Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The One holds power over the whole order of things. It could make tigers and hawks live quietly on grass, and turn gentle grass-eaters into hunters. It could raise dry land up out of the rivers, and sink whole deserts beneath deep oceans.
It could set a crown on a lowly worm, and turn a mighty army to ashes. Every creature alive depends on breathing — yet the One could keep us alive with no breath at all. Whatever pleases it, the One provides. Nothing is fixed except its Will.
This shalok is a meditation on the absolute freedom of the One over everything we assume to be fixed and necessary. Guru Nanak runs through the supposedly unbreakable rules of the world and shows the One unbound by every one of them. The food chain? Tigers, hawks, falcons and eagles — the Lord could make them eat grass; and the grass-eaters He could make eat meat. Geography? He could raise dry land from the rivers, and turn the deserts into bottomless oceans. Social rank? He could appoint a worm as king, and reduce an army to ashes. Even biology itself: all beings live by breathing, but He could keep us alive even without the breath.
The cumulative effect is to dissolve our sense that the way things are is the way things must be. We take the order of nature — predator and prey, land and sea, the powerful and the weak, the necessity of breath — as fixed law. Guru Nanak says: none of it is fixed in itself; all of it is the One's free arrangement, and could be otherwise in an instant. What looks like iron necessity is actually ongoing choice.
This humbles us in two directions at once. It humbles our certainty — we do not actually know what must be; we only know what the One has, for now, willed. And it humbles our anxiety and our pride — the worm can be crowned and the army turned to ash, so neither the lowly need despair nor the mighty grow proud of an arrangement that is held entirely in another's hand. As it pleases the True Lord, He gives us sustenance. Our very survival is not a right we have secured but a gift continually willed — and the One who could feed tigers on grass and keep us alive without breath is not short of ways to provide. The right response to such a power is not fear but a deep, trusting humility.
What do you treat as fixed, unbreakable 'law' in your life that might actually be more open than you assume?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI