Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
It's like carefully damming a pond that's already dried up, or fencing a field that's already been harvested.
We guard and hoard what we can't actually keep — and in the end it's all carried away anyway.
Kabir gives two wonderfully wry images of futile hoarding: building a dam around a pond that has already dried up, and putting a fence around a field that's already been harvested. Both are perfect pictures of guarding things that are already gone or can't be kept — pouring effort into protecting what we were never going to hold onto. And the honest end: when death comes, it carries away what the person tried to preserve as 'their own.' It's not gloomy so much as clarifying: so much anxious effort goes into hoarding and protecting 'stuff,' and none of it finally stays with us. Better to hold things lightly and spend your effort on what actually lasts.
What's something people work hard to protect or hoard that they can't really keep forever?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI