Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
**Dh** — why go searching all over the place, off in every direction, when what you're looking for isn't out there?
You could spend your whole life running around outside and still come up empty. So I climbed the highest mountain looking — and when I came back down, I found the One right there in the fortress. And the fortress was my own self, built by the One all along. I'd been living inside the answer.
The letter Dhadha. Kabir mocks — gently, at himself — the outward search: dhig dhoodheh kat aanaa, “why search in other directions?” The warning dhoodhat hee dheh ga-ay paraanaa — you could exhaust a whole life searching outside — is memento not as fear but as urgency to turn inward now. The mountain-climbing image (charh sumayr) is the grand spiritual quest to far-off places; the punchline is that on returning he finds the One in the garh — the fortress — jih garh garhi-o, the very fortress the One built, which is the seeker's own body-and-being. The whole outward journey circles home. It rhymes with the earlier “found Him near myself.”
If the thing you most want to find is inside you, what's one way you could look inward instead of outward?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI