Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
No good deeds, no righteous faith, no pure conduct has really welled up in me.
Letting go of cleverness and self-punishment, Nanak falls at the teaching's feet.
The close is radical honesty about merit — "the karma of good deeds... has not been produced in me, in the least." The speaker claims no achievements to earn grace. And crucially, he lets go not only of "cleverness" but of "self-mortification" — the harsh self-punishment that tries to earn worthiness. Both scheming and self-flagellation are dropped; what remains is simply falling at the feet, empty-handed, trusting grace alone.
Do you try to earn worth by achievement or by being hard on yourself? What if you could simply drop both?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI