Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
When the soul goes out from within, the body becomes dreadful. The fire of life goes out — the breath stops, the smoke no longer rises.
The five relatives — the senses, the eyes and ears and skin that knew the world — weep and waste away. Their loss is the loss of duality: they were connected to the wrong center.
You are not this body. You inhabit it. And the quality of how you inhabit it is everything.
This shabad opens with the image of death — specifically, the moment when the body becomes a corpse. The panch parivar (five relatives) are the five senses: they weep because what animated them — the soul — has departed.
The phrase "waste away through the love of duality" is significant: the senses suffer because they were attached to the body as the final reality, not as a vehicle for the soul. When the body they loved ends, they have nothing.
This is Guru Nanak's consistent invitation: use the body fully — hear, see, taste, feel — but love the soul, not the body.
If you woke up tomorrow in a completely different body — different appearance, different health — would you still be you? What would remain?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI