Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The one who dies in the Shabad — who lets the ego dissolve completely into the divine Word — that person is finished with death. They will never die in the way that matters.
Through the Shabad, we find the One, and love for the Name opens inside us like a door that was always there.
Without the Shabad, the world keeps getting it wrong. It dies and comes back, and dies again — turning in a circle that never ends.
This is the culminating teaching of the ashtapadee — and one of the most important verses in Guru Nanak's Siree Raag. Sabad marai so mar rahai, fir marai na doojee vaar — the one who dies in the Shabad stays dead and never dies again.
The "dying in the Shabad" is jeevat marnaa (dying while alive) by another name. The ego-self — the claiming, asserting, defending haumai — dissolves in the absorption of the Shabad. This is the death that matters. Commentators read the line as saying that once it has happened, the "second death" no longer has the same hold — the soul has already let go of what death would otherwise take. What remains, in this reading, is what was always there: the consciousness that was never separate from the One.
The contrast with the final line is total: without the Shabad, the world is bhoola (deceived, led astray), cycling through birth and death (mar janmai vaaro vaar — dying and being born again and again). The deceived world dies the wrong kind of death — the meaningless one — without ever having died the meaningful one. And so it keeps returning.
For reading with an older child or teenager: the question "what is the part of me that can actually die before I die?" is one of the most generative questions in all of spiritual philosophy. Guru Nanak's answer is specific: it is the ego-self, the haumai. And it can dissolve now, in this life. The Shabad is how.
What would you lose if the part of you that needs to be seen, approved, and proven quietly disappeared — and what would remain?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI