Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The scholars read book after book, but they never actually *taste* what they're reading — it stays on the page and never reaches the heart. Their minds are busy chasing money and chasing "the second thing" — whatever feels separate from the One. That chasing crowds out their real understanding, so they keep making the same wrong turns and end up full of regret.
The key word here is saad — taste, flavor, the actual savor of a thing. The pandit, the learned scholar, "parheh saad na paaveh": reads and reads but never tastes. This is one of Guru Amar Das's sharpest distinctions: there's a difference between knowing about something and experiencing it. You can memorize every word ever written about honey and never once know its sweetness on your tongue. Spiritual reading without inner tasting is exactly that — a mouth full of descriptions and an empty heart.
Why does the taste never come? Doojai bhaai maaiaa — the mind is in love with dooja bhaav (the felt sense of a second thing, separate from the One) and with maya (the glittering surface-world of money and status). You can't taste the One while your tongue is busy chasing the many. The reading becomes just one more thing the ego collects — knowledge as a possession — and so it never melts into actual experience.
This is the gentle tragedy of the stanza: sabh sudh gavaai, all real understanding gets displaced, pushed out, by the love of maya. Note that the scholar isn't condemned as wicked — he's pitied as someone who had every tool and missed the point, who held the cup of water his whole life and never drank. The regret (pachhotavania) is the natural ache of having spent a life near the treasure without ever opening it.
What's something you know a lot of facts about but have never really experienced for yourself?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI