Lobh (Greed)

The Guru Granth Sahib treats lobh with a specific structural observation repeated across several hymns: greed is not resolved by acquiring what it currently wants, since satisfying one craving simply reveals or generates the next, a self renewing hunger the scripture compares to fire fed with fuel, growing rather than diminishing the more it consumes. This diagnosis places lobh in direct tension with Guru Nanak's teaching on kirat karo, honest labour, one of the three pillars of Sikh ethical life alongside naam japna, remembrance of the Name, and vand chakko, sharing with others, since the tradition explicitly commends earning a livelihood and providing for one's family while condemning the specific excess of accumulation pursued beyond need or hoarded rather than shared.

The Sikh institution of daswandh, voluntarily contributing a portion, traditionally a tenth, of one's income to charitable and communal purposes, functions in Sikh practice as a concrete structural counter to lobh, converting the discipline from a purely internal restraint into an ongoing communal habit with material consequence, langar, the free community kitchen found at every gurdwara, standing as its most visible institutional expression.

Sikh ethical teaching organises daily life around three named pillars attributed to Guru Nanak, naam japna, kirat karo and vand chakko, and lobh is understood in Sikh commentary as the thief most directly capable of corrupting all three at once: greed can turn remembrance of the Name into a transactional pursuit of blessing sought for material gain, can turn honest labour into labour pursued without limit or ethical restraint, and most directly undermines vand chakko, sharing, by hoarding what an unchecked craving insists must be retained rather than distributed.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism notes that this triple vulnerability is why lobh receives particularly sustained attention in Sikh homiletic literature relative to some of the other thieves, since a community organised as centrally around communal sharing and service, seva, as the Sikh Panth is has a structural as well as a personal stake in the vice's containment.

Pashaura Singh's account of the Guru Granth Sahib's canon notes that hymns addressing lobh frequently conclude not with a warning alone but with an invocation of contentment, santokh, presented as greed's specific antidote, a settled sufficiency with what one has that Sikh teaching treats as achievable through disciplined practice rather than as a rare, unattainable temperament.