Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
You are great — and every bit of greatness anywhere flows out from you. You are good — and all goodness shines from you. You are true — and everything that comes from you is true; there is nothing false in it at all.
Talking, looking, walking, living, even dying — all of that comes and goes, passing like weather. But by your Will you make everything and hold everything, and you yourself are the one thing that is truly real.
This shalok is a quiet hymn about where greatness, goodness, and truth actually come from. You are so Great — all Greatness flows from You. You are So Good — Goodness radiates from You. You are True — all that flows from You is True. Each line makes the same move: a quality we admire is traced back to its single source. Greatness is not something a person manufactures; it flows from the One. Goodness does not originate in the good person; it radiates from the One through them. Truth is not our possession; it is the One's nature, present in whatever genuinely comes from the One.
This gently dismantles the ego's habit of taking credit. When you are great, good, or true in any moment, you are not the spring of those qualities — you are a channel through which the One's greatness, goodness, and truth are passing. Nothing at all is false in what truly flows from the One; falseness enters only where the channel claims the water as its own.
And then the shalok sets all our activity against the backdrop of impermanence: talking, seeing, speaking, walking, living and dying — all these are transitory. Everything we do, and even the living and dying themselves, are passing motions. What is not passing is named in the close: by the Hukam of His Command, He creates, and in His Command He keeps us. O Nanak, He Himself is True. The One creates and sustains everything through the flow of Hukam, and amid all the transient doing, the One alone is sach — the real, the permanent, the True. We are passing channels; the One is the abiding source. To know this is to stop grasping at our own greatness and to let the real Greatness simply flow.
When you do something good, can you feel the difference between being its source and being a channel for it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI