Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
A person can perform endless rituals and good-looking religious deeds, and still not become free. They can wander to far-off lands on every pilgrimage, and yet — in love with "the second thing" — be ruined. The one who's only putting on a show wastes a whole precious life; without the **shabad**, all they get is pain.
This stanza is Guru Amar Das's clear, firm rejection of external religion as a substitute for inner change — a theme that runs all through this Mehl (the proud pilgrim of Shabad 60, the scrubbed-but-dirty kitchen of Shabad 68). The first line states it bluntly: bahu karam kamaavai mukat na paae — you can perform all sorts of religious deeds and rituals (karam), heaps of them, and still not be liberated. The quantity of religious activity is simply not the measure. You could do every ceremony, keep every observance, and remain exactly as bound as before.
Why? Because the rituals address the outside while the real problem is inside. The stanza names the inside problem: doojai bhaai khuaae — love of the second thing (dooja bhaav, the felt sense of separation from the One) is what ruins them. No amount of outer ceremony touches that inner stain. The image of desantar bhavai — wandering to foreign lands, traveling to distant pilgrimage sites — drives it home (just like Shabad 60's proud pilgrim who came home dirtier): you can cross the whole world looking for what can only be found within, and arrive nowhere. The geography is wrong because the destination was never external.
And the sharpest word in the stanza is kapti — deceitful, fraudulent. Why call the busy ritualist "deceitful"? Because there's a kind of lie at the heart of external-only religion: putting on a show of devotion while the inner heart stays unchanged — performing holiness to be seen, rather than actually transforming (the same kapat, the inner deceit of the false dancer, Shabad 69). It's a deception aimed partly at others and partly at oneself: I'm doing all these holy things, so I must be holy. But the shabad — the inner Word that actually dissolves the ego — is missing, so nothing real happens: bin sabdai dukh paavnia, without the Word, only pain. The whole life of effortful ritual, like the false-writer's spent paper and ink (Shabad 71), comes to birtha janam — a wasted birth. The lesson for the boys is bracing: it's entirely possible to be very religious and completely miss the point. What changes you isn't the amount of holy activity you perform on the outside; it's whether the shabad has actually done its quiet work within.
What's the difference between *doing* religious or "good" things to look the part, and actually being changed inside? How could you tell which is happening in yourself?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI