Moh (Attachment)

Moh in the Guru Granth Sahib names an emotional entanglement broader than the Buddhist and Hindu moha this entry is deliberately kept separate from: where those traditions use the term chiefly for cognitive delusion, a failure to perceive reality correctly, Sikh scripture uses moh for the felt bond of attachment itself, to spouse, children, wealth, one's own body, and worldly status, the specific way maya, illusion, is said to take hold of a person through love of what is impermanent rather than through faulty perception in the abstract.

Guru Nanak's compositions are careful, though, not to condemn family and worldly life as such, a position that would put Sikh teaching at odds with its consistent rejection of renunciation as the spiritual ideal: moh is not love or care for one's family but attachment that has displaced remembrance of Waheguru as the deeper anchor of a person's identity, the disorder rather than the relationship itself. The Guru Granth Sahib frequently pictures moh through the image of a person building an elaborate house of sand at the ocean's edge, investing enormous care in a structure the incoming tide will erase regardless, a warning against mistaking the impermanent for the lasting rather than a warning against building at all.

The specific Sikh answer to moh is captured in a phrase used across secondary literature on the tradition, living detached while remaining engaged, jivan mukti sought within ordinary householder life rather than through withdrawal from it, a position W.H. McLeod identifies as one of the clearest points of departure between Sikh teaching and the renunciate traditions of North India it emerged alongside, since several of those traditions treat family and worldly entanglement as obstacles a serious spiritual seeker must eventually leave behind. The Sikh answer instead asks the householder to hold worldly relationships the way a lotus holds water on its petals, present and touching the surface without soaking through and altering the flower's own nature, an image repeated across Sikh devotional literature to describe the goal of engagement without the specific disorder moh names.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism notes that moh is treated as especially insidious among the five thieves precisely because its objects, family and legitimate worldly responsibility, are themselves good and commanded rather than forbidden, making the vice harder to recognise than kam or lobh, whose objects scripture more readily names as excessive on their face.