^[20] Consensus on the text.

The Japjī describes the goal as the end of an ascent through five “realms” (khaṇḍs), of duty, knowledge, effort, grace and truth, the last being the sach khaṇḍ, “the realm of truth”, where the formless one dwells.^[19]​^[1]​^[2] Consensus

And release need not wait for death: the believer dies to the self while still alive.^[1] The term jīvan mukti, release while living, is older than the Sikh scripture, and Guru Nānak already uses it: “he is called liberated while alive from within whom haumai goes” (Mārū, aṅg 1009); the later Gurus use it too.^[21]​^[7] Consensus McLeod counted liberation in this life among the teachings Guru Nānak shared with the Sant poets before him (§1).^[1] Majority

What scholars disagree about

What karam means in the Japjī. Karam in the hymns stands for two words: the Sanskrit karma, action and its consequence, and the Arabic karam, generosity, which in the hymns is another word for nadar, grace.^[7]​^[1] Consensus The fourth pauṛī of the Japjī sets the two side by side:

ਕਰਮੀ ਆਵੈ ਕਪੜਾ ਨਦਰੀ ਮੋਖੁ ਦੁਆਰੁ ॥

karamī āvai kapaṛā nadarī mokhu duāru ||

“By karam comes the robe; by grace, the door of release.”^[22]

McLeod, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism and the English translations of Sant Singh Khalsa and Manmohan Singh read karam here as action: past deeds bring the body, “the cloth”, and only grace opens the door. Sahib Singh’s commentary reads it as grace as well, and the robe as the robe of praise.^[1]​^[7]​^[22]​^[23] Contested on the reading. On the first reading, past deeds bring the body and only grace frees from the round; on the second, the line speaks of grace twice.

What the fourth realm is. The same doubt hangs over the karam khaṇḍ, the Japjī’s fourth realm: most commentators make it the realm of grace, Macauliffe, Teja Singh and Khushwant Singh the realm of action, and McLeod proposed “the realm of fulfilment”.^[1] Contested

How much of this was new. McLeod’s reconstruction of Guru Nānak’s teaching in 1968 is still the starting point, and he read its release in this life as a teaching shared with the Sant poets; later scholars have put more weight on what was new in it and less on its debts to the Sants (§1).^[1]​^[24]​^[25] Majority Whether that makes Guru Nānak a Sant, a reformer or the founder of something new is argued over, and the Sikh tradition holds that he brought a new revelation (Is Sikhism a mix of Hinduism and Islam?).^[24]​^[25] Majority; Political

Common misconceptions

• “Sikhism has no idea of hell at all.” The hymns name hell by its Indian and Persian names and use the figures of Dharamrāj and Jam; what they deny is that heaven and hell are the goal.^[14]​^[12]​^[13]​^[1] Consensus on the texts.
• “Good Sikhs go to heaven when they die.” Guru Arjan makes heaven and hell stations on the round of rebirth, and the hymns seek release from the round itself, by grace; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Sikhism “does not stipulate heaven or hell” as reward or punishment.^[5]​^[7] Majority
• “Sikhs do not believe in reincarnation.” The Gurus rejected idols, pilgrimage and ritual purity as ways to God, but kept the Indian picture of rebirth and the count of eighty-four lakh births.^[1]​^[24]​^[9] Consensus
• “Release comes only after death.” The hymns speak of jīvan mukti, release while still alive.^[21]​^[7] Consensus

Where the idea came from

The picture the hymns inherit, heavens and hells as stops in a cycle of rebirth rather than final homes, goes back in India to the Upanishads, around 700 BCE; Buddhism took it over, and so, in the sixteenth century, did Sikhism. Judaism and Christianity reached heaven and hell by a different route, through resurrection and a final judgement, first clearly in Judaism around 165 BCE. Where did the idea of heaven and hell come from? sets the histories side by side. Majority

What the evidence cannot settle

Historians can say which words the hymns use for heaven, hell and release, and how translators and commentators have read them. What happens after death, and whether release comes as the Gurus taught, is a question of faith that the evidence neither confirms nor refutes. Consensus