Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The one the One touches with natural kindness has the grip of Death cut loose from them.
Nanak says: meet the perfect teaching, and you're honored both as a householder and as one who has let go.
The close offers release and a resolution to an old tension. Grace "cuts the noose of Death" — frees a person from the fear that drove all the grabbing. And the final line dissolves the false choice between the worldly and the spiritual life: the one who meets the true teaching is "celebrated as a householder as well as a renunciate." You need not flee the world to be free, nor cling to it to belong; the freed person lives fully in the world without being owned by it. The lotus in the water, once more.
What would it look like to be fully engaged in your life and yet not gripped by it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI