Dr.Commander Selvam Siddhar
Kabir is associated with the Sant Mat, a loosely related group of teachers
(Sanskrit: Guru) that assumed prominence in the northern part of the Indian
sub-continent from about the 13th century. Their teachings are distinguished
theologically by inward loving devotion to a divine principle, and socially by egalitarianism
opposed to the qualitative distinctions of the Hindu caste hierarchy and to the
religious differences between Hindu and Muslim. The Sants were not homogeneous,
consisting mostly of these Sants' presentation of socio-religious attitudes
based on bhakti (devotion) as described a thousand years earlier in the
Bhagavad Gita. Sharing as few conventions with each other as with the followers
of the traditions they challenged, the Sants appear more as a diverse collection
of spiritual personalities than a specific religious tradition, although they
acknowledged a common spiritual root. The first generation of north Indian
Sants, (which included Kabir), appeared in the region of Benares
in the mid 15th century. Preceding them were two notable 13th and 14th century
figures, Namdev and Ramananda. The latter, a Vaishnava ascetic, initiated
Kabir, Raidas, and other Sants, according to tradition. Ramanand's story is
told differently by his lineage of "Ramanandi" monks, by other Sants preceding
him, and later by the Sikhs. What is known is that Ramananda accepted students
of all castes, a fact that was contested by the orthodox Hindus of that time,
and that his students formed the first generation of Sants.
His greatest work is the Bijak (that is, the Seedling), an idea of
the fundamental one. This collection of poems demonstrates Kabir's own universal
view of spirituality. His vocabulary is replete with ideas regarding Brahman
and Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation. His Hindi was a very vernacular,
straightforward kind, much like his philosophies. He often advocated leaving
aside the Qur'an and Vedas and to simply follow Shahaj path, or the Simple/Natural Way
to oneness in God. He believed in the Vedantic concepts of atman and therefore spurned
the orthodox Hindu societal caste system and worship of statues, thus showing
clear belief in both bhakti and sufi ideas. The major part of Kabir's work as a
Bhagat was collected by the fifth Sikh guru, Guru Arjun Dev, and forms a
section of the holy Sikh scripture "Guru Granth Sahib". According to
legendary accounts Kabir and Guru Nanak had met once. While many ideas reign as
to who his living influences were, the only Guru of whom he ever spoke was Ramananda,
a Vaishnav saint whom Kabir claimed to have taken initiation from in the form
of the "Rama" mantra.
"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."
In Kabir's wide and rapturous vision of the universe he never
loses touch with 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 philosophizing, 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; and God is the only need of
man--"happiness shall be yours when you come to the Root." 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 insofar as they contribute to this consummation. So
thorough-going is Kabîr's eclecticism that he seems by turns Vedântist and
Vaishnavite, Pantheist and Transcendentalist, Brahmin 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.
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