Ik Onkar

The phrase

It is written as the numeral one followed by the syllable onkar. The numeral is not decorative: the tradition insists on writing the digit rather than the word, so that the claim of oneness is made in a form that cannot be inflected, translated away or read as one among many. Onkar is the divine as sound and as creative principle, a term with Upanishadic ancestry that Nanak uses without its ritual apparatus.

Together the phrase asserts one being, without second, from which all creation proceeds and which pervades it.

Theological weight

The assertion is directed in two directions at once. Against a polytheism of many deities it insists on one; against a strict transcendence it insists that the one pervades what it made. Sikh theology is accordingly neither the worship of images nor a doctrine of a wholly separate creator, and the Gurus argued against both.

It also excludes incarnation. Because the one is unborn and without form, the Sikh tradition does not accept avatars, and this marks its clearest doctrinal separation from Vaishnava Hinduism, with which it otherwise shares much devotional vocabulary.

As a symbol

Ik Onkar in Gurmukhi script is used as the emblem of the tradition — inscribed over gurdwara entrances, on ceremonial objects, in jewellery and in the decoration of homes. It functions much as a symbol does in other traditions while remaining, unusually, a piece of writing whose meaning is the doctrine itself rather than an image standing in for it.