Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Nanak says: the wise and the ancient books alike agree on this: what those who love the One speak from the heart comes true.
It shows plainly across all creation, and everyone comes to hear of it.
Those who set themselves against people of goodness never find peace — not because anyone punishes them, but because ill-will has no rest in it.
The good ones only wish them well and want to bless them with goodness, yet they stay burning in their own ego.
They hate those who hold no hatred — and that is a fire that consumes only itself.
When a tree is cut at its roots, its branches wither on their own; ill-will, cut off from any real ground, simply dries up.
The heroic step reaches its climax here, with one of the Vaar's harder passages — those who "fight with the Saints" and are "cursed." Such lines read best as the natural self-defeat of ill-will, never as a curse pronounced upon a person. The good ones lochan onaa gunai no — actively "seek to bless them with virtue." The people of goodness are wishing their opponents well. The famous closing image — a tree cut at the root, whose branches wither — stays, framed this way: ill-will has no living ground of its own, so like a severed branch it simply dries up on its own. The target is always the corrosive feeling, never a human being.
Good people wished their opponents well even so. Why is wishing someone well stronger than wishing them harm?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI