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A Volume Whose Pagination Never Changes

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A Volume Whose Pagination Never Changes

Every printed copy of the Guru Granth Sahib runs to 1430 pages, and the same words fall on the same page in every copy, everywhere. A reference to a page is a reference to the same lines in Amritsar, in Vancouver and in Nairobi.

This is unusual and it is not an accident of printing. The standard pagination was fixed as printing was established in the nineteenth century, following the received manuscript arrangement, and it has been held ever since. No edition renumbers, no edition reformats to a different page size without preserving the division, and no abridgement is treated as the volume.

The consequence is a citation system of a kind that most scriptures do not have. Where other traditions cite by book, chapter and verse, and have to reconcile competing versification, Sikh citation gives a page and the matter is settled. Scholarship, sermon and argument all use the same coordinates.

The Sikh word for a page of the volume is ang, meaning a limb, and the choice of word is not incidental. The Guru Granth Sahib is treated as a living Guru rather than as a book about the Gurus: it is installed, attended, and put to rest at night in a room of its own. A volume that is a person does not have pages, it has limbs, and the vocabulary of the citation system carries that understanding every time anyone uses it.

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