Cultivating Compassionate Courage as Sage Warriors

This presentation will explore the Sikh ideal of the Sage Warrior (sant sipahi) as one who operates with compassionate courage in the face of injustice and suffering for communal and individual sovereignty, liberation, and freedom.  In Sikh conceptions, compassion or ‘daya’ is most often translated as ‘mercy' signifying a sense of power, agency, and sovereignty of an individual, community, or the divine.  It will examine the ways in which compassion or mercy (daya) is one of the five key virtues in Sikhism and how it is inextricably interlinked with the others: truth (sat), contentment (santokh), humility (nimrata), and love (pyaar). Through a hermeneutics of Gurbani, self, and other, this paper will explore the philosophical and practical ways in which compassionate courage is understood as a tool toward individual and collective liberation (mukti). It will do so by highlighting historic and contemporary Sikh examples of sacrifice, seva, non-violent protest, and movement organizing.