Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
By listening — truth, contentment and wisdom come to you.
By listening — you receive the blessings people once travelled for years to find at holy places near and far. They are already yours, wherever you are.
By listening — through reading and study, real understanding follows. And with it, something like quiet dignity.
By listening — deep meditation comes naturally.
For those who are devoted — there is constant blossoming.
By listening — suffering dissolves. The weight of wrong actions lifts.
Deep listening brings three gifts: truth, contentment, and a wise, settled mind.
Santokh means contentment — the feeling that what you have is enough. It is one of the five virtues in Sikh teaching, alongside truth (sat), compassion (daya), humility (nimrata) and love (pyaar). Here it grows out of Suniai, deep listening. Many people think contentment makes you lazy: if you are happy, why try? Guru Nanak sees it the other way. Contentment is not giving up. It is freedom from the anxious, grabbing feeling that keeps people running in circles. You still work, still make things, still join in fully. You just do it from a full cup instead of an empty one.
The pauri also points to sahj — natural ease, the calm of being in step with the flow of things. Some people call it being "in the zone," when a game or a drawing just flows. Sahj is that feeling as a way of living, not a lucky moment. You cannot force it. It comes when the noise inside gets quiet enough to feel the deeper current. Picture a river that has reached the ocean. It does not try to be still. It simply is.
Then there is the bath at the sixty-eight holy places (athsath teerath). In Guru Nanak's day, visiting them was a great honour, and only the rich could afford it. Guru Nanak says the blessings of all those years of costly travel are open to the poorest person, through deep listening. Everyone starts on the same ground.
When do you feel most content — not excited, not happy about something specific, but just quietly okay with everything? What is happening in those moments?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI