Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
They wipe away their old wrongs and let go of their anger, keeping the Guru's **shabad** held tight against their hearts like something precious. People who are soaked in truth stay calm and unhooked from the world's pulling — not because they ran away from life, but because nothing can grab them anymore. With the ego quieted, they merge into the One.
This stanza shows what a truth-soaked life actually feels like from the inside, and the first thing to go is krodh, anger — one of the panch vikaar, the five passions that distort how we see. Anger is what happens when the separate self feels threatened or thwarted. So as the ego quiets, anger naturally drains away; there's no longer a fragile "me" that needs to defend itself. The old wrongs (kilvikh) get erased not by punishment but by the same quieting — when the doer dissolves, so does the residue of its doing.
What keeps it all in place is wonderfully physical: gur ka sabad rakhai ur dhaare — keep the Guru's Word clasped to the heart. Not filed in the head like the pandit's reading, but held against the chest like a child holds a treasure. The shabad isn't studied here; it's embraced. That's the whole difference between Pauri2 and Pauri4 — head versus heart, possessing versus holding close.
The most striking phrase is sach rate sada bairaagi — those dyed in truth are forever detached. The stanza does not say where that detachment is to be lived, and this tradition reads its wording as consonant with the grihast, the householder path — the divine found in ordinary life rather than by running off to a forest. On that reading the detachment here is inner: you stay fully in the world, working and loving, but the world's hooks no longer catch you, because you're dyed so deeply in truth that the passing colors can't stain you. You're in the river but no longer swept by it.
What's something that used to upset you a lot but has slowly lost its grip on you — and what changed inside?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI