Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
In realm after realm, in world after world — there are storehouses. The oneness is seated in all of them. Everything that was placed there was placed all at once, in one complete act.
Having created, the creator watches over all of it — every realm, every world, everything within them.
Nanak says: the work of the true one is true. What the oneness creates is real. What it sustains is real.
I bow to the oneness, I bow. Primal. Pure light. Without beginning, without end. Through all the ages — ever the same.
This is one of the most compact and quietly powerful pauris in Japji. In six lines — four before the closing bow — Guru Nanak makes several significant philosophical claims.
Aasan lo-ay lo-ay bhandaar — in realm after realm, the storehouses. Every level of existence has been provided for. This connects to the vision of the oneness as daataa — the infinite giver — from Pauris 25 and 26. The provision is not limited to the human world, or to any one tradition's picture of the worlds. Every realm — physical, subtle, cosmic — is stocked with what it needs.
Jo kichh paa-i-aa so aykaa vaar — whatever was placed there was placed all at once — is one of the more philosophically interesting lines in this section. It suggests the completeness of creation: not a work in progress with mistakes to be corrected, but a complete act. The oneness did not need to adjust or revise. What is, is complete as it is. This does not mean suffering doesn't exist, or that nothing needs to change. It means that the ground of existence itself — the foundation that holds everything — is not partial or flawed. The imperfections of the surface do not compromise the completeness of the source.
The teaching tradition hears something more intimate in these lines. The "storehouse" (bhandaar) is not a warehouse in some far-off realm; it is your own true home — the light and aliveness (loy) in which you already live, and which lives in you. We spend our lives assuming home is the body and the house around it, and the restless mind keeps reaching outward for more, sensing this is too small. The tradition pictures the me as an eggshell: while the chick is inside, the shell is its whole universe. It has to crack the shell itself — no one can do it for it — and once it steps out and grows, it can never fit back in. To break the shell of "me" is not to lose everything; it is to discover the vast home that was there all along, all around the egg. And read this way, jo kichh paa-i-aa so aykaa vaar means: this wealth was stocked once and never needs restocking. Unlike every worldly pleasure, which wears off, the bliss of stepping past the small self does not run out. (There is even a quiet turn hidden in kar kar vaykhai — "having made it, the maker watches." Read simply, it can sound like a distant god peering down; the tradition reads it closer, as the one who watches doing so through your own eyes, right now. The seeing happening as you read this — you have labelled it "me," but the watching itself was never yours.)
Kar kar vaykhai sirjanhaar — having created, the creator watches. The oneness did not build the universe and walk away. It is continuously present to what it has made — watching in the sense of being aware, being with, caring for. This is the vision of a universe that is held rather than abandoned. No matter how vast or impersonal the cosmos may appear, it is held within the awareness of the oneness that made it.
When things feel chaotic or out of control, do you have a sense that there is some kind of underlying order or care? Or does that feel too far-fetched? What would it take to trust that more?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI