Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Who is really free? Who is truly joined to the One?
Who counts as a real teacher, a real guide? And who is living the right life — the one with a family and a home, or the one who gives it all up to go searching? Could anyone ever even measure how vast the One is?
Guru Arjan opens this song not with answers but with a string of questions — and the questions are the very ones the entire religious world of his time argued over endlessly. Who is liberated, and who is united? Who is a spiritual teacher, and who is a preacher? Who is a house-holder, and who is a renunciate? These were live, fierce debates: who has really attained freedom; who has the authority to teach; and above all, which way of life is holier — staying in the world with a family, or abandoning it for the forest and the begging bowl.
By laying the questions out plainly, Guru Arjan does something subtle. He refuses to let them stay abstract or factional. He gathers up all the categories people use to rank and divide each other — liberated versus bound, teacher versus layperson, householder versus renunciate — and holds them up for inspection. The whole song will work to dissolve these divisions into something far simpler.
The last question is the deepest: Who can estimate the Lord's Value? After all the human sorting and ranking, here is the One that no category can contain and no mind can measure. It hangs over the whole song. The stanzas to come will answer every question — but notice already that this final one cannot be answered by calculating. The Value of the One is not a quantity to be estimated; it is a reality to be entered. Hold the questions; the answer, when it comes, will be a single word.
Which labels do you use to sort people into 'higher' and 'lower' — and what would it be like to set them down?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI