Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
What's the good of fine food and fine clothes, if the One doesn't live in your heart?
What's the use of fruits and butter and sweets and bread and rich dishes — of soft beds and every comfort — of armies and servants and grand mansions to live in — if the One isn't there inside? Without the True Name, all of it is just stuff that will one day simply vanish, leaving nothing behind.
This shalok is a single, mounting question, asked over and over about everything human beings work and worry to acquire: what good is it, if the True Lord does not abide within the mind? Food, clothes, fruits, ghee, jaggery, flour, meat, soft beds, sensual pleasures, armies, soldiers, servants, mansions — Guru Nanak lists the whole inventory of comfort, wealth, and power, and after each, the same quiet refrain hangs: what good is it, without the One inside?
The point is not that these things are evil or that we should despise food and shelter. Guru Nanak was a householder who valued honest work and provision. The point is about what gives anything its worth. A feast eaten by a heart empty of the One is empty; a mansion lived in by a soul that has forgotten its source is hollow; an army serving a person who does not know the One protects nothing that lasts. The presence of the One within is what makes everything else meaningful; its absence drains the meaning out of even the richest life. The same dinner, the same house, the same comfort is either full or empty depending on whether the One is at the center of the one enjoying it.
And the closing line gives the reason all this "paraphernalia" cannot be the foundation: without the True Name, all this paraphernalia shall disappear. The word paraphernalia is exactly right — it is the equipment of a life, the props and furnishings, not the life itself. And like all props, it will be struck and carried off when the play ends. To build your meaning on the paraphernalia is to build on what is already on its way out the door. Build instead on the True Name, the one thing that does not disappear — and then the food, the clothes, the house, enjoyed from that center, become full at last.
What 'paraphernalia' do you tend to chase — and what would it mean to enjoy it from a full center rather than for its own sake?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI