



Produced by Chetan K. Jain and John B. Hare









SONGS OF KABIR


Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

Introduction by Evelyn Underhill

New York, The Macmillan Company

1915




INTRODUCTION


The poet Kabir, a selection from whose songs is here for the
first time offered to English readers, is one of the most
interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism.
Born in or near Benares, of Mohammedan parents, and probably
about the year 1440, he became in early life a disciple of the
celebrated Hindu ascetic Ramananda.  Ramananda had brought to
Northern India the religious revival which Ramanuja, the great
twelfth-century reformer of Brahmanism, had initiated in the
South.  This revival was in part a reaction against the
increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion
of the demands of the heart as against the intense
intellectualism of the Vedanta philosophy, the exaggerated monism
which that philosophy proclaimed.  It took in Ramanuja's
preaching the form of an ardent personal devotion to the God
Vishnu, as representing the personal aspect of the Divine Nature:
that mystical "religion of love" which everywhere makes its
appearance at a certain level of spiritual culture, and which
creeds and philosophies are powerless to kill.

Though such a devotion is indigenous in Hinduism, and finds
expression in many passages of the Bhagavad Gita, there was in
its mediaeval revival a large element of syncretism.  Ramananda,
through whom its spirit is said to have reached Kabir, appears to
have been a man of wide religious culture, and full of missionary
enthusiasm.  Living at the moment in which the impassioned poetry
and deep philosophy of the great Persian mystics, Attar, Sadi,
Jalalu'ddin Rumi, and Hafiz, were exercising a powerful influence
on the religious thought of India, he dreamed of reconciling this
intense and personal Mohammedan mysticism with the traditional
theology of Brahmanism.  Some have regarded both these great
religious leaders as influenced also by Christian thought and
life: but as this is a point upon which competent authorities
hold widely divergent views, its discussion is not attempted here.
We may safely assert, however, that in their teachings, two--perhaps
three--apparently antagonistic streams of intense
spiritual culture met, as Jewish and Hellenistic thought met in
the early Christian Church: and it is one of the outstanding
characteristics of Kabir's genius that he was able in his poems
to fuse them into one.

A great religious reformer, the founder of a sect to which nearly
a million northern Hindus still belong, it is yet supremely as a
mystical poet that Kabir lives for us.  His fate has been that of
many revealers of Reality.  A hater of religious exclusivism, and
seeking above all things to initiate men into the liberty of the
children of God, his followers have honoured his memory by
re-erecting in a new place the barriers which he laboured to cast
down.  But his wonderful songs survive, the spontaneous
expressions of his vision and his love; and it is by these, not
by the didactic teachings associated with his name, that he makes
his immortal appeal to the heart.  In these poems a wide range of
mystical emotion is brought into play: from the loftiest
abstractions, the most otherworldly passion for the Infinite, to
the most intimate and personal realization of God, expressed in
homely metaphors and religious symbols drawn indifferently from
Hindu and Mohammedan belief.  It is impossible to say of their
author that he was Brahman or Sufi, Vedantist or Vaishnavite.
He is, as he says himself, "at once the child of Allah and of Ram."
That Supreme Spirit Whom he knew and adored, and to Whose joyous
friendship he sought to induct the souls of other men, transcended
whilst He included all metaphysical categories, all credal
definitions; yet each contributed something to the description of
that Infinite and Simple Totality Who revealed Himself, according
to their measure, to the faithful lovers of all creeds.

Kabir's story is surrounded by contradictory legends, on none of
which reliance can be placed.  Some of these emanate from a Hindu,
some from a Mohammedan source, and claim him by turns as a Sufi
and a Brahman saint.  His name, however, is practically a
conclusive proof of Moslem ancestry: and the most probable tale is
that which represents him as the actual or adopted child of a
Mohammedan weaver of Benares, the city in which the chief events
of his life took place.

In fifteenth-century Benares the syncretistic tendencies of
Bhakti religion had reached full development.  Sufis and Brahmans
appear to have met in disputation: the most spiritual members of
both creeds frequenting the teachings of Ramananda, whose
reputation was then at its height.  The boy Kabir, in whom the
religious passion was innate, saw in Ramananda his destined
teacher; but knew how slight were the chances that a Hindu guru
would accept a Mohammedan as disciple.  He therefore hid upon the
steps of the river Ganges, where Ramananda was accustomed to
bathe; with the result that the master, coming down to the water,
trod upon his body unexpectedly, and exclaimed in his
astonishment, "Ram!  Ram!"--the name of the incarnation under
which he worshipped God.  Kabir then declared that he had
received the mantra of initiation from Ramananda's lips, and was
by it admitted to discipleship.  In spite of the protests of
orthodox Brahmans and Mohammedans, both equally annoyed by this
contempt of theological landmarks, he persisted in his claim;
thus exhibiting in action that very principle of religious
synthesis which Ramananda had sought to establish in thought.
Ramananda appears to have accepted him, and though Mohammedan
legends speak of the famous Sufi Pir, Takki of Jhansi, as Kabir's
master in later life, the Hindu saint is the only human teacher
to whom in his songs he acknowledges indebtedness.

The little that we know of Kabir's life contradicts many current
ideas concerning the Oriental mystic.  Of the stages of
discipline through which he passed, the manner in which his
spiritual genius developed, we are completely ignorant.  He seems
to have remained for years the disciple of Ramananda, joining in
the theological and philosophical arguments which his master held
with all the great Mullahs and Brahmans of his day; and to this
source we may perhaps trace his acquaintance with the terms of
Hindu and Sufi philosophy.  He may or may not have submitted to
the traditional education of the Hindu or the Sufi contemplative:
it is clear, at any rate, that he never adopted the life of the
professional ascetic, or retired from the world in order to
devote himself to bodily mortifications and the exclusive pursuit
of the contemplative life.  Side by side with his interior life
of adoration, its artistic expression in music and words--for he
was a skilled musician as well as a poet--he lived the sane and
diligent life of the Oriental craftsman.  All the legends agree
on this point: that Kabir was a weaver, a simple and unlettered
man, who earned his living at the loom.  Like Paul the tentmaker,
Boehme the cobbler, Bunyan the tinker, Tersteegen the
ribbon-maker, he knew how to combine vision and industry; the
work of his hands helped rather than hindered the impassioned
meditation of his heart.  Hating mere bodily austerities, he was
no ascetic, but a married man, the father of a family--a
circumstance which Hindu legends of the monastic type vainly
attempt to conceal or explain--and it was from out of the heart
of the common life that he sang his rapturous lyrics of divine
love.  Here his works corroborate the traditional story of his
life.  Again and again he extols the life of home, the value and
reality of diurnal existence, with its opportunities for love and
renunciation; pouring contempt--upon the professional sanctity of
the Yogi, who "has a great beard and matted locks, and looks like
a goat," and on all who think it necessary to flee a world
pervaded by love, joy, and beauty--the proper theatre of man's
quest--in order to find that One Reality Who has "spread His form
of love throughout all the world." [Footnote: Cf. Poems Nos. XXI,
XL, XLIII, LXVI, LXXVI.]

It does not need much experience of ascetic literature to
recognize the boldness and originality of this attitude in such a
time and place.  From the point of view of orthodox sanctity,
whether Hindu or Mohammedan, Kabir was plainly a heretic; and his
frank dislike of all institutional religion, all external
observance--which was as thorough and as intense as that of the
Quakers themselves--completed, so far as ecclesiastical opinion
was concerned, his reputation as a dangerous man.  The "simple
union" with Divine Reality which he perpetually extolled, as alike
the duty and the joy of every soul, was independent both of ritual
and of bodily austerities; the God whom he proclaimed was "neither
in Kaaba nor in Kailash."  Those who sought Him needed not to go
far; for He awaited discovery everywhere, more accessible to "the
washerwoman and the carpenter" than to the self--righteous holy man.
[Footnote: Poems I, II, XLI.]  Therefore the whole apparatus of
piety, Hindu and Moslem alike--the temple and mosque, idol and holy
water, scriptures and priests--were denounced by this inconveniently
clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things
intervening between the soul and its love--

/*
  The images are all lifeless, they cannot speak:
    I know, for I have cried aloud to them.
  The Purana and the Koran are mere words:
    lifting up the curtain, I have seen.
*/
[Footnote: Poems XLII, LXV, LXVII.]

This sort of thing cannot be tolerated by any organized church;
and it is not surprising that Kabir, having his head-quarters in
Benares, the very centre of priestly influence, was subjected to
considerable persecution.  The well-known legend of the beautiful
courtesan sent by Brahmans to tempt his virtue, and converted,
like the Magdalen, by her sudden encounter with the initiate of a
higher love, pre serves the memory of the fear and dislike with
which he was regarded by the ecclesiastical powers.  Once at
least, after the performance of a supposed miracle of healing