Archive for January 2022

I remember something my cousin’s grandfather used to say. After a lifetime of reading the Guru Granth Sahib, he should have been reading faster; instead, each year, a single line took him longer. “The line keeps opening,” he’d smile, tracing a letter with his fingertip. “I arrive at one word, then I can't move.” He would close the book and let the room breathe in him. “A day well spent,” he’d add, “when one word refuses to be finished.”

I continue to grow into his pace. I like the slow reading now, the way a saying of the Guru settles, the way a small phrase can carry a whole afternoon. And where does this slowing end? Bulleh Shah answers with where this ends: “Ik alf paṛho chhuṭkārā e”—read one letter and be free. Not even one line, one word, but one letter! All joy gathers there, in a single stroke. I guess we can call it the master stroke.

That master stroke letter is Bulleh Shah’s classroom. The alif is only a vertical line, yet he treats it like a whole syllabus: learn it inwardly and every other lesson finds its place. This reverence for the first letter—the axis on which all letters turn—reminds me of Guru Nanak’s love for ek oankar, the One that steadies the many.

Bulleh Shah also knows our ordinary drift: from one to two, three, four, and soon lakhs and crores until counting runs without end. The problem is not numbers; it is being numbered, split and scattered by ten thousand details. So he offers subtler arithmetic: “hik alif dā nukta niārā e,” the dot of the One-letter is unique. In the old calligraphers’ lore, every letter begins from the nuqta, the point. Miss the point and the forest of script tangles you; find the point and the forest becomes legible.

Are you getting Bulleh Shah’s point, O mind?

From here he turns and looks me in the face. Why haul cartloads of books if the heart stays unmoved? Why polish the tongue if the mind runs errands elsewhere? In his sharpest line he warns that piety without surrender can harden into the face of an executioner. He is not scolding study. He is reordering it: begin where all letters rise, and let every discipline serve that beginning. Otherwise knowledge inflates the self and the road grows heavy.

He closes with a parable tight as a seed. “Bullah planted a banyan.” It grew vast, as banyans do, then passed into dust. What remained was the letter, the seed-shape that started it all. Forms rise high, institutions spread shade; in time they fall. The seed endures. The lesson is not to despise the tree, but to keep faith with the seed.

Whitman’s Multitudes on a Single Spine

This is where Walt Whitman arrives like a neighbor at dusk. In Song of Myself (section 51) he writes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Notice how Walt is having this conversation with Bulleh Shah. The issue is not having many selves, voices, demands; the trouble is being had by them. Whitman’s largeness is not a swollen ego; it is a capacious self anchored enough to welcome contradictions without shattering. He even gives us a posture for practice: “I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.” He listens before he speaks. The door-slab is a threshold image—precisely the place where Bulleh’s alif stands upright inside us.

Bulleh’s point, Whitman’s posture: stand the vertical line within, then let the multitudes arrive. Oneness does not erase the many; it steadies them. The “I” that contains multitudes is the same “I” aligned on the One—an alif running through the center so the crowd within becomes a choir rather than a quarrel.

The Seed and the Field: Krishna on Beeja

In the battlefield of Kurukshretra, Arjuna’s will trembled. He didn’t want to fight. In a chapter meant to steady Arjuna’s will, Krishna moves from metaphysics to sensation: “I am the taste of water, the light of sun and moon, the sound in space, the ability in humans.” Then he brings the alif kernel: bījaṁ māṁ sarva-bhūtānāṁ viddhi Pārtha sanātanam—“Know Me, O Arjun, as the eternal seed of all beings.” When Arjuna wants a map, Krishna gives him a seed. The seed is hidden and generative, tiny and total.

Later in the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna paints the cosmos as an upside-down aśvattha (banyan), root above and branches below. Know it, he says, and cut entanglement with a sharp insight; then seek the Root. Bulleh’s banyan echoes here: vastness can stun us; fidelity to origin frees us. The seed is not less than the tree—it is the cause held in living smallness. This upside down tree reminds me of the ultabhashi Kabir poems where the Arabian Sea is flowing into the Ganges, instead of the other way round. The ocean is flowing into the river. The multitudes feed the seed, and the seed feeds the multitudes.

A Single Twig, Saas-Saas: Sukhmani Sahib

One of my favorite line from Guru Arjan’s Sukhmani carries the same teaching into the house and garden:

ਕਿਨਕਾ ਏਕ ਜਿਸੁ ਜੀਅ ਬਸਾਵੈ / ਤਾ ਕੀ ਮਹਿਮਾ ਗਨੀ ਨ ਆਵੈ।
The one who settles even a single twig (kinkā ek) in the heart—his praise cannot be counted.

The Ashtapadi begins with a triple call—“Simrau, simar, simar”—remember, remember, remember, and find peace; it names the One Word behind scriptures (“Ram Naam ik ākhṛ”), then gives the smallest, kindest task: plant one living twig of remembrance and keep it. Bulleh would smile: the alif stood upright inside, the seed set in soil, the twig drinking breath by breath. Later in the last ashtapadi of Sukhmani, he repeats the message in saas-saas, remember through each breath. Plant one twig and, paradoxically, you move beyond counting—“ਗਨੀ ਨ ਆਵੈ.” The arithmetic flips: the tiny becomes inexhaustible.

Two Other Echoes: Laozi and T. S. Eliot

Long before and far away, Laozi says: “The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth; the named is the mother of the ten thousand things.” The nameless origin is Bulleh’s alif; the ten thousand things are our crores of details. We need both, but we need the origin first. Another Laozi image clarifies the practice: we shape clay into a pot, but it is the empty space that holds what we need. The emptied center is not nothing—it is hospitality. Bulleh’s alif is that interior space where the Name rests, the quiet capacity to receive multitudes without cracking.

T. S. Eliot calls it “the still point of the turning world.” There, he says, is the dance, though there is no movement; the axis that allows every motion to be meaningful. The world turns; the still point gives it shape. That is Bulleh’s method in one image: stand up the vertical line and you can travel without being torn.

Returning to Bulleh—and Ending with Freedom

When Bulleh asks us to read one letter, he is not shrinking the world; he is teaching us how to carry it. He has seen how piety can make an executioner and how scholarship can become a hall of mirrors. He offers a discipline that refuses both vanity and drift: learn the One first. Then learn all you like.

The banyan will grow again—families, institutions, work, poems. It will be beautiful and hard. It may even outlast us. But the pledge we make is to the seed. When forms thin and projects fail, when applause fades and plans change, the seed is what remains. If we have tended it in secret, it will meet us like a friend.

At that point the arithmetic is reversed. We do not fear the countless anymore. We receive them. In Guru Arjan’s words, the 86 million lifeforms are here to serve us. We can say with Whitman that multitudes arrive; with Laozi that the ten thousand things are mothered; with Eliot that the dance is real at the still point; with Krishna that the Seed is present in everything; with Guru Arjan that a single twig in the heart moves us beyond counting. And with Bulleh Shah that one letter, honestly read, is enough.

In the end we come to freedom — like we end the Japji with “keti chhutti naal — many are freed if one is freed, Bulleh Shah says chhutkara - freedom! Freedom is not escape from the world’s many; it is the capacity to move among them without losing the One. It is not flight from duty but a way to do it with a light step and a soft face. It is what happens when the vertical line stands up inside you and the breath learns its quiet Name. Then millions of details begin to harmonize, and the heart—no longer numbered—answers to a single call.

May I continue to grow into his pace. May I continue to harmonize. May I continue to be veparvaah, the word Guru Nanak uses in Japji. I thought it was for God. But no. It is for me. Carefree!

Bulleh Shah Kafi