Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Listen — you wandering, confused mind. Come to rest in the Guru's teaching.
Meditate on the Name of the One. When you do, death loses its grip on you, and suffering begins to leave.
The soul that has forgotten its Beloved aches in that forgetting. Without the connection, how can the love hold?
The opening line addresses the mind directly — sun man bhoolay baavray (listen, O deluded and demented mind). This is Guru Nanak's characteristic move: treating the wandering mind as a companion who has gotten lost, not as an enemy to be defeated. Bhoolay means "forgotten, strayed"; baavray means "mad, intoxicated by delusion." Together: the mind that has forgotten what it is and is drunk on its own confusion.
The Guru's feet (Gur kee charnee) — the traditional gesture of surrender to the teacher in the Indian tradition is to touch the feet, to bow completely. Guru Nanak uses this idiom not for supplication but for re-orientation: when the mind is spinning in confusion, the Guru's teaching is the fixed point it can return to.
"Death will be afraid of you" is a striking inversion: normally death is what we fear. But the Naam shifts the relationship — the one absorbed in the Name is already aligned with what endures; death, which can only claim what is impermanent, loses its authority over them.
The duhaagani (deserted wife) is the soul separated from the divine. The image is not accusation — it is the observation of a natural consequence. The soul that forgets its connection suffers in that forgetting. The question "how can her Husband Lord remain with her forever?" is not rhetorical despair — it is an opening: the Lord remains when the soul turns back.
What does it feel like when you realize you have been going in the wrong direction — and what helps you find your way back?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI