Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
In the first watch of the night, the Lord placed your soul in the womb. Month by month, you were shaped into a human being. And with your birth came a gift: time — not unlimited time, but allotted time, given so you could do something real with it.
Everything was arranged around you: your family, your people, your circumstances. The Lord placed them there. Even the actions you take, the choices you make — these happen within the flow of something larger than you. The creature is not as in control as it thinks.
Says Nanak: in the first watch of the night, the soul is placed in the womb.
Guru Arjan — the fifth Guru's voice
Guru Arjan Dev Ji (1563–1606) was the first Sikh Guru to be martyred — he died under Mughal torture in 1606 rather than abandon his teaching or convert. He compiled the Adi Granth (the first version of the Guru Granth Sahib) in 1604, including his own enormous body of compositions. He is the most prolific single composer in the GGS.
His voice in this Pehray is the most sobering of the four. Where Guru Nanak observes, and Guru Ram Das warms, Guru Arjan confronts: the fool gathering poison, the ego-drunk youth who cannot tell good from evil, the one standing before the Righteous Judge with no answer prepared. Guru Arjan lived in a time of increasing political pressure on the Sikh community, and something of that urgency enters his compositions — the time for spiritual work is not unlimited.
"Allotted time to perform good deeds"
Kar muhlatat karam kamāhi — "you were given your allotted time to perform good deeds." The word muhlatat (from the Arabic muhlat) means a grace period, a deadline, an interval of time that has been granted. This is how Guru Arjan frames life: not as an open-ended opportunity but as a specific, limited interval. A grant of time, within which something must be done. The word carries the slight urgency of something that will expire.
"Nothing in the creature's control"
Is janṭai vas kichh nāhi — "the creature has no control over any of this." This is Guru Arjan's version of hukam: whatever happens is happening within a larger order. The soul did not choose its parents, its birth circumstances, its family configuration. Even what it does — karam sukaram karā'e āpe (God causes both bad deeds and good deeds) — is within the divine's causation. This is not fatalism. It is humility about the limits of individual agency — and an invitation to align with the flow rather than fight it.
*If this life is a period of allotted time, what would you most want to have done when that time is up?*
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI