Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The fire of doubt is not extinguished even by wandering through foreign lands and countries. You can circle the whole earth and bring your confusion with you.
If the inner filth is not removed — the confusion, the self-deception, the accumulated wrong — then everything about your life is cursed. Even the clothes you wear.
There is no other way to genuine devotion except through the teacher's guidance.
This shabad is one of Guru Nanak's most direct critiques of external pilgrimage as a spiritual path. He traveled more than almost any person of his era — to Mecca, to Sri Lanka, to Tibet — and he did this not to find the divine outside but to meet people where they were and demonstrate that the divine is not in any location.
The sanshay (doubt) he describes is not intellectual uncertainty but existential disorientation — the mool maraadaa (inner confusion about what matters). Geography cannot resolve this. Only the inner work removes it.
Have you ever traveled or changed your circumstances to escape a feeling — and found the feeling followed you? What does that tell you?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI