Sikh Book Review: Peace Lagoon -- Sacred Songs of the Sikhs (Adi Granth)

Mixed Media: Book Reviews, Website Reviews, Music Reviews

By James Bean

Copyright August 2006

Peace Lagoon -- Sacred Songs of the Sikhs

By Sardarni Premka Kaur, Dr. Katar Singh Puri, and, Bibi Inderjit Kaur,

405 pages

ISBN: 1-928761-11-9
Publisher: Sikh Dharma
Distributed by SpiritVoyage.com
www.spiritvoyage.com
Peace Lagoon entry at the Spirit Voyage website:
www.spiritvoyage.com/shopping/detail.cfm

*JPG IMAGE of the Book Cover:
www.geocities.com/santmat_m...Lagoon.jpg

Recent Blog featuring a passage from Peace Lagoon:
"The Mind is Filled with the Divine Music of the Spheres".
The icon image is that of Guru Amar Das:
santmat.zaadz.com/blog/2006...he_spheres

tinyurl.com/lowq4

Peace Lagoon -- Sacred Songs of the Sikhs -- The collected hymns of Guru Nanak, Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das, Guru Arjun, and Guru Gobind Singh, serves as an excellent introduction to the Sikh scriptures of India, also known as the Adi Granth or Sri Guru Granth Sahib. It is one of the few anthologies of the Granth in English, providing selections from key texts such as the Jap Ji or Morning Prayer of Guru Nanak, Sidh Godht (Nanak's Dialogue with the Siddhas), Anand Sahib (Song of Bliss), Rehiras Sahib (Evening Prayer), Shabad Hazare (The Prayer Worth One Thousand Prayers), Kirtan Sohila (Song of Praise), Bara Maha (The Twelve Months), Lavan (Wedding Song), Ardas (Prayer), and Sukhmani Sahib (Guru Arjun Dev's Peace Lagoon or Song of Peace). This collection also includes the Jaap Sahib (Meditation) of Guru Gobind Singh from another text known as the Dasam Granth. ("Granth" means scripture composed by an enlightened Master or Saint.)

This particular translation is extremely well done, in a very readable, pleasurable contemporary English, which is not always the case with some of the these translations of the Granth published in India. I know -- I own most all the English translations of the Granth that are available, including an eight-volume set, two four-volume sets, and several other anthologies, also a three-volume set of the Dasam Granth. Therefore, I highly recommend Peace Lagoon to anyone interested in beginning their exploration of this great holy book from India, and to anyone who is a devotee of mystic poetry in the bhakti tradition of "lover and the Beloved". If you enjoy the ecstatic, divine love-poetry of the Odes of Solomon, Mandaean or Manichaean Gnostic Psalms, Rumi, Hafiz, Mirabai, John of the Cross, Ravidas, Surdas, or Kabir, you will no doubt also fall in love with the Sri Guru Granth.