Everyone spends their one life on something. The good-hearted spend theirs on the Name — and no one is really the fool.
The Arc
A companion piece to 2062, this Ashtapadee uses the refrain kaahoo bihaavai — some pass their lives. Verse by verse it surveys the astonishing variety of human days: pleasure and beauty, family, power and trade, scripture-debates and tastes and longings, gambling and drink, yoga and worship, illness and sorrow, travel and battle and teaching, performing, harming, ruling by fear, counseling, serving, seeking. Against every one of these it sets how the sant spends the same day: on the Name, on singing praise, on drinking the essence of the One. The rahau holds the ground under all this difference: the world is the True One's making; He alone is Master of all. The close is a tender leveling: wherever the One places a heart, that is where it takes hold — so no one is truly the fool and no one the clever one; the whole heart bows to those given the Name by grace.
Key Vocabulary
Kaahoo bihaavai — some pass their lives; the surveying refrain.
Rachnaa saach banee — the creation is made of the real, the True (the rahau).
Har ras peevat — drinking the essence of the One; the deepest nourishment.
Naa ko moorh nahee ko siaanaa — no one foolish, no one wise; the closing leveling.
Themes and Cross-Connections
The hymn's quiet radicalism is its refusal to rank people: since every attachment flows from where the One has placed a heart, judgment dissolves. This is Ik Onkar as compassion. It rhymes with 2062's marketplace of paths and with the Third Guru's aapay vision in 2061, where givers and askers alike are arranged by one hand.
For Raag Raamkalee
The seeker's raag here becomes a mirror held up to a whole society: look how many ways a life can be spent. The teaching is not scorn for any of them but an invitation to spend the days on what lasts.
Translation Notes
P2 (lapat sang naaree, clinging in the company of women) is rendered without gendered blame as being lost in longing and attachment.
P6 (jee-aa-ih hirtay, taking others' lives; raaj meh dartay, ruling by intimidation) is rendered soberly and gently, not graphically.
Leveling (P8): naa ko moorh nahee ko siaanaa is foregrounded as non-judgment; receiving the Name is named as grace, not earning.
Everyone spends their one life on something. The good-hearted spend theirs on the Name — and no one is really the fool.
The Arc
A companion piece to 2062, this Ashtapadee uses the refrain kaahoo bihaavai — some pass their lives. Verse by verse it surveys the astonishing variety of human days: pleasure and beauty, family, power and trade, scripture-debates and tastes and longings, gambling and drink, yoga and worship, illness and sorrow, travel and battle and teaching, performing, harming, ruling by fear, counseling, serving, seeking. Against every one of these it sets how the sant spends the same day: on the Name, on singing praise, on drinking the essence of the One. The rahau holds the ground under all this difference: the world is the True One's making; He alone is Master of all. The close is a tender leveling: wherever the One places a heart, that is where it takes hold — so no one is truly the fool and no one the clever one; the whole heart bows to those given the Name by grace.
Key Vocabulary
Themes and Cross-Connections
The hymn's quiet radicalism is its refusal to rank people: since every attachment flows from where the One has placed a heart, judgment dissolves. This is Ik Onkar as compassion. It rhymes with 2062's marketplace of paths and with the Third Guru's aapay vision in 2061, where givers and askers alike are arranged by one hand.
For Raag Raamkalee
The seeker's raag here becomes a mirror held up to a whole society: look how many ways a life can be spent. The teaching is not scorn for any of them but an invitation to spend the days on what lasts.
Translation Notes