ਚਾਰ ਲਾਵਾਂ (ਭਾਗ ੧੫) | Chaar Laavaan (Part 15) — Desire Does Not Grow Old With the Body

Giani Sant Singh Ji Maskeen opens with a simple observation that undoes a lifetime of assumptions: the body ages and the body dies, but vasna — desire — does neither. Greed-desire turns a man into a robber and a cheat; ego-desire turns him violent. He tells of an old friend, long-bearded, heavy with paath and a long mala, who married again at ninety, and of the old proverb the elders repeated: the body grows old, desire never does. And if desire truly died when the body died, he asks, what would be the need of jap, of tap, of naam at all? Death would liberate everyone automatically. From there the katha moves to what carries desire forward. As long as vasna runs, birth and death keep running — the desire of the last life brought this one, and the desire of this one is already arranging the next. He cites Shams Tabrez's Persian line ਬਾਜ਼ ਆਮਦਮ ਬਾਜ਼ ਆਮਦਮ — "I have come again, and again" — and the nine mothers whose names Shams recorded, the last three of Jewish households; it was for teaching rebirth that the Nawab of Multan had him flayed alive, because Islam, Christianity, Judaism and the Parsi faith do not accept repeated birth, while the four traditions born in this land — Sanatan, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh — do. He explains why it is the mother's samskaras a child carries, and recalls two Gursikhs who spoke to him of their own former lives, including a warning given at Manji Sahib in 1982 that he never forgot. The second half turns to the fight itself, and to why we keep losing it — ਕਹਤ ਕਬੀਰ ਪੰਚ ਕਉ ਝਗਰਾ ਝਗਰਤ ਜਨਮੁ ਗਵਾਇਆ. The answer is not to defeat desire but to become unattached to what carries it, and the image he gives is the ripened coconut: the kernel sits inside the hard shell yet has broken every connection with it. Such a one is cut limb from limb and still smiles, is seated on a heated plate and still laughs, is put in the boiling cauldron and stays in bliss — because the tie to the body is already gone. Some bhagats ask only that the shell break sooner: ਜਿਸੁ ਮਰਨੇ ਤੇ ਜਗੁ ਡਰੈ ਮੇਰੈ ਮਨਿ ਆਨੰਦੁ. He ends on the most powerful desire of all, ahankar, which alone drags a being back into the womb again and again — ਹਉਮੈ ਏਈ ਬੰਧਨਾ ਫਿਰਿ ਫਿਰਿ ਜੋਨੀ ਪਾਹਿ. A thief cannot boast of his theft, he notes, but a donor will have his charity written on the wall; the giver takes pride in giving and the renunciate takes pride in renouncing, and both are held by the same hand. Against that he sets Bhai Gurdas Ji's kabit — ਰੂਪ ਹੀਨ ਕੁਲ ਹੀਨ ਗੁਨ ਹੀਨ ਗਿਆਨ ਹੀਨ — without beauty, lineage, virtue, knowledge, fame, fortune or tapas: no eye able to see, no ear able to hear the shabad, no tongue fit to sing the praise. Even paath and kirtan, he warns, can become one more thing to be proud of. Chapters: 0:00 What Desire Makes of a Person 0:44 The Body Grows Old, Desire Does Not 1:56 If Desire Died With the Body, Why Naam At All 3:42 Shams Tabrez: I Have Come Again 5:12 Why the Child Carries the Mother's Samskaras 6:29 Those Who Remember a Former Birth 8:33 The Quarrel With the Five That Wastes a Life 11:04 The Ripened Coconut Inside Its Shell 12:16 The Death the World Fears 13:08 Haumai, the Strongest Desire of All 14:24 I Am Not — You Are 18:57 Ego Rides on Charity, Never on Theft 21:20 Bhai Gurdas Ji: Without Beauty, Lineage or Virtue