Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Not the sun, not the moon, not the planets; not the great continents or the deep oceans; not even the food we eat or the wind we breathe — nothing of it is permanent.
You alone, Lord — You alone.
Now the litany reaches its widest, cosmic scale. Having named the beings and the virtuous, it turns to the very furniture of the universe — the things that seem most fixed and reliable of all: the sun, the moon, the planets, the seven continents, the oceans, food, the wind. These are the constants by which we measure everything else; the sun has risen every day of every human life. And Guru Nanak says plainly: nothing is permanent. Not even the sun. Not even the wind. Not even the ground of the continents or the depth of the seas.
There is something both humbling and freeing in being told that even the sun will pass. It dissolves the last hiding place of the craving for permanence. If you cannot count on the sun and the oceans to last, then clearly permanence is simply not a property of anything in creation — it belongs to the Creator alone. The litany has now excluded every possible candidate: the great and the holy, every being, the virtuous, and finally the cosmos itself. And after the most reliable things imaginable have been named and seen to pass, the refrain returns, carrying now the full weight of the whole sweep: You alone, You alone. Only the One stands outside the universal passing — and so only the One is worth building a life upon.
If even the sun isn't permanent, what does that free you from clinging to — and toward what does it point you instead?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI