Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The One Himself dyes us in the color of His love — we don't paint it on ourselves. Only the people who are soaked in the Guru's **shabad** take on that color. And when the One's color sets in them, it's endless and unfading; so they sing His praises again and again, tasting joy in every drop.
After the previous stanza showed that effort can't reach the jewel, this one shows how the transformation actually happens: aapay range — He Himself dyes. The image is rang, the dye, one of Raag Maajh's most beloved metaphors. You don't color yourself in the divine love by willpower, the way the pandit tried to read himself into wisdom. The dyeing is something done to you, received, when you let yourself be soaked.
What the stanza itself says is that the One's color, taken in through genuine shabad, is "at apaara," utterly boundless. The sharper contrast commentators often draw out from this — the world's colors as kachaa, bright but fading and washing out because they're made of impermanent things (maya, the three gunas), against the One's color as pakkaa, fast — is a traditional gloss rather than this composition's own wording. Either way, it is why "those steeped in the Guru's Word" are specified: only the dye that soaks all the way through the fiber holds. A surface splash of religiosity rinses off in the first hard rain. A heart truly steeped keeps its color forever.
And notice the joy. Har ras ras gun gavania — they sing with ras upon ras, savor upon savor. This is the saad, the taste, that the pandit of Pauri2 never found, now overflowing. When the color truly sets, praise isn't a chore — it bubbles up as sheer delight, the natural overflow of a soaked and colored heart. The dye and the joy are the same event: to be filled with the One's color is to brim with His song.
What in your life is a "fast color" that has stayed bright through hard times — and what has washed out the moment things got tough?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI