Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Watch a whole life pass by. First, the baby loves its mother's milk. Then it learns its mother and father; then brothers and sisters; then the joy of play wakes up. Then running after food and treats. Then desire pulls so hard it forgets its manners. Then gathering money and settling into a house. Then anger that burns you up from the inside. Then hair turning grey and breath growing short. And then — ashes.
The people who loved you cry out and send you off. The soul lifts up like a startled bird and asks, 'Which way do I go now?' You came, you went, and after a while even your name fades from the world. If a person spends the whole journey forgetting the One, it's like loving the dark. But with a teacher to light the way, the world is not something you drown in.
This is one of the great sweeping shaloks of Guru Nanak — a whole human life compressed into ten quick stages, from the first taste of mother's milk to the final handful of ashes. Read slowly, it is almost unbearably true: the baby at the breast, the child learning faces and names, the awakening of play, then appetite, then desire that does not respect social customs, then the accumulating years of wealth and house, then anger that consumes the body, then grey hair and labored breath, then the pyre. Ten steps, and a life is over.
The most haunting moment comes at death: the swan of the soul takes flight, and asks which way to go. The hans, the soul-swan, suddenly airborne and disoriented, with no idea of the direction — because nothing in all those ten busy stages prepared it for this one. And then the quiet devastation: he came and he went, and now, even his name has died. Not only the body but the very memory dissolves. The customs that follow — food offered on leaves, the birds called to come and eat — are pictured precisely to show their helplessness; the rituals go on, and the departed is past their reach.
But Guru Nanak does not leave us in the dark he has just described. The shalok closes with its diagnosis and its hope: the self-willed manmukhs love the darkness — there is a kind of person who prefers the forgetting, who would rather not see where the road leads. Without the Guru, the world is drowning. The ten stages are not a counsel of despair; they are a wake-up call. A life can be spent sleepwalking from milk to ashes — or it can be walked awake, with a teacher's light, so that the soul, when it takes flight, already knows the way home.
If you watch your own life as ten quick stages, which one are you in — and are you walking it awake or asleep?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI