Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Every month, every season, every minute and hour, I keep you in mind. No one has ever reached you by being clever or doing the math — you are beyond all reckoning, unseen and endless.
The scholar stuffed with greed and pride, for all his learning, turns out to be a fool. So do this instead: read the Name, let it become real in you, sit quietly with the teaching. That's how I earned the only wealth worth having — storehouses overflowing with devotion. Trust the spotless Name, and you're counted true at the One's door.
The light of the endless One — the very One who owns your soul and your every breath — is glowing right inside you. You alone are the true Banker; next to you, the whole world is just a small-time trader.
This Pauree addresses the Creator and makes a pointed claim about how the One is — and is not — reached. The soul keeps the One in mind through every unit of time, months, seasons, minutes, hours. But then comes the key line: no one has attained You by clever calculations. The One is True, Unseen, and Infinite, and that means it is fundamentally beyond the reach of the calculating, clever, accumulating mind. You cannot compute your way to the infinite. The intellect, for all its power, meets a wall here — the same truth voiced elsewhere in the Vaar, that the One cannot be seized by cleverness or effort.
From this follows a deliberately provocative line: that scholar who is full of greed, arrogant pride and egotism, is known to be a fool. Learning itself is not condemned — but learning that feeds greed, pride, and ego is foolishness, because it has used the mind to inflate the very self that blocks the One. The remedy is not more cleverness but a different activity entirely: read the Name, realize the Name, contemplate the Guru's Teachings. Move from calculating about the One to dwelling in the Name.
And the Pauree closes with a wonderful merchant's metaphor that reframes all of human striving. The light of the Infinite — the One who owns the soul and the breath of life — is already glowing within. And You alone are the True Banker; the rest of the world is just Your petty trader. Picture it: the One is the great Banker who holds all the real capital — soul, breath, life, the Name itself — and every human being, with all our anxious getting and spending, is a small-time trader dealing in trifles, often mistaking glass for jewels. The only wealth that counts is the Name, drawn from the One Banker's bottomless store. All our frantic commerce in lesser things is petty trading next to that.
Where are you trying to 'calculate' your way to something that can only be received by dwelling in it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI