Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
No end to praise. No end to what can be said. No end to actions. No end to giving. No end to seeing. No end to hearing. No end to what the mind can understand or contemplate.
No end to the shape of creation. No end to what lies beyond it.
Many have searched and struggled to find the edge — and wept in frustration — because there is no edge. No limit can be found.
No one knows this limit. And the more you say about it, the more there is to say.
The Great One is truly great. High is its place. Higher than the highest is the name.
Only one as high as this can know it. Only the oneness knows the full extent of itself.
Nanak says: by grace, and grace again — never earned, only received — the gift is given.
The One has no end — no end to its praise, its gifts, its seeing, its hearing — and the more you say about it, the more there is to say.
Ant na means "no end." Guru Nanak says it again and again, line after line. By the time you have heard it that many times, you begin to feel it, not just understand it. The words pull you into the feeling of endlessness.
Why is there no end to the praise? The teaching tradition gives a lovely answer. For someone who has merged with the One — a river back in the ocean — everything they meet is the One. The sun is the One shining. A bird's call is the One singing. A breeze is the One moving through the leaves. Praise is no longer something done at set times. It is what the whole world is doing, all the time, in every sound and sight. Many traditions use the picture of the world as a stage, with one actor playing every part. Guru Arjan describes that actor taking off all the costumes backstage to be one again, and Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" is a close cousin. Once you see the one actor behind every part, every scene becomes praise, and there is no counting where that ends.
Bahutaa kahee-ai bahutaa ho-ay — the more you say, the more there is to say. Every true thing you discover about the One sits inside something bigger still. The search never runs out. That is not a failure. It is a sign of how deep it goes.
Ayvad oochaa hovai ko-ay / tis oochay ka-o jaanai so-ay — only someone as high as the One could know it; only the One knows itself. The two pauris before this one said the same. The One cannot be fully known from the outside, because there is no outside. Everyone who tries to know it is already inside it.
One line in the middle puzzles many readers: oochay upar oochaa naao — higher even than the Highest is the Name. How can a name be greater than the thing it names? The tradition answers through what naam means. The One needs no name; it simply is, and everything it does is already its name. The Name is not for its sake. It is for ours. Naam is our awareness of the One — the key that opens the door to what is everywhere and yet so often missed. To someone locked out, the key can matter more than the treasure behind the door. Not because the key is worth more, but because without it the treasure stays out of reach. That is how the Name can stand even higher than the High.
The last line — naanak nadree karmee daat — brings it back to us. How do the gifts reach us? By grace, and then grace again: nadar, the One's loving glance toward us, and karam, its mercy. The tradition is careful here. Karam in this line is the Persian word for mercy or blessing, not the Sanskrit karma of cause and effect. The gift is not earned by piling up good points. It is given. Even knowing there is a way out of the fog — even being handed the key — is already the gift. You cannot make grace happen. But like sunlight behind a curtain, it was never held back. You only have to stop standing in its way.
Have you ever gone deep into something — a subject, a question, a skill — and found that the deeper you went, the more there was to discover? What was that like?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI