Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
A person can spend all their hours running in circles, driven by an endless hunger that is never satisfied.
With the heart turned away from the One who made and holds us, that restless chase just keeps on turning.
This Shalok is set in the vocabulary of the Islamic tradition — it speaks of the rasool (the Prophet) — a mark of Guru Arjan's respectful, wide reach across the faiths of his time. The verse pictures someone athay pahar bha-udaa firai, wandering "all eight watches" (all day and night), forever chasing khaavan — appetite that never fills. The original warns of falling into dojak (hell); in this project's voice, that frightening image is set aside, and the real teaching is kept: a life run only by appetite becomes a loop that never closes. The "hell" is simply the endless treadmill itself. What breaks the loop is turning the heart back toward its source.
When have you kept wanting "just one more" of something and never felt full? What actually made the wanting quiet down?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI