Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Greet the Holy Saint with your palms pressed together. This is an act of great merit.
Bow down before them. This is a genuinely virtuous action.
The rahao (pause) shabad is a recommendation that sounds simple but is not: greet the holy with genuinely pressed palms and a genuinely bowed head. Not performance. Not the outward gesture while the mind is somewhere else.
The act of bowing — the physical lowering of the head — is one of the oldest human ways of acknowledging something greater than the self. It is not weakness. It is the recognition of what is actually larger, what is genuinely worthy of reverence. The merit in this act comes from its honesty, not its form.
Is there something or someone in your life that you genuinely revere — not because you have to but because you cannot help it? What does that reverence feel like?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI