Songs of Kabir

Songs of Kabir

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Title: Songs of Kabir
Author: Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6519] [Yes, we are more than
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SONGS OF KABÎR
Translated by Rabindranath Tagore
Introduction by Evelyn Underhill
New York, The Macmillan Company
1915

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, be 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