A parable tells of a frog, swollen with pride, in a little well. He thought his well was the whole universe. How could there be anything outside of his domain for he could not see anything through and beyond the high walls of his little well?

But then one day another frog that had roamed the world fell in and told the fat old frog of the world outside. Imagine the consternation. It was safer to ignore and dismiss the young frog's ramblings of a wide world outside than to face the disintegration of a life-long sense of a precariously held reality.

When Guru Nanak taught us of countless suns, innumerable moons and universes without end he was pushing us out of our self-limiting well. When he questioned the conventional wisdom that a proverbial bull supported the weight of the earth on his horns or that our dead ancestors would starve unless Brahmins were feasted here on earth, he was asking us to stretch our minds beyond our self-imposed limitations. In urging us to find our true self within, Guru Nanak was asking us to think outside of the box, to stretch in all directions beyond the established modes.

Sikhism speaks of an ineffable God that cannot be limited by words or images. Revealed through his creation but even so, the creator cannot be fathomed, cannot be described, can never be measured or weighed. All our formulations will always remain incomplete, like the comprehension of a three-dimensional structure by a blind man. It follows then that all knowledge can never be entirely and totally condensed into a measurable, knowable, tangible pot that one may hold or behold.

Yet, to walk the path of knowing is the essence of life itself - hence of both science and religion. The idea is to stay focused on the path and to keep moving; the journey is the destination. Certainly that is how I understand and relate to Sikhism. There are ways of knowing. The only way out of the well is to learn of the universe - both inside and outside of us.

A noted Sikh savant, Bhai Vir Singh, singled out three dimensions of religion - the spiritual experience, development of human character and social values, along with the associated rites and rituals. Certainly the last two are clearly inter-related, the first provides the fundamentals for both.

The spiritual thus becomes basic to all else.

In Sikhism it is encountered through the Guru Granth, which is the repository of the Gurus' word. The shabd or word is the Guru. The Bible echoes the thought when it says "In the beginning was the word and the word was God." I should add here that it is not the ink that is sacred or the page on which it makes patterns in script, but the idea and thought that is given form and shape by the word.

To integrate shabd into one's life the words need to be understood. To be understood they have to be read. And then they have to be debated and discussed within one's own head and with others. A book - like the Guru Granth - needs other books to understand it. To come to terms with our heritage we need access to books that discuss our history, our values, our rites and our spiritual base - the mundane as well as the sacred.

When in the Japji Guru Nanak talks of the khands, he is, in essence, laying out the trajectory for individual endeavor along the path of knowing. Words carry ideas and are useless without vichar. But until words are recorded in writing or by other means, they are limited to speech that exists only at a given time and for that time only. Books are portable knowledge that spans generations.

By telling us of the world outside our little well Guru Granth can transport us to a wider world. We can discuss what we read from it and we can debate the fine points of our heritage with eminent minds, some that are long gone or far too distant, by delving into what they have written, if we have access to books.

Then why is it that I have never seen a gurdwara that has even a semi-respectable library and reading room? Why is it that we Sikhs publish and read so few books?

That we read very little registered most forcefully upon me when I was looking at the jacket of the newly published Encyclopedia of Sikhism. I noticed that only 2100 copies were printed. We are proud of our numbers in the world - almost 22 million - and of the fact that Sikhism is now perhaps the fifth largest religion in the world. About half a million Sikhs live in North America. India alone must have over 2100 libraries, colleges and universities. Granted that only a minority of Sikhs would be comfortable with the English language, but 2100 seems distressingly, piddlingly and shamefully small.

Then I started looking at other books on Sikhism in my modest library. The average print run was about 500. Then I looked at the Koran, Bible, commentaries on the two, and finally at pulp fiction. Would you believe several hundred thousand for a single run, rarely less than ten thousand? This in spite of the fact that Sikhism is unique in that it is the word that commands loyalty, respect and veneration, not the person of a Guru or his image. We revere, not the palki or the printed page but the word therein and what it means to us. There are no icons in the iconoclastic message of Sikhism.

Visit a Sikh home; better yet, look around your own. There probably won't be a book or magazine on Sikhism, but Soap Opera Digest or Mad magazine would make the grade. If we see ourselves as sophisticated we might have a subscription to New York or New Yorker. Agatha Christie, Leo Rosten, even Germaine Greer, certainly Danielle Steele might rate shelf space but not Kahan Singh, Vir Singh or Kapur Singh.

The legendary library in Alexandria was burnt twice - once by the Muslims, a second time by the Christians - both times for the same reasons. Any knowledge that did not stem from their own religious teachings and their own scriptures (Christian or Islamic) was deemed false and unworthy of existence. To me that is like being the smug fat frog in the small well. Francis Bacon reminds us that "reading maketh a full man, writing an exact man, conversation a ready man."

Our homes, libraries and reading habits reflect the contents and habits of our minds or "where our head is at" as they used to say in the wild world of the 1960's. By leaving us the written word the Gurus have given us a way out of the little well, but we seem happiest when we are digging deeper - perhaps our way to China.

Dr. Inder Jit Singh is Professor & Co-ordinator in Anatomy, New York University. Among other publications, he is the author of two books: 'Sikhs and Sikhism: A View With a Bias' and 'The Sikhs Way: A Pilgrims Progress'.

I.J. Singh is on the editorial advisory board of 'The Sikh Review', Calcutta and 'The Encyclopedia of Sikhism', Punjabi University, Patiala.

The author welcomes feedback at ijs1@nyu.edu on this or any other of his writings.