Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Now count it out by tens. At ten, a child. At twenty, young and strong. At thirty, in your prime. At forty, bursting with life. At fifty, your step begins to slip. At sixty, old age arrives. At seventy, the sharp mind starts to dim. At eighty, the body can no longer keep up. At ninety, you lie in bed, too weak even to understand how weak you've become.
After looking and looking for something solid to hold onto, here is what I have found: the whole world is a mansion built of smoke — beautiful for a moment, and then gone on the wind.
If the previous shalok counted life in ten stages, this one counts it in nine decades — the same truth from another angle, ten to ninety, the slow arc of rising and then falling that no life escapes. The honesty is bracing and tender at once: the slipping foot at fifty, the dimming mind at seventy, the bedridden helplessness at ninety, too weak even to understand its own weakness. Guru Nanak refuses to look away from where the body's road actually goes.
But the shalok's power is all in its final line, one of the most famous images in Gurbani: after seeking and searching for such a long time, I have seen that the world is just a mansion of smoke — dhuay ka mehlu. Picture a palace made entirely of smoke: it has shape, grandeur, even beauty — for a moment. And then a breath of wind, and there is nothing there at all. This is what the world's apparent solidity actually is. We spend our lives furnishing and defending a mansion of smoke, mistaking it for stone.
This is not nihilism, and it is crucial not to read it as despair. Guru Nanak is not saying nothing matters; he is saying this is not where to build. By showing the world to be smoke, he is pressing the question the whole Vaar exists to answer: then what is solid? What can you build on that a breath of wind won't scatter? The answer, already named in the opening — the Guru, the Name, the everlasting wealth — is thrown into relief precisely by this smoke. You only go looking for solid ground once you have felt the floor turn to vapor beneath you.
What in your life have you been treating as solid stone that might, honestly, be more like smoke?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI