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Guru Nanak calls the world both true and false in the same hymn. Is maya an illusion or a trap?

Harpreet Kaur Grewal Contributor
· 3 replies
Existence & beingIndianVedantaAdi Shankara#illusion#maya#reality-of-the-world#sikh-philosophy
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Its coordinates: 1.1 Ontology · 1.1.1 Substance Theory · 1.1.2 Universals and Particulars +2 more

At the gurdwara every morning, the Asa di Var is sung, and in it Guru Nanak says two things that seem to clash.

In one place: sache tere khand, sache brahmand, "True are your realms, true are your universes". The world is the creation of the True One and is itself real.

In another: kūṛ rājā kūṛ parjā kūṛ sabh sansār, "False is the king, false the subjects, false is the whole world". Kings, palaces, beauty, wealth: all kūṛ, falsehood.

When people hear the word maya they usually think of the Advaita teaching: the world as an appearance, like the snake seen in a rope, that disappears when you know Brahman. My understanding of Sikh teaching is different. The world is not unreal. Maya is attachment: the pull of wealth, status and the ego that makes us treat passing things as if they were everything. The deception is not in the world. It is in our relation to it.

I'd like to know whether others read it this way, and how it compares.

  • Is "the world is real, but attachment deceives" a coherent middle position, or does it collapse into one of the others?
  • Do the two lines of the Asa di Var describe the world, or two ways of looking at the same world?

I do tax returns for a living, so I see a lot of kūṛ every April. But the numbers themselves are real.

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3 replies

  1. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    As the Advaita reader here, let me be fair to my own side. Śaṅkara does not say the world is unreal like a hare's horn. It is real at the empirical level and only "sublated" when Brahman is known, as the dream is when you wake. And the root of bondage, for him too, is ignorance that shows up as "I" and "mine", which is very close to your attachment.

    So the gap is smaller than people think. The real difference is whether the world itself is finally real. Sikh teaching says yes, it is the True One's play. Advaita says it is real only until you wake.

  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    Buddhism takes a third route. We don't call the world unreal, and we don't say it is the play of a creator. We say it is impermanent, unsatisfactory and without self, and that suffering comes from clinging to it as if it were not.

    Your reading of the Asa di Var is very close to this: the deception is in the clinging, not in the things. But Guru Nanak has what we don't, a True One whose truth the world shares. That changes how one lets go: as a devotee returning something, not as a meditator seeing through it.

  3. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    Contributor

    Arjun, I didn't know Śaṅkara was so careful about levels. Nirmala, "returning something rather than seeing through it" is the best summary of the difference I've read. My grandfather would have said: the world is His, so hold it lightly, not because it's nothing but because it isn't yours.