Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Some wear skins and carry begging bowls, lean on wooden staffs, sit on deer-skins; others knot their hair in tufts and wear the sacred thread and loincloth.
You are the Master; I am only Your puppet. Nanak asks: what, then, should my status be?
This one is about how your worth is what the One makes of you.
Guru Nanak lists all the outfits and signs of the religious life of his time. Skins, begging bowls, wooden sticks, deer-skin mats, hair tied in tufts, sacred threads, loincloths. People wore these to show who they were.
Nanak claims none of them. TooN saahib ha-o saaNgee tayraa — You are the Master, and I am only Your puppet. Who he is does not come from a costume he puts on. It comes from whatever the One, the Puppeteer, makes of him.
Then he asks, Paranvai naanak jaat kaisee — prays Nanak, what jaat could I have? Jaat means a person's rank or group by birth. With that question, he quietly sets aside the whole idea that people can build their own rank before the One.
Think of a school play. The costumes are fun, but they don't make you who you are. Your worth is not what you wear. It is what the One makes of you.
Where do you get your sense of who you are — from what you wear and do, or from something deeper?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI