Topic: Kabir

[Nichi]

Hey brother, why do you want me to talk?
Talk and talk and the real things get lost.

Talk and talk and things get out of hand.
Why not stop talking and think?

If you meet someone good, listen a little, speak;
If you meet someone bad, clench up like a fist.

Talking with a wise one is a great reward.
Talking with a fool? A waste.

Kabir says: A pot makes noise if it's half full,
But fill it to the brim -- no sound.


~Kabir

~.~

[Nichi]

Sant Kabir (1440 – 1518)
Life and Works of the Unique Mystical Saint Poet

By Subhamoy Das

The saint poet Kabir is one of the most interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism. Born near Benaras or Varanasi, of Muslim parents, in c.1440, he became in early life a disciple of the celebrated 15th century Hindu ascetic Ramananda, a great religious reformer and founder of a sect to which millions of Hindus still belong.

Kabir's Early Life in Varanasi

Kabir's story is surrounded by contradictory legends that emanate from both Hindu and Islamic sources, which claim him by turns as a Sufi and a Hindu saint. Undoubtedly, his name is of Islamic ancestry, and he is said to be the actual or adopted child of a Muslim weaver of Varanasi, the city in which the chief events of his life took place.

How Kabir Became a Disciple of Ramananda

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 Muslim as disciple. He therefore hid on the steps of the river Ganges, where Ramananda came to bathe often; 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 Brahmins and Muslims, both equally annoyed by this contempt of theological landmarks, he persisted in his claim.

Ramananda's Influence on Kabir's Life and Works

Ramananda appears to have accepted Kabir, and though Muslim 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. Ramananda, Kabir's guru, was a man of wide religious culture who dreamed of reconciling this intense and personal Mohammedan mysticism with the traditional theology of Brahmanism and even Christian faith: and it is one of the outstanding characteristics of Kabir's genius that he was able in his poems to fuse these thoughts into one.

Was Kabir a Hindu or a Muslim?

Hindus called him Kabir Das, but it is impossible to say whether Kabir was Brahmin or Sufi, Vedantist or Vaishnavite. He is, as he says himself, "at once the child of Allah and of Ram." Kabir was a hater of religious exclusivism, and seeking above all things to initiate human beings into the liberty of the children of God. Kabir remained for years the disciple of Ramananda, joining in the theological and philosophical arguments which his master held with all the great Mullahs and Brahmins of his day, which acquainted him to both Hindu and Sufi philosophy.

Kabir's Songs are His Greatest Teachings

It is by his wonderful songs, the spontaneous expressions of his vision and his love, and 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 - expressed in homely metaphors and religious symbols drawn indifferently from Hindu and Islamic beliefs.

Kabir Lived a Simple Life

He may or may not have submitted to the traditional education of the Hindu or the Sufi contemplative and never adopted the life of an ascetic. Side by side with his interior life of adoration, its artistic expression in music and words, he lived the sane and diligent life of a craftsman. 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. And it was from out of the heart of the common life of a married man and the father of a family that he sang his rapturous lyrics of divine love.

Kabir's Mystical Poetry was Rooted in Life and Reality

Kabir's 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. The "simple union" with Divine Reality 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. Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Muslim 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; as he said, "The Purana and the Koran are mere words."

The Last Days of Kabir's Life

Kabir's Varansi was the very center of Hindu priestly influence, which made him subject to considerable persecution. There is a well-known legend about a beautiful courtesan, who was sent by Brahmins to tempt Kabir's virtue. Another tale talks of Kabir being brought before the Emperor Sikandar Lodi, and charged with claiming the possession of divine powers. He was banished from Varanasi in 1495 when he was nearly 60 years old. Thereafter, he moved about throughout northern India with his disciples; continuing in exile a life of an apostle and a poet of love. Kabir died at Maghar near Gorakhpur in 1518.

The Legend of Kabir's Last Rites

A beautiful legend tells us that after his death his Muslim and Hindu disciples disputed the possession of his body; which the Muslims wished to bury, the Hindus to burn. As they argued together, Kabir 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 Muslims at Maghar, and half carried by the Hindus to the holy city of Varanasi to be burned - a fitting conclusion to a life which had made fragrant the most beautiful doctrines of two great creeds.

Based on Evelyn Underhill's introduction in Songs of Kabir translated by Rabindranath Tagore and published by The Macmillan Company, New York (1915)
http://hinduism.about.com/od/gurussaintsofthepast/a/Kabir.htm?nl=1

[Nichi]

Revisiting Kabir – the Weaver, the Myth, the Master
Posted on April 3, 2007 by Raza Rumi   

By Raza Rumi

Do not go to the garden of flowers!
O Friend! go not there;
In your body is the garden of flowers.
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus,
and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.

(translation by Tagore)

Fifteenth century India witnessed the coming of age of a process that started brewing with the arrival of Central Asian Sufis who accompanied or followed the invaders from Asia Minor. When Sufi thought, an off-shore spiritual undercurrent to the rise of Islam, met its local hosts, the results were terrific. There was no shortage of fundamentalists and communalists in that cultural landscape; and the gulf between alien rulers and the native subjects was a stark reality as well.

Nevertheless, a synthesis of sorts was navigated by hundreds of yogis, Sufis and poets of India. Very much a people’s movement from the below, Bhakti movement articulated a powerful vision of tolerance, amity and co-existence that is still relevant. This is many centuries before the suave, western educated intelligentsia coined the ‘people-to-people’ contact campaigns. Yes, much has been lost in the tumultuous twentieth century and perhaps the histories and nation states rhetoric are also irreversible. But common ground remains.

Kabir – born 71 years before Nanak – is the supreme, sublime and perhaps the simplest of voices from the bhakti era. His poems have been sung across the subcontinent now for nearly five centuries. Researchers grappled with the challenge of sifting the original Kabir from all that is attributed to his name. Does it matter? At the popular level, not much. Was he a Muslim or a Hindu? We know that there are more than one tombs of Kabir where he is ostensibly buried. Same is the case with confusion over Kabir Samadhi. His name was evidently Muslim and the origins shrouded by labels of all kinds. However, Kabir’s internalization of the Indian spiritual tenets and lore made him a complete hindustanee – beyond the barriers of religion, creed and identity politics that generates violence.

A weaver by profession and therefore at the lower end of socio-economic strata Kabir also represented the woes of rural folk who lived in ‘thousands of villages’ at the margins of central power and its intrigues.Kabir’s songs were reformist in nature and influenced the ordinary villagers and low caste and provided them self-confidence to question Brahmins.

Rabindranath Tagore’s translation of Kabir songs introduced Kabir to the world outside India. Tagore’s translations are lyrical and retain the essential simplicity inherent to his otherwise complex thought. Here is a powerful thought – God is the breath of all breath – the fundamental pillar of Bhakti where worship and divine experience emanate from and are located in the self:

O servant, where dost thou seek Me?
Lo! I am beside thee.
I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash:
Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and
renunciation.
If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt
meet Me in a moment of time.
Kabir says, “O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath.”

Echoing Rumi and his successor Bulleh Shah, Kabir sings:

I do not know what manner of God is mine.

The Mullah cries aloud to Him: and why? Is your Lord deaf? The subtle anklets that ring on the feet of an insect when it moves are heard of Him.

Tell your beads, paint your forehead with the mark of your God, and wear matted locks long and showy: but a deadly weapon is in your heart, and how shall you have God?

The deadly weapon in the hearts of all is central to introspection and working inwards rather than the external symbols and structures of formal religion and religiosity.

Last year I came across Vinay Dharwadker’s excellent translations titled Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs. The translations are imaginative and open up newer vistas of meaning layered in Kabir’s ostensibly simple songs. However, it was the erudite introduction that added a newer dimension to my previous understanding of Kabir. Dharwadker while exploring the underlying secularism of Kabir’s verse detects the extra dimension that amazingly is far beyond the known boundaries of secularism. He writes of how the Kabir poets and followers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries added to the discourse of spirituality and that primordial search for God:

” In this dissident conception of the secular, institutionalized religions – with their wealth, power, mediating structures and violent practices – determine what constitutes religion and what is legitimately ‘religious’ in the human world. But the human world belongs wholly to the domain of Maya , so these institutions and their definitions of dharma or religion cannot reach beyond the limits of Maya to be God without attributes. Nirguna God stands outside the immense scaffolding of organized human religions and what they define as religious doctrine and practice, and since the ‘secular’ is that which lies outside the scope of the ‘religious’, God as such is entirely secular.”

Therefore, the process of attaining mukti (liberation) from the trappings of religions to achieve a union with a God without attributes is a secular process. “It is precisely such a secularism that makes both God and mukti completely accessible to anyone and everyone, regardless of caste, class, birth, gender, upbringing, status or rank, and that becomes indistinguishable from the deeply subversive egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism of the Kabir community.”

Amazing!

The Kabir community comprises scores of followers and later poets who kept on adding verse to the Kabir anthology and all that is today ascribed to the great sage. Let’s hope this community grows and flourishes. I will end with my favourite translation from Dharwadker that I posted earlier on this blog:

Allah and Rama

If Khuda inhabits the mosque,
then whose play-field is the rest of the world.

If Rama lives in the idol at the pilgrim station,
then who controls the chaos outside?

The East is Hari’s domicile, they say,
the West is Allah’s dwelling place.

Look into your heart, your very heart:
That’s where Karim-and-Rama reside.
All the men and the women ever born,
Are nothing but Your embodied forms:
Kabir’s a child of Allah-and-Rama
They’re his Guru-and-Pir

That says it all!
http://indianmuslims.in/revisiting-kabir-the-weaver-the-myth-the-master/

[Nichi]

Mahaveer Swami

[Nichi]

Mahaveer Swami