Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Look at the huge variety of lives. Some eat meat, some live only on plants. Some feast on every delicacy there is; others scrape by on almost nothing. Some practice elaborate breathing disciplines; and some simply live on the strength of the Name.
Through all of it, the Great Giver never runs dry — and in the deepest sense, no one truly dies; it is all held in the One. The only ones really lost are those who never once let the One into their hearts.
This shalok surveys the sheer variety of human ways of living — and quietly refuses to rank them by their outer form. Some eat meat, while others eat grass. Some have all the thirty-six varieties of delicacies, while others live in the dirt and eat mud. Some control the breath... some live by the Support of the Naam. Diet, wealth, spiritual technique — the whole spread of human conditions and practices is laid out without Guru Nanak stopping to praise one and condemn another by its surface.
This restraint is itself a teaching, and a characteristic one. Elsewhere in this very Vaar, Guru Nanak refuses to make religion a matter of food rules (taking what is not yours, he said, is the real forbidden meat). Here too, he does not say the grass-eaters are holy and the meat-eaters are not, or the breath-controllers are advanced and the simple are behind. The outer form — what you eat, how much you have, what technique you practice — is not where the real difference lies.
Where, then? In two final lines. First: the Great Giver lives; no one dies. Behind all the variety stands one undying Giver, sustaining every kind of life, and in that One nothing is ultimately lost. And second, the one distinction that actually matters: those who do not enshrine the Lord within their minds are deluded. The real divide is not between meat and grass, feast and famine, this technique and that — it is between the heart that has welcomed the One inside and the heart that has not. A simple soul living on little, with the One enshrined within, is on the right side of the only line that counts; an elaborate practitioner without the One is deluded, for all their discipline. What you eat and own and practice is the surface; whether you hold the One is the depth.
Do you ever rank people by surface things — what they eat, own, or practice — when the real question is something deeper?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI