Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Think of all the powerful people — kings, their subjects, the great leaders. Not one of them stays. The shops, the cities, the busy streets all crumble away in time.
Those grand, solid mansions that the foolish are so sure belong to them? The treasure-rooms packed with gold? Emptied in a heartbeat. The horses and chariots, the camels and the decorated elephants, the gardens and lands and houses — where are they all now? The fancy tents, the soft beds, the silk canopies — gone.
Only the One, the Giver of everything, remains — showing itself through the sheer wonder of all that it creates.
This Pauree is Gurbani's great meditation on the vanishing of worldly power and possession — a sweeping where are they now? that empties out, one by one, everything human beings build their pride upon. Neither the kings, nor their subjects, nor the leaders shall remain. The whole social order, top to bottom, dissolves. The shops, the cities and the streets shall eventually disintegrate — and not by accident, but by the Hukam of the Lord's Command, in the natural unfolding of how existence works.
Then the Pauree lingers, almost tenderly, over the specific objects of human pride — and the listing itself is the teaching. Those solid and beautiful mansions — the fools think that they belong to them. There is the heart of the illusion: not the mansions, but the thinking they belong to us. The treasure-houses emptied out in an instant; the horses, chariots, camels and elephants with all their decorations; the gardens, lands, houses; the tents, soft beds and satin pavilions — and over all of it the quiet, devastating question: where are they now? Everything the great ones were so certain was theirs has simply vanished, as it always does. This is the mansion of smoke from the Vaar's opening shaloks, shown now at the scale of empires.
But the Pauree does not end in emptiness; it ends in the one thing that does not vanish: the True One is the Giver of all; He is revealed through His All-powerful Creative Nature. Behind every possession that came and went was a single Giver, lending it for a while. The kings owned nothing; they were given it, briefly, and it was taken back. What remains when all the mansions and elephants and treasure-houses are gone is the One — revealed not in the possessions but in the kudrat, the boundless creative power that pours out worlds and gathers them back. The right response to the vanishing is not despair but a turning toward the only owner there ever was — the Giver, who alone remains.
What do you think of as 'mine' that was really only ever lent to you for a while?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI