Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The overnight guest departs in the morning. God alone is True — all else is false.
The guest who came and stayed for the night of life departs when morning comes.
Only God is permanent. Everything else is the guest's temporary presence.
The overnight guest (raiinee mehmaanaa) who departs in the morning — the life-as-one-night-stay metaphor in its most compressed form. The whole human life is a single night's stay. In the morning (prabhat), the guest departs.
The rahao's claim: Ek Prabhu aatam raam (God alone is True). Everything else — the house, the furnishings, the other guests — is the guest's temporary surroundings. Only God is permanent; everything else is chhad jaavna (will be left behind).
This is Guru Arjan's most basic claim about what is real: permanence and temporariness are different categories, and only the divine belongs to the first category.
If your life were one night at an inn, how would you spend it? What would you want to have experienced or understood by morning?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI