Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
I could dig a cave in a mountain of solid gold, or hide deep beneath the water. I could stand on my head, upside-down, for years. I could wrap myself in robes and wash them over and over. I could shout out every scripture there is. I could even roll in dirt and filth to look holy.
And all of it would still be just the mind showing off — missing the whole point. Here is the truth that actually sets me free: I was nothing, I am nothing, and on my own I will never be anything at all. So I rest in only one thing — the Word.
This shalok is Guru Nanak's sweeping dismissal of spectacular religion — the dramatic feats of self-denial that impress onlookers and feed the very ego they claim to conquer. He lists them with a kind of weary irony: the cave dug in a mountain of gold or under the sea, the years of standing on one's head, the endlessly washed robes, the loud shouting of all the colored Vedas, even living in dirt and filth as a show of holiness. Every one of these is a famous form of religious athleticism — and Guru Nanak calls them all what they are: a product of evil-mindedness, and intellectual corruption. Not because hardship is bad, but because hardship performed by the ego only inflates the ego. The holy man standing on his head is still, often, the most self-regarding man in the room.
Against all this spectacle, the shalok offers a line of radical humility that is the true center of the spiritual life: I was not, I am not, and I will never be anything at all! This is the death of the ego stated as plainly as it can be. Every austerity in the list was a way of the self trying to become something — holy, impressive, advanced. Guru Nanak cuts the root: there is no separate self that is, or was, or ever will be anything on its own. The ego's whole project of self-construction is built on a fiction.
And when that fiction collapses, what remains? O Nanak, I dwell only on the Word of the Shabad. Not on feats, not on a constructed holy self, but on the Shabad — the Word that comes from beyond the self entirely. This is the great reversal of the whole tradition: you do not climb to the One by becoming impressive; you arrive by becoming nothing, and resting on the Word. The cave of gold and the headstand are the ego's monuments; the Shabad is what is left when the monuments come down.
Is there a way you try to 'become something' impressive — and what might it feel like to set that project down entirely?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI