INTRODUCTION
The poet Kabîr, 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 Râmânanda. Râmânanda had brought to
Northern India the religious revival which Râmânuja, the great
twelfth-century reformer of Brâhmanism, 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 Vedânta
philosophy, the exaggerated monism which that philosophy proclaimed.
It took in Râmânuja'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
Gîtâ, there was in its mediæval revival a large element of
syncretism. Râmânanda, through whom its spirit is said to have
reached Kabîr, 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,
Attâr, Sâdî, Jalâlu'ddîn Rûmî, and Hâfiz, 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 Brâhmanism. 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 Kabîr'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 Kabîr 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 Brâhman or Sûfî, Vedântist or Vaishnavite. He is, as he says
himself, "at once the child of Allah and of Râm." 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.
Kabîr'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 Sûfî and a Brâhman 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. Sûfîs and Brâhmans appear to have met in disputation:
the most spiritual members of both creeds frequenting the teachings
of Râmânanda, whose reputation was then at its height. The boy
Kabîr, in whom the religious passion was innate, saw in Râmânanda
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 Râmânanda 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. Kabîr then declared that he had received the mantra
of initiation from Râmânanda's lips, and was by it admitted to
discipleship. In spite of the protests of orthodox Brâhmans 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 Râmânanda had sought to
establish in thought. Râmânanda appears to have accepted him, and
though Mohammedan legends speak of the famous Sûfî Pîr, Takkî of
Jhansî, as Kabîr'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 Kabîr'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 Râmânanda, joining
in the theological and philosophical arguments which his master held
with all the great Mullahs and Brâhmans of his day; and to this
source we may perhaps trace his acquaintance with the terms of Hindu
and Sûfî philosophy. He may or may not have submitted to the
traditional education of the Hindu or the Sûfî 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
Kabîr 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, Kabîr 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 Kailâsh." 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 Purâna 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
Kabîr, 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 Brâhmans 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 Sikandar Lodi, a ruler of considerable culture, was
tolerant of the eccentricities of saintly persons belonging to his
own faith. Kabîr, being of Mohammedan birth, was outside the
authority of the Brâhmans, and technically classed with the Sûfîs,
to whom great theological latitude was allowed. 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. Thenceforth he appears to have moved about
amongst various cities of northern India, the centre of a group of
disciples; 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 of his body; which the Mohammedans wished to bury, the
Hindus to burn. As they argued together, Kabîr appeared before them,
and told them to lift the shroud and look at that which lay beneath.
They did so, and found in the place of the corpse a heap of flowers;
half of which were buried by the Mohammedans at Maghar, and half
carried by the Hindus to the holy city of Benares to be
burned—fitting conclusion to a life which had made fragrant the
most beautiful doctrines of two great creeds.
II
The poetry of mysticism might be
defined on the one hand as a temperamental reaction to the vision of
Reality: on the other, as a form of prophecy. As it is the special
vocation of the mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders,
going out 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.
Kabîr's songs are of this kind:
out-births 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 Todì and
Richard Rolle—to the people rather than to the professionally
religious class; and all must be struck by the constant employment in
them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal experience.
It is by the simplest metaphors, by constant 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
universe no fences between the "natural" and "supernatural"
worlds; everything 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. For them, when they have achieved at
last the true theopathetic state, all aspects of the universe possess
equal authority as sacramental declarations of the Presence of God;
and their fearless employment of homely and physical symbols—often
startling and even revolting to the unaccustomed taste—is in direct
proportion to the exaltation of their spiritual life. The works of
the great Sûfîs, and amongst the Christians of Jacopone da Todì,
Ruysbroeck, Boehme, abound in illustrations of this law. Therefore we
must not be surprised to find in Kabîr's songs—his desperate
attempts to communicate his ecstasy and persuade other men to share
it—a constant juxtaposition of concrete and metaphysical language;
swift alternations between the most intensely anthropomorphic, the
most subtly philosophical, ways of apprehending man's communion with
the Divine. The need for this alternation, and its entire naturalness
for the mind which employs it, is rooted in his concept, or vision,
of the Nature of God; and unless we make some attempt to grasp this,
we shall not go far in our understanding of his poems.
Kabîr belongs to that small group
of supreme mystics—amongst whom St. Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the
Sûfî poet Jalâlu'ddîn Rûmî are perhaps the chief—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 transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic aspects
of the Divine Nature; between the Absolute of philosophy and the
"sure true Friend" of devotional religion. They have done
this, 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 perfect
Whole. This proceeding entails for them—and both Kabîr and
Ruysbroeck expressly acknowledge it—a universe of three orders:
Becoming, Being, and that which is "More than Being," i.e.,
God. [Footnote: Nos. VII and XLIX.] God is here felt to be not the
final abstraction, but the one actuality. He inspires, supports,
indeed inhabits, both the durational, conditioned, finite world of
Becoming and the unconditioned, non-successional, infinite world of
Being; yet utterly transcends them both. He is the omnipresent
Reality, the "All-pervading" within Whom "the worlds
are being told like beads." In His personal aspect He is the
"beloved Fakir," teaching and companioning each soul.
Considered as Immanent Spirit, He is "the Mind within the mind."
But all these are at best partial aspects of His nature, mutually
corrective: as the Persons in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity—to which this theological diagram bears a striking
resemblance—represent different and compensating experiences of the
Divine Unity within which they are resumed. As Ruysbroeck discerned a
plane of reality upon which "we can speak no more of Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, but only of One Being, the very substance of
the Divine Persons"; so Kabîr says that "beyond both the
limited and the limitless is He, the Pure Being." [Footnote: No.
VII.]
Brahma, then, is the Ineffable Fact
compared with which "the distinction of the Conditioned from the
Unconditioned is but a word": at once the utterly transcendent
One of Absolutist philosophy, and the personal Lover of the
individual soul—"common to all and special to each," as
one Christian mystic has it. The need felt by Kabîr for both these
ways of describing Reality is a proof of the richness and balance of
his spiritual experience; which neither cosmic nor anthropomorphic
symbols, taken alone, could express. More absolute than the Absolute,
more personal than the human mind, Brahma therefore exceeds whilst He
includes all the concepts of philosophy, all the passionate
intuitions of the heart. He is the Great Affirmation, the font of
energy, the source of life and love, the unique satisfaction of
desire. His creative word is the Om or "Everlasting Yea."
The negative philosophy which strips from the Divine Nature all Its
attributes and defining Him only by that which He is not—reduces
Him to an "Emptiness," is abhorrent to this most vital of
poets.—Brahma, he says, "may never be found in abstractions."
He is the One Love who Pervades the world., discerned in His fullness
only by the eyes of love; and those who know Him thus share, though
they may never tell, the joyous and ineffable secret of the universe.
[Footnote: Nos. VII, XXVI, LXXVI, XC.]
Now Kabîr, achieving this synthesis
between the personal and cosmic aspects of the Divine Nature, eludes
the three great dangers which threaten mystical religion.
First, he escapes the excessive
emotionalism, the tendency to an exclusively anthropomorphic
devotion, which results from an unrestricted cult of Divine
Personality, especially under an incarnational form; seen in India in
the exaggerations of Krishna worship, in Europe in the sentimental
extravagances of certain Christian saints.
Next, he is protected from the
soul-destroying conclusions of pure monism, inevitable if its logical
implications are pressed home: that is, the identity of substance
between God and the soul, with its corollary of the total absorption
of that soul in the Being of God as the goal of the spiritual life.
For the thorough-going monist the soul, in so far as it is real, is
substantially identical with God; and the true object of existence is
the making patent of this latent identity, the realization which
finds expression in the Vedântist formula "That art thou."
But Kabîr says that Brahma and the creature are "ever distinct,
yet ever united"; that the wise man knows the spiritual as well
as the material world to "be no more than His footstool."
[Footnote: Nos. VII and IX.] The soul's union with Him is a love
union, a mutual inhabitation; that essentially dualistic relation
which all mystical religion expresses, not a self-mergence which
leaves no place for personality. This eternal distinction, the
mysterious union-in-separateness of God and the soul, is a necessary
doctrine of all sane mysticism; for no scheme which fails to find a
place for it can represent more than a fragment of that soul's
intercourse with the spiritual world. Its affirmation was one of the
distinguishing features of the Vaishnavite reformation preached by
Râmânuja; the principle of which had descended through Râmânanda
to Kabîr.
Last, the warmly human and direct
apprehension of God as the supreme Object of love, the soul's
comrade, teacher, and bridegroom, which is so passionately and
frequently expressed in Kabîr's poems, balances and controls those
abstract tendencies which are inherent in the metaphysical side of
his vision of Reality: and prevents it from degenerating into that
sterile worship of intellectual formulæ which became the curse of
the Vedântist school. For the mere intellectualist, as for the mere
pietist, he has little approbation. [Footnote: Cf. especially Nos.
LIX, LXVII, LXXV, XC, XCI.] Love is throughout his "absolute
sole Lord": the unique source of the more abundant life which he
enjoys, and the common factor which unites the finite and infinite
worlds. All is soaked in love: that love which he described in almost
Johannine language as the "Form of God." The whole of
creation is the Play of the Eternal Lover; the living, changing,
growing expression of Brahma's love and joy. As these twin passions
preside over the generation of human life, so "beyond the mists
of pleasure and pain" Kabîr finds them governing the creative
acts of God. His manifestation is love; His activity is joy. Creation
springs from one glad act of affirmation: the Everlasting Yea,
perpetually uttered within the depths of the Divine Nature.
[Footnote: Nos. XVII, XXVI, LXXVI, LXXXII.] In accordance with this
concept of the universe as a Love-Game which eternally goes forward,
a progressive manifestation of Brahma—one of the many notions which
he adopted from the common stock of Hindu religious ideas, and
illuminated by his poetic genius—movement, rhythm, perpetual
change, forms an integral part of Kabîr's vision of Reality. Though
the Eternal and Absolute is ever present to his consciousness, yet
his concept of the Divine Nature is essentially dynamic. It is by the
symbols of motion that he most often tries to convey it to us: as in
his constant reference to dancing, or the strangely modern picture of
that Eternal Swing of the Universe which is "held by the cords
of love." [Footnote: No. XVI.]
It is a marked characteristic of
mystical literature that the great contemplatives, in their effort to
convey to us the nature of their communion with the supersensuous,
are inevitably driven to employ some form of sensuous imagery: coarse
and inaccurate as they know such imagery to be, even at the best. Our
normal human consciousness is so completely committed to dependence
on the senses, that the fruits of intuition itself are instinctively
referred to them. In that intuition it seems to the mystics that all
the dim cravings and partial apprehensions of sense find perfect
fulfilment. Hence their constant declaration that they see the
uncreated light, they hear the celestial melody, they taste the
sweetness of the Lord, they know an ineffable fragrance, they feel
the very contact of love. "Him verily seeing and fully feeling,
Him spiritually hearing and Him delectably smelling and sweetly
swallowing," as Julian of Norwich has it. In those amongst them
who develop psycho-sensorial automatisms, these parallels between
sense and spirit may present themselves to consciousness in the form
of hallucinations: as the light seen by Suso, the music heard by
Rolle, the celestial perfumes which filled St. Catherine of Siena's
cell, the physical wounds felt by St. Francis and St. Teresa. These
are excessive dramatizations of the symbolism under which the mystic
tends instinctively to represent his spiritual intuition to the
surface consciousness. Here, in the special sense-perception which he
feels to be most expressive of Reality, his peculiar idiosyncrasies
come out.
Now Kabîr, as we might expect in
one whose reactions to the spiritual order were so wide and various,
uses by turn all the symbols of sense. He tells us that he has "seen
without sight" the effulgence of Brahma, tasted the divine
nectar, felt the ecstatic contact of Reality, smelt the fragrance of
the heavenly flowers. But he was essentially a poet and musician:
rhythm and harmony were to him the garments of beauty and truth.
Hence in his lyrics he shows himself to be, like Richard Rolle, above
all things a musical mystic. Creation, he says again and again, is
full of music: it is music. At the heart of the Universe "white
music is blossoming": love weaves the melody, whilst
renunciation beats the time. It can be heard in the home as well as
in the heavens; discerned by the ears of common men as well as by the
trained senses of the ascetic. Moreover, the body of every man is a
lyre on which Brahma, "the source of all music," plays.
Everywhere Kabîr discerns the "Unstruck Music of the
Infinite"—that celestial melody which the angel played to St.
Francis, that ghostly symphony which filled the soul of Rolle with
ecstatic joy. [Footnote: Nos. XVII, XVIII, XXXIX, XLI, LIV, LXXVI,
LXXXIII, LXXXIX, XCVII.] The one figure which he adopts from the
Hindu Pantheon and constantly uses, is that of Krishna the Divine
Flute Player. [Footnote: Nos. L, LIII, LXVIII.] He sees the supernal
music, too, in its visual embodiment, as rhythmical movement: that
mysterious dance of the universe before the face of Brahma, which is
at once an act of worship and an expression of the infinite rapture
of the Immanent God.'
Yet in this wide and rapturous
vision of the universe Kabîr never loses touch with diurnal
existence, never forgets the common life. His feet are firmly planted
upon earth; his lofty and passionate apprehensions are perpetually
controlled by the activity of a sane and vigorous intellect, by the
alert commonsense so often found in persons of real mystical genius.
The constant insistence on simplicity and directness, the hatred of
all abstractions and philosophizings,[Footnote: Nos. XXVI, XXXII,
LXXVI] the ruthless criticism of external religion: these are amongst
his most marked characteristics. God is the Root whence all
manifestations, "material" and "spiritual," alike
proceed; [Footnote: Nos. LXXV, LXXVIII, LXXX, XC.] and God is the
only need of man—"happiness shall be yours when you come to
the Root." [Footnote: No. LXXX.] Hence to those who keep their
eye on the "one thing needful," denominations, creeds,
ceremonies, the conclusions of philosophy, the disciplines of
asceticism, are matters of comparative indifference. They represent
merely the different angles from which the soul may approach that
simple union with Brahma which is its goal; and are useful only in so
faras they contribute to this consummation. So thorough-going is
Kabîr's eclecticism, that he seems by turns Vedântist and
Vaishnavite, Pantheist and Transcendentalist, Brâhman and Sûfî. In
the effort to tell the truth about that ineffable apprehension, so
vast and yet so near, which controls his life, he seizes and twines
together—as he might have woven together contrasting threads upon
his loom—symbols and ideas drawn from the most violent and
conflicting philosophies and faiths. All are needed, if he is ever to
suggest the character of that One whom the Upanishad called "the
Sun-coloured Being who is beyond this Darkness": as all the
colours of the spectrum are needed if we would demonstrate the simple
richness of white light. In thus adapting traditional materials to
his own use he follows a method common amongst the mystics; who
seldom exhibit any special love for originality of form. They will
pour their wine into almost any vessel that comes to hand: generally
using by preference—and lifting to new levels of beauty and
significance—the religious or philosophic formulæ current in their
own day. Thus we find that some of Kabîr's finest poems have as
their subjects the commonplaces of Hindu philosophy and religion: the
Lîlâ or Sport of God, the Ocean of Bliss, the Bird of the Soul,
Mâyâ, the Hundred-petalled Lotus, and the "Formless Form."
Many, again, are soaked in Sûfî imagery and feeling. Others use as
their material the ordinary surroundings and incidents of Indian
life: the temple bells, the ceremony of the lamps, marriage, suttee,
pilgrimage, the characters of the seasons; all felt by him in their
mystical aspect, as sacraments of the soul's relation with Brahma. In
many of these a particularly beautiful and intimate feeling for
Nature is shown. [Footnote: Nos. XV, XXIII, LXVII, LXXXVII, XCVII.]
In the collection of songs here
translated there will be found examples which illustrate nearly every
aspect of Kabîr's thought, and all the fluctuations of the mystic's
emotion: the ecstasy, the despair, the still beatitude, the eager
self-devotion, the flashes of wide illumination, the moments of
intimate love. His wide and deep vision of the universe, the "Eternal
Sport" of creation (LXXXII), the worlds being "told like
beads" within the Being of God (XIV, XVI, XVII, LXXVI), is here
seen balanced by his lovely and delicate sense of intimate communion
with the Divine Friend, Lover, Teacher of the soul (X, XI, XXIII,
XXXV, LI, LXXXV, LXXXVI, LXXXVIII, XCII, XCIII; above all, the
beautiful poem XXXIV). As these apparently paradoxical views of
Reality are resolved in Brâhma, so all other opposites are
reconciled in Him: bondage and liberty, love and renunciation,
pleasure and pain (XVII, XXV, XL, LXXIX). Union with Him is the one
thing that matters to the soul, its destiny and its need (LI, I, II,
LIV, LXX, LXXIV, XCIII, XCVI); and this union, this discovery of God,
is the simplest and most natural of all things, if we would but grasp
it (XLI, XLVI, LVI, LXXII, LXXVI, LXXVIII, XCVII). The union,
however, is brought about by love, not by knowledge or ceremonial
observances (XXXVIII, LIV, LV, LIX, XCI); and the apprehension which
that union confers is ineffable—"neither This nor That,"
as Ruysbroeck has it (IX, XLVI, LXXVI). Real worship and communion is
in Spirit and in Truth (XL, XLI, LVI, LXIII, LXV, LXX), therefore
idolatry is an insult to the Divine Lover (XLII, LXIX) and the
devices of professional sanctity are useless apart from charity and
purity of soul (LIV, LXV, LXVI). Since all things, and especially the
heart of man, are God-inhabited, God-possessed (XXVI, LVI, LXXVI,
LXXXIX, XCVII), He may best be found in the here-and-now: in the
normal. human, bodily existence, the "mud" of material life
(III, IV, VI, XXI, XXXIX, XL, XLIII, XLVIII, LXXII). "We can
reach the goal without crossing the road" (LXXVI)—not the
cloister but the home is the proper theatre of man's efforts: and if
he cannot find God there, he need not hope for success by going
farther afield. "In the home is reality." There love and
detachment, bondage and freedom, joy and pain play by turns upon the
soul; and it is from their conflict that the Unstruck Music of the
Infinite proceeds. Kabîr says: "None but Brahma can evoke its
melodies."
"This version of Kabîr's songs
is chiefly the work of Mr. Rabîndranâth Tagore, the trend of whose
mystical genius makes him—as all who read these poems will see—a
peculiarly sympathetic interpreter of Kabîr's vision and thought. It
has been based upon the printed Hindî text with Bengali translation
of Mr. Kshiti Mohan Sen; who has gathered from many sources—sometimes
from books and manuscripts, sometimes from the lips of wandering
ascetics and minstrels—a large collection of poems and hymns to
which Kabîr's name is attached, and carefully sifted the authentic
songs from the many spurious works now attributed to him. These
painstaking labours alone have made the present undertaking possible.
We have also had before us a
manuscript English translation of 116 songs made by Mr. Ajit Kumâr
Chakravarty from Mr. Kshiti Mohan Sen's text, and a prose essay upon
Kabîr from the same hand. From these we have derived great
assistance. A considerable number of readings from the translation
have been adopted by us; whilst several of the facts mentioned in the
essay have been incorporated into this introduction. Our most
grateful thanks are due to Mr. Ajit Kumar Chakravarty for the
extremely generous and unselfish manner in which he has placed his
work at our disposal.
E. U.
The reference of the headlines of
the poems is to:
Sântiniketana; Kabîr by Srî
Kshitimohan Sen, 4 parts,Brahmacharyâsrama, Bolpur, 1910-1911.
For some assistance in normalizing
the transliteration we are indebted to Professor J. F. Blumhardt.