Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
O restless mind, no one has ever found the One by being clever.
No one has found the One by being clever. Listen, O my mind.
Maya — the glitter of the world — is so dazzling that people wander lost in doubt because of it.
This dazzling Maya was made by the same One who gave the world its sleepy, sweet potion.
I give myself to the One who made our clinging to things taste so sweet.
Nanak says: O restless mind, no one has found the One by being clever.
Ay man chanchlaa — "O fickle mind" — the mind addressed now by its oldest nickname: chanchal, restless, mercurial. Chaturaa-ee kinai na paa-i-aa — by cleverness, no one has ever found Him. Not rarely; never. This closes the last exit the spiritual ego keeps open — the belief that with enough intelligence, technique, or strategy, realization can be engineered. Japji opens the same way (sahas si-aanpaa lakh hohi — a hundred thousand clevernesses avail not one); Anand Sahib presses it into the mind's own ear.
Then the remarkable move: Maya, the fascinating enticer (mohnee) who keeps the world wandering in doubt, is explicitly the One's own creation: maa-i-aa ta mohnee tinai keetee jin thag-ulee paa-ee-aa — the One made the enchantress and administered the intoxicating potion (thag-ulee: the drugged sweet used by thags to stupefy travelers — a vivid, dark image). And the verse's response is not resentment but reverence: kurbaan keetaa tisai vitahu — I am a sacrifice to the One who made attachment sweet. The game is real, the potion is real, and both belong to the One playing all the parts. This is a small answer to why hard things happen: nothing, not even the mechanism of delusion, is outside the One.
For the tradition's teaching: Maya is not money or matter per se but the forgetting-power — whatever makes the One slip from mind (defined precisely at verse 29). Cleverness cannot beat her because cleverness is her favorite instrument. What defeats forgetting is not smarter thinking but remembrance.
What's something that looked shiny and exciting until you got it — and then what happened?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI