Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
You can read every holy book there is and have everyone call you wise and learned. But if your heart is still turned toward *two-ness* — chasing the world as if it were something separate from the One — you'll ache inside no matter how much you know.
When you're drunk on wanting things (the old word is **bikhia** — the poison of endless craving), you can't really see anything clearly. You just keep going around the same painful circle, again and again, never quite arriving.
This opening stanza draws the portrait the whole song will work against: the manmukh who is also a pandit — a person turned toward their own ego who is nonetheless learned, celebrated, called a scholar. Guru Amar Das is making a sharp point: knowledge and ego are perfectly compatible. You can accumulate scripture the way you accumulate anything else, and the accumulating self only grows louder.
The root problem is named as doojai bhaa-ay — "the love of the second," the love of duality. This is the felt conviction that you are separate from the One, that the world out there is a different thing from you and from the divine. From that single false starting point flows mahaa dukh, terrible suffering. Not as punishment — as consequence. If you live as if you were cut off, you will feel cut off.
And then the image of intoxication: bikhi-aa maatay — drunk on bikhia, which means both poison and the poison-sweetness of worldly craving. A drunk person cannot judge distances, cannot tell what is real. So they "understand nothing at all" and circle back — fir fir joonee, birth after birth, the same loop. The tragedy here is not wickedness; it is a kind of blindness that book-learning cannot cure, because the books are being read by the very self that needs to quiet down.
Is there something you know a lot about but have never actually felt or lived?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI