Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
You are the water. You are the fish swimming in the water. And You are also the net that catches the fish.
You are the bait. You set the whole situation up — You are in every role at once.
You are the lotus — blooming clean and bright even under hundreds of feet of muddy water.
You liberate those who think of You for even a single instant.
Lord, nothing is beyond You. Seeing You through the Guru's Word fills me with delight.
The self-referential Lord
This Pauree is one of the most philosophically dense in the Vaar. Guru Ram Das describes the Lord playing every role simultaneously:
Tu āp jal, tu āp meenā, tu āp jāl bisā'iā — "You Yourself are the water, You Yourself are the fish, and You Yourself are the net." Water, fish, and net — three entirely different positions in the same situation (hunter, hunted, medium) — are all the Lord. There is no element of the world-situation that is not the Lord. The hunter who catches the fish is the Lord. The fish being caught is the Lord. The water in which both exist is the Lord.
This is not pantheism as a philosophical position. It is an expression of the mystic's inability to find anything outside the divine. Every direction you look — the Lord.
"You liberate those who think of You for even an instant"
Ik nimakh jinhā simari'ā, so mukt kartā — "You Yourself liberate those who think of You for even an instant." The radical liberality of grace: one instant of genuine thought of the Lord is sufficient for liberation. Not years of practice, not accumulation of merit, not systematic training. One instant of genuine remembrance. This is the Vaar's most generous claim about what is required.
The lotus — clean in mud
Kamal anek jali rang — "You Yourself are the lotus, unaffected and still brightly-colored in hundreds of feet of water." The lotus is the soul in the world: rooted in the mud of existence, blooming above it in pure light. The Lord is the lotus — He exists in creation without being stained by it.
*Is there anything in your experience where the source, the thing, and the process were all the same thing? What did that feel like?*
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI