When Pearl Buck Read the Guru Granth Sahib

“I have studied the scriptures of other great religions, but I do not find elsewhere the same power of appeal to the heart and mind as I find here in these volumes.”

Pearl Buck in Japan, 1960. J. T. VINTAGE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.

Among Western writers who engaged deeply with Sikh thought, few voices carry the weight and sensitivity of Pearl S. Buck. The Nobel Prize–winning American novelist was the daughter of missionary parents and spent much of her early life in China. Her exposure to different cultures and religions shaped a lifelong curiosity about spiritual traditions beyond the West.

During a visit to India in the early 1960s, Buck was presented with a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib translated into English by Dr Gopal Singh, a distinguished Punjabi poet and critic.

Reading the scripture carefully in her Pennsylvania home, Buck began to recognise its power to shape people whether or not they consciously identify as religious.

She found in the Guru Granth Sahib a voice that articulated humanity’s deepest hunger for clarity:

“Shri Guru-Granth Sahib is a source book, an expression of man’s loneliness, his aspirations, his longings, his cry to God and his hunger for communication with that Being. I have studied the scriptures of other great religions, but I do not find elsewhere the same power of appeal to the heart and mind as I find here in these volumes.”

She was especially impressed by the balance the scripture maintained: expansive but focused, spiritual yet grounded. Buck believed that the power of the Guru Granth Sahib emerged from “the brilliant minds and deep searching hearts” of India itself.

Through the Sikh Gurus, she felt, readers are given a glimpse of a transcendent reality: “a Beyond that belongs to us all.” Her final assessment was unequivocal and deeply personal:

“I can only say that as a western reader who nevertheless has some small understanding of the other side of our world, I find in this translation of the Sikh Scriptures a great book. It speaks to me of life and death; of time and eternity; of the temporal human body and its needs; of the mystic human soul and its longing to be fulfilled; of God and the indissoluble bond between them.”

Through Pearl Buck’s reflections, the Guru Granth Sahib emerges not merely as a sacred text rooted in a particular tradition, but as a work capable of speaking across boundaries of religion, addressing the shared questions that define the human search for meaning.

For readers intrigued by the meeting of East and West, devotion and modernity; more of Pearl Buck’s (and other western women’s) writings can be found in Eleanor Nesbitt’s ‘Sikh: Two Centuries of Western Women’s Art & Writing’, which you can buy here.