Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The thinking mind is like a bird. Depending on what it does, it lands high or low — sometimes resting in a sweet, fragrant sandalwood tree, sometimes perched on a branch of something bitter and poisonous, and sometimes soaring way up through the open skies.
And through all its flitting about, the One guides us along by the flow of how things truly work. That is simply its way.
This lovely shalok captures the restless, changeable nature of the mind in a single image: the intellect is a bird. Anyone who has tried to sit quietly with their own thoughts knows the truth of it — the mind hops, flits, takes off, lands somewhere else, never still for long. And on account of its actions, it is sometimes high, and sometimes low. Where the mind-bird lands depends on what it does, on the habits and choices that direct its flight.
The image then names the three kinds of branch the mind-bird alights on. Sometimes it is perched on the sandalwood tree — the fragrant, precious wood, an image of resting in goodness, sweetness, the company of the holy. Sometimes it is on the branch of the poisonous swallow-wort — settling into bitterness, harm, the toxic. And sometimes it soars through the heavens — rising into expansive, exalted states. The same bird, the same mind, can be found in any of these places, often within a single hour: now sweet, now bitter, now soaring. This is simply the nature of the unsteadied mind — and recognizing it is the first step to not being ruled by it. You are not the branch the bird happens to be sitting on; you are the one who can notice where it has landed.
And the shalok closes by setting even this restless flight within the larger order: our Lord and Master leads us on, according to the Hukam of His Command; such is His Way. The mind-bird's flitting is real, and our actions do steer it — but the whole of it unfolds within the One's Hukam, the flow of how existence works. This is both humbling and steadying. Humbling, because even the mind we think of as ours moves within a larger current we did not author. Steadying, because the bird's wanderings, high and low, sweet and bitter, are not finally chaos — they are held within a Way. The practice the image quietly suggests is to notice the bird, and to let it more and more often choose the sandalwood tree.
Where has your 'mind-bird' been landing most lately — the sandalwood or the bitter branch — and can you simply notice it without being ruled by it?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI