Who Is Kabir? And Why We Should Know Him

“I laugh when I hear the fish in the water is thirsty.” — Kabir

Kabir, a 15th-century mystic and musician, was born in Benares, Northern India, around 1440. Many scholars believe his parents were Brahmin (Hindu) but raised in a Muslim family of weavers.

As a young boy, he became a disciple of Ramanda, a Hindu ascetic. As he matured, he wrote stunning poetry celebrating love as the only way to bind human beings together.

His core message was one of living righteously, respecting everything, living or not as divine, and letting go of the individual self and ego as the path to experiencing bliss.

He was known for promoting Hindu-Muslim unity, condemning institutionalized religion and the workshop of idols, and influencing the Bhakti (devotion to a personal deity) movement and Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism.

A family man, he believed love and goodness lead to salvation. As an opponent to the caste system, he wrote poetry in a form of spoken Hindi, which made it accessible to ordinary people.

Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian poet, philosopher, and playwright, is well known for his translations of Kabir poetry. Tagore died in 1941, and poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, born that same year, published a well-received book of Kabir’s poems in 2011.

I’ve had Tagore’s Songs of Kabir, initially a small green and yellow paperback book, since 1974. I think it’s one of the best translations available.

I want to share a part of a long poem and a shorter one with you.

#27 from the Songs of Kabir.

In the first line, Kabir references “it,” which he explains previously as the “Cup of the ineffable, Key of the Mystery, Root of Union, Ultimate World, and Unstruck Music.”

Knowing it, the ignorant man becomes wise, and the wise man becomes speechless and silent,

The worshipper is utterly inebriated,

His wisdom and detachment are made perfect;

He drinks from the cup of the inbreathings and the outbreathings of love.

There, the whole sky is filled with sound, and there that music is made without fingers and without strings;

There the game of please and pain does not cease.

Kabir says: If you merge your life in the Ocean of Life, you will find your life in the Supreme land of Bliss.

Pretty potent stuff from an illiterate man. Makes you wonder what he was experiencing, right?

My interpretation

When we connect to our higher self, our life force, we gain wisdom that humbles us and can’t describe because we have glimpsed the divine.

To have such a glimpse, we leave our worldly self, sense of identity, and ego behind — we enter a transcendental state, inebriated, as Kabir says.

“The inbreathing and outbreathings of love” — our breath. The rising and falling of the breath is used in many forms of meditation to tame the active mind, soothing it so that we can witness the subtle beauty reverberating within us.

“Music made without fingers and without strings” — the celestial harmonies, known as the music of spheres in spiritual writings. He’s talking about the glory of the inner experience — the sounds of silence that fill us when we are deep in meditation.

There, “the game of pleasure and pain does not cease.” We are alive in the world but having communion with the Supreme. This makes sense given Kabir’s belief we don’t need to be an ascetic to experience enlightenment.

He says if we understand we are but a drop of water, we can merge back to our source, the ocean, and find peace — an affirmation we need to find our way back to our true home. This objective of life is to rediscover our source and connect with it while we are alive.

#23 from the Songs of Kabir.

The shadows of evening fall thick and deep, and the darkness of love envelops the body and the mind.

Open the window to the west, and be lost in the sky of love;

Drink the sweet honey that steeps the petals of the lotus of the heart.

Receive the waves in your body: what splendor is in the region of the sea!

Hark! The sounds of the conches and the bells are rising.

Kabir says: O brother behold! The Lord is in this vessel of my body.

My interpretation.

I imagine myself sitting quietly at the end of a long day in the pine needles on the edge of a forest or on a rock overlooking a pasture, the sun setting in front of me.

I close my eyes for a moment and breath in the cool air, feeling it fill every part of my being. I listen to the wind softly blowing through the trees, the branches gently swaying.

I feel my breath and the tingling of my life in my fingers and toes. I’m grateful for being alive, knowing there is a doorway to my soul open for me to pass through.

I slowly open my eyes, drunk with happiness and peace.

In this poem, Kabir tells me I can open with window to my soul and enjoy the simple but profound beauty within me.

In closing.

Kabir, a child of Allah (Muslim) and Ram (Hindu), a rebel against worldly austerity and ritual, teaches us to live simply and find peace within our hearts by living with open arms of love for our Creator.

I hope you get to know him more.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like, Inspiration From A Relatively Unknown Author.

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