Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
I bow to the Oneness, and to the true wisdom that wakes me.
At the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, the One has no shape you can draw — and yet it holds everything.
It rests in perfect stillness. It sits in its own peace. It listens to its own song of praise.
It made itself out of itself. It is its own father and its own mother. It is the tiniest, most invisible thing, and also the big, solid world you can touch.
Its wondrous play is far too vast to fully figure out — and that is part of the wonder.
The first Pauri, opening with ONG — the sacred sound of the One creating. This section paints the One as self-arising: it made itself, fathers and mothers itself, needs nothing outside itself to exist. It is both sookham (subtle, hidden, formless) and asthool (gross, manifest, the solid visible world) — the same reality showing up as the unseen and the seen. The last line, lakhee na jaa-ee... leelaa — "His play cannot be fully grasped" — is not a defeat but an invitation: the point is not to conquer the mystery with the intellect but to stand in wonder before it. Leelaa (divine play) reframes all of existence as a game the One is playing with itself, joyfully, for its own delight.
What is something so vast or beautiful that trying to fully explain it would only shrink it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI