Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
When you are with me, what else could I possibly need? With you near, only truth comes out of me.
But a soul robbed by the 'thieves' of endless worldly busy-ness never reaches your Mansion; a heart gone hard as stone misses its chance to serve. A heart that hasn't found the True One inside it is like a crooked, faulty building — better to tear it down and build it again right. How would such a heart ever weigh true on the scale of wholeness?
Only by letting go of ego — then nothing is missing from its weight. The genuine are tested and welcomed at the One's door. And the genuine goods are sold in only one shop: the true teacher.
This Pauree opens with a line of pure contentment: When You are with me, what more could I want? I speak only the Truth. The presence of the One is itself complete fulfillment — with the One near, there is nothing left to crave, and truth flows naturally from a satisfied heart. This is the contentment the whole Vaar keeps pointing toward, and the Pauree sets it first, as the standard against which everything else is measured.
Then it names what blocks that contentment. The soul is plundered by the thieves of worldly affairs — the endless busy-ness and distraction of the world steal the soul's attention and energy like robbers, so that it does not obtain the Mansion of His Presence. And worse, the heart can go hard: being so stone-hearted, she has lost her chance to serve. A heart turned to stone — unfeeling, closed — forfeits the very opportunity that would have saved it. For such a heart, the Pauree offers a startling remedy: that heart, in which the True Lord is not found, should be torn down and re-built. Not patched, not touched up — demolished and built again. Some inner structures are so crooked that renovation won't do; they need to be taken down to the ground and raised true. This is the radical renewal that real transformation sometimes requires.
And the Pauree returns to the scale and the assay that frame this whole stretch: how can she be weighed accurately, upon the scale of perfection? The answer is the key to everything: no one will say that her weight has been shorted, if she rids herself of egotism. Ego is the thing that makes a soul weigh short on the scale of truth — the false metal mixed into the coin. Remove the ego, and the weight comes out full and true. The genuine are assayed, and accepted in the Court. And where does one obtain genuine metal in the first place? The genuine merchandise is found only in one shop — it is obtained from the Perfect Guru. There is one source for the real thing, the true coin, the genuine goods: the teacher. You cannot manufacture your own genuineness; you receive it, from the one shop that sells the real.
Is there an inner structure in you so crooked that it needs rebuilding from the ground up, not just patching?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI