Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
With the mind caught up in playful pleasures and all sorts of amusements and sights that stagger the eyes, people are led astray.
The emperors sitting on their thrones are consumed by anxiety.
Power doesn't deliver what it promises. The most powerful people in the world are not at peace.
Guru Arjan lived and died in the shadow of Mughal power. The emperors he refers to were his literal contemporaries — Akbar, who treated the Gurus with relative respect, and Jahangir, who would eventually order his execution. He is not making an abstract point: he observed the lives of actual emperors.
The anxiety of power: those who have achieved the pinnacle of worldly success are consumed by chintaa (worry, anxiety). The more you have, the more you have to protect. The throne produces its own prison.
This opening makes the shabad's argument from evidence: look at the most powerful people. Are they at peace? The evidence says no.
Do you know anyone who has achieved exactly what they said they wanted and is still clearly not at peace? What does that tell you about what they were actually looking for?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI