Hukam and Grace

Hukam comes from an Arabic word for command. In Sikh use it means the order that runs through the universe. It appears in the first stanza of the Japji Sahib, where Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji asks how falsehood can be overcome and answers that a person must walk in hukam. The next stanza says all forms are made by it and nothing stands outside it.

W. H. McLeod, writing in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, prefers the translation divine order. He argues that the English word carries both senses: regularity and command. He contrasts this with translating hukam as will, which he thinks misses its dependable, law-like character. Hukam covers the physical world and also moral cause and effect.[EoS][DB]

People have enough freedom to choose to live in harmony with hukam or against it. Living against it keeps a person in the cycle of rebirth and its suffering. Accepting it dissolves haumai, the self-centred pride that separates people from God.

This does not reduce to knowing facts. The Encyclopaedia describes understanding hukam as an inner realisation, and not a feat of the intellect. The words bhana and raza, meaning God's will or pleasure, are used close to it in Sikh speech and scripture.[EoS]

Nadar comes from an Arabic word for a glance of favour. Other words in scripture include prasad, kirpa, karam and mihar. A line in the Japji Sahib on ang 2 sets karma beside grace: actions shape the birth a person receives, but the door of liberation opens by God's favour.

Why some are moved and others are not is treated as beyond human understanding. The sources do not treat this as fatalism. Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji uses the picture of washing a vessel before milk is poured into it. A person should prepare through right action, humble prayer and cultivating virtue, while accepting that the gift is God's to give.[EoS][DB]