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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 tent-maker, 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
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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." *
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 was
1 Cf. Poems Nos. XXI, XL, XLIII, LXVI, LXXVI.
b
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" 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 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. 2