Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Beautiful gates, houses, and palaces. Solidly built forts. Elephants, saddled horses, armies beyond counting.
None of these will go along with anyone in the end.
And yet the fools exhaust themselves building and defending these things — and then they die.
The list that constitutes Pauri 3 is the most visible form of the things people build their lives around: sundar dar mahal mahlee, garh kot agammai — beautiful gates, palaces, fortresses built as if impregnable. Haatheean turkeean fauj aganat saamai — elephants, Turkish horses, armies beyond counting, arrayed in formation. These are the marks of power and achievement in any age: beautiful structures, accumulated wealth, military force.
Ant na saathay ja-ay ko, moorh gaavan tham na ahai — in the end, none of these go along with anyone; the fools exert themselves to exhaustion with them, and then die. Moorh (fools, the spiritually unaware) — the classification is not about intelligence but about direction: they are investing all their energy in what will not follow them out. Not that the buildings are wrong or the armies are evil; they are simply not portable. Everything built here stays here.
The pathos of gaavan tham na ahai (they exert themselves to exhaustion, they can't stop) — the fools are not lazy. They work very hard. The tragedy is the direction of the work, not the work itself. This is the ashtapadee's central image: the exhausted achiever who dies having left everything behind, with nothing that actually travels.
What are you working hardest for right now — and will it be with you when you leave?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI