



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
ent