Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The One made every kind of living thing and even gave us speech and whole worlds.
The One is the ocean and the sea — and the one who tucks the pearls into it.
The One is the rough water, and the boat, and the boatman who rows you safely across.
There's simply no one else like this — the One does it all.
The aapay litany reaches its most reassuring image: the One is "the terrifying world-ocean, and the boat, and the boatman who ferries us across." The danger and the rescue are the same One. This dissolves the fear the ocean-image usually carries: if the rough water and the safe boat both belong to the One, then even the hard passage is held. And the One "puts the pearls in the ocean" and "enables the Gurmukh to find them" — the treasures are hidden in the very depths we're afraid of. For a child: even the scary parts of life are held by the same One who is also your boat across them.
When something feels scary, how might it help to know the 'boat' and the 'water' come from the same place?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI