One Hundred Poems


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. In this revival was in part a reaction against the increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion of the de mands 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. 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 ... Fuller Jersey 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 other worldly 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. 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 Rama nanda 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, I /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 theo logical and philosophical arguments which his master held with all the great Mullahs and Brahmans of his day and to this source we may per haps 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, thai; 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 pur suit of the contemplative life. Side by side /with his interior life of adora tion, its artistic expression in music and words' for he was a skilled musi cian 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 tent maker, Boehme the cob bler, Bunyan the tinker, Tersteegen the ribbon maker, he knew how to combine vision and industry the work of his hands helped rather thanhindered 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 corro borate the traditional story of his life. Again and again he extols the life of home, the value and reality of diurnal existence, with its oppor tunities for love and renunciation pouring contempt upon the profes [url=http://www.officialbearsnflauthentic.com/authentic-kyle-fuller-jersey.html]... Fuller Kids Jersey sional 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 through out all the world." 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. 1 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 was1 Cf. Poems Nos. XXI, XL, XLIII, LXVI, LXXVI." 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. 1 Therefore fthe 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 loveThe 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. 2This sort of thing cannot be toler ated by any organized church and it is not surprising that Kabir, having1 Poems I, II, XLI. 2 Poems XLII, LXV, LXVII.his head quarters in Benares, the very centre of priestly influence, was sub jected to considerable persecution. The well known legend of the beautiful courtesan sent by the 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, he was brought before the Emperor Sikandar Lodi, and charged with claiming the possession of divine powers. But Si kandar Lodi, a ruler of considerable culture, was tolerant of the eccentrici ties of saintly persons belonging to his own faith. Therefore, though he was banished in the interests of peace from Benares, his life was spared. This seems to have happened in 1495, when he was nearly sixty years of age it is the last event in his career of which we have definite knowledge. Thence forth he appears to have moved about amongst various cities of northern India, the centre of a group of dis ciples continuing in exile that life of apostle and poet of love to which, as he declares in one of his songs, he was destined " from the beginning of time." In 1518, an old man, broken in health, and with hands so feeble that he could no longer make the music which he loved, he died at Maghar near Gorakhpur.A beautiful legend tells us that after his death his Mohammedan and Hindu disciples disputed the possession ofhis body which the Mohammedans wished to bury, the Hindus to burn. As they argued together, Kabir ap peared before them, and told them to lift the shroud and look at that which lay beneath. As it is the special vocation of the mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders, going out [url=http://www.giantsnflofficialauthentic.com/authentic-andre-williams-jersey.h... in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell the secrets of Eternity to other men so the artistic self expression of this consciousness has also a double character. It is love poetry, but love poetry which is often written with a missionary intention/feabir's songs are of this kind outbirths at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindi/ not in the literary tongue,? they were deliberately addressed^ like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Todl and Richard Rolle 4 to the people rather than to the professionally re ligious class and all must be struck by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal experience, j It is by the simplest metaphors, by con stant appeals to needs, passions, relations which all men understand the bridegroom and bride, the guru and disciple, the pilgrim, the farmer, the migrant bird that he drives home his intense conviction of the reality of the soul's intercourse with the Transcendent. There are in his uni verse no fences between the " natural " and " supernatural " worlds every thing is a part of the creative Play of God^ and therefore even in its humblest details capable of revealing the Player's mind./This willing acceptance of the here and now as a means of representing supernal realities is a trait common to the greatest mystics. The works of the great Sufis, and amongst the Christians of Jacopone da Todl, Ruys broeck, Boehme, abound in illustra tions of this law. Therefore we must not be surprised to find in Kabir's songs his desperate attempts to com municate his ecstasy and persuade other men to share it a constant juxtaposition of concrete and meta physical language J swift alternations between the most intensely anthro pomorphic, the most subtly philo sophical, ways of apprehending man's communion with the Divine. The need for this alternation, and its entire naturalness for the mind which em ploys it, is rooted in his concept, or vision, of the Nature of God t and unless we make some attempt tograsp this, we shall not go far in our understanding of his poems.^Kabir belongs to that small group of supreme mystics amongst whom St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sufi poet Jalalu'ddln Rumi are per haps the chief J who have achieved that which we might call the synthetic vision of God. These have resolved the perpetual opposition between the personal and impersonal, the tran scendent and immanent, static and dynamic aspects of the Divine Nature! between the Absolute of philosophy and the " sure true Friend " of de votional religion. They have done this,f not by taking these apparently incompatible concepts one after the other but by ascending to a height of spiritual intuition at which they are, as Ruysbroeck said, " melted and merged in the Unity," and perceived as the completing opposites of a per feet Whole. God. 1 /God is here felt to be not the final abstraction, but the one actuality. He inspires, sup ports, indeed inhabits, both the dura tional, conditioned, finite world of Becoming and the unconditioned, non successional, infinite world of Being yet utterly transcends themj)oth. He is the omnipresent Reality] the^ "All pervading" within Whom "the ^ worlds are being told like beads." ^ In His personal aspect He is the 14 beloved Fakir," teaching and com panioning each soul. Considered as Immanent Spirit, He is " the Mind within the mind."j But all these are at best partial aspects of His nature,