Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
You don't have the power to make yourself speak — or to keep yourself silent. You don't have the power to ask for something — or to give it. You don't have the power over life — or over death. You don't have the power of rulership or wealth — even with all the noise in your mind. You don't have the power to force intuition, or spiritual wisdom, or meditation to come. You don't have the power to free yourself from this world by your own effort alone.
The one who has all power — that is the oneness. It holds everything and watches over it all.
Nanak says: no one is truly high and no one is truly low.
No one has power of their own — to speak or stay quiet, to live or die — and so no one is truly high or low.
Jor na means "no power." Guru Nanak says it again and again, across every part of life: speaking and keeping silent, asking and giving, living and dying, ruling and getting rich, finding wisdom, finding the way out. By the end of the list, nothing is left that a person fully controls.
This is not a call to sit back and do nothing. It corrects a mistake about where power really lives. People tend to think they are more in control than they are. We talk as if we choose our thoughts. We act as if we chose to be born, or could choose not to die. We take credit for our wisdom and our kindness, as if they came from us alone — when they were shaped by our nature, our family, our circumstances, and grace.
The teaching tradition takes on the obvious question: "If I control nothing, why try at all?" That question, it says, rests on the very idea the pauri is dissolving. To claim a will that is all your own is to claim to be separate — a little self standing outside the whole, giving it orders. But Japji has been gently taking that separateness apart. There is no "you" outside the whole, pushing it around. There is one movement, and what you call your choosing is already part of it. A wave rises and falls with real force, but the force is the ocean's.
Then the key line: jis hath jor kar vaykhai so-ay — the One in whose hands the power rests watches over all. The power that moves the universe belongs to the One. And the One does not use it to push anyone around. It watches with awareness and care.
The last line follows from all of this: naanak utam neech na ko-ay — no one is high, no one is low. If no one controls anything by their own power, then the ladders people build — of power, status, caste and money — have nothing solid under them. The king is not high because of his own merit. A worker from a so-called low caste is not low because something is wrong with him. Both are held by the same source. In the eyes of the One, the difference does not exist.
It would be easy to hear all this as gloomy, as if a person had been made small and helpless. The tradition says the opposite. If the One is the power behind your every word and breath, it is not far away at all. It is nearer than your own hands, moving as you, right now. And a quiet practice comes out of this. When remembering the One feels hard, simply remember that you are not the one doing anything: not me — this is You. Noticing your own powerlessness, gently and without despair, is one more way of keeping the Name.
Is there something in your life you've been trying to force — trying to will into existence through sheer effort — that just hasn't moved? What might it look like to hold that more lightly, without giving up on it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI