Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Drawn by the good they have done, some come to serve a true teacher; and through the teaching they clear out the ego and hold the Name in mind.
Spend your life on anything else, and it slips away wasted; without the Name, even your food and your clothes become a kind of poison. But praise the Word, and you melt into the True One.
Without a teacher, there is no settled home of peace — only more circling. Trade with fake coins, and all you earn is more fakeness. But sing the praises of the Pure One, and you leave this life with honor.
This Pauree gathers up several of the Vaar's running themes and presses them toward the question of how a life ends — with honor or in waste. It opens with the gentle mystery of how anyone comes to the path at all: by the karma of good actions, some come to serve the Perfect Guru. The good done in the past ripens as the impulse to seek a true teacher now; and through that teacher, the familiar transformation — selfishness and conceit eliminated, the Naam meditated upon.
Then the Pauree states the stakes starkly. Undertaking any other task, they waste their lives in vain. Without the Name, all that they wear and eat is poison. This echoes earlier shaloks — the uselessness of all paraphernalia without the One — but sharpens it: a life poured into anything but the Name is not merely empty, it is wasted, and its very comforts turn to poison when the One is absent from the center. By contrast, praising the True Word of the Shabad, they merge with the True Lord — the same merging the whole Vaar keeps promising.
And the Pauree returns once more to the counterfeit-coin metaphor that frames this stretch of the song: investing counterfeit capital, they earn only falsehood. A life traded in fakeness — false values, false self, false coin — can only earn more falsehood; you cannot get truth out of a counterfeit investment. The contrast lands on the manner of departure, which is the Pauree's real concern: without the Guru, no home of peace, only reincarnation's circling; but singing the Praises of the Pure, True Lord, they depart with honor. This is the good death the tradition prizes — to leave this life not as a defrauded counterfeit slinking out, but with honor, having traded in true coin, sung the real praise, and merged with the True One. How you leave depends entirely on what you invested in while here.
What 'capital' are you investing your life in — and is it the kind that lets a person depart with honor?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI