Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The one who kept tearing me down — by grace, that harm has been turned aside.
The deepest thing in existence turned kind toward me, and the attack simply lost its power.
This shabad deals with a real and painful experience: being the target of a nindak, a slanderer — someone actively working to harm your name. The vivid line "with Shiva's arrow, He shot his head off" is figurative, borrowing a mythic image to say: the harm was decisively stopped, not by my own counterattack, but by grace. The teaching to notice is what the devotee did not do — they did not descend into a war of revenge. They trusted, and the destructive energy was disarmed. (This theme runs through several of Guru Arjan's shabads: the slandered stay at peace, and the slander undoes itself.)
When someone is unkind to you, what happens if you try to get even? What other response is possible?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI