Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
It is of you that I sing, always — my true and wonderful One. Yours is the one court that lasts; everything else comes and goes.
And here is a marvel: those who ask you for the gift of your Name actually become like you. Your command is true, and the Word makes us beautiful. Through trust and faith, wisdom and depth flow into us from you. By your grace, a banner of honor is raised over us that can never be taken down or lost.
You are the true Giver — you give and give, and somehow your gifts only keep increasing. So Guru Nanak asks for just one thing: give me whatever gift is pleasing to you.
This Pauree is a song of praise and a model of how to ask. It opens in pure devotion — it is of You, O my True and Wondrous Lord, that I sing forever — and immediately sets the One apart from everything else by the one quality that has run through the whole Vaar: permanence. Yours is the True Court. All others are subject to coming and going. Every other court, every other power, rises and falls; the One's Court alone endures. To sing of the One is to sing of the only thing that lasts.
Then comes a quietly astonishing line: those who ask for the gift of the True Name are like You. The soul that asks for the Name does not merely receive something from the One — it begins to resemble the One. We become like what we genuinely seek and love; ask for the Name with your whole heart, and you start to take on the qualities of the One whose Name it is. This is the deepest logic of devotion: the seeker is slowly shaped into the likeness of the sought. And the gifts that come are named — wisdom and meditation through faith and trust, the banner of honor raised by grace that cannot be taken away or lost (unlike every honor the previous shalok showed the world can strip away).
And the Pauree celebrates the One as the inexhaustible Giver: You are the True Giver; You give continually. Your Gifts continue to increase. This is the same truth that beats through Japji — the Giver keeps giving, and the gifts, far from running short, increase. There is no scarcity in the One; its generosity grows as it gives. And so the Pauree ends with the perfect prayer, a model of how a surrendered heart asks: Nanak begs for that gift which is pleasing to You. Not give me what I want — but give me whatever You want to give. The highest asking is not a list of the soul's demands but a trusting openness to the Giver's own choosing. To ask for "the gift that pleases You" is to trust that what the One delights to give will be exactly what the soul most truly needs — and it is, itself, the prayer of a soul already becoming like the One it asks.
If you could ask only for 'the gift that pleases the Giver,' rather than your own list, what would change in how you pray or hope?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI