Songs of Kabir | Page 3

whether Hindu or Mohammedan,
Kabîr 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. 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 "neither in Kaaba
nor in Kailâsh." 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. [Footnote:

Poems I, II, XLI.] Therefore the 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 Purâna and the Koran are mere words: lifting
up the curtain, I have seen. */ [Footnote: Poems XLII, LXV, LXVII.]
This sort of thing cannot be tolerated by any organized church; and it is
not surprising that Kabîr, having his head-quarters in Benares, the very
centre of priestly influence, was subjected to considerable persecution.
The well-known legend of the beautiful courtesan sent by Brâhmans to
tempt his virtue, and converted, like the Magdalen, by her sudden
encounter with the initiate of a higher love, pre serves the memory of
the fear and dislike with which he was regarded by the ecclesiastical
powers. Once at least, after the performance of a supposed miracle of
healing, he was brought before the Emperor Sikandar Lodi, and
charged with claiming the possession of divine powers. But Sikandar
Lodi, a ruler of considerable culture, was tolerant of the eccentricities
of saintly persons belonging to his own faith. Kabîr, being of
Mohammedan birth, was outside the authority of the Brâhmans, and
technically classed with the Sûfîs, to whom great theological latitude
was allowed. Therefore, though he was banished in the interests of
peace from Benares, his life was spared. This seems to have happened
in 1495, when he was nearly sixty years of age; it is the last event in his
career of which we have definite knowledge. Thenceforth he appears to
have moved about amongst various cities of northern India, the centre
of a group of disciples; continuing in exile that life of apostle and poet
of love to which, as he declares in one of his songs, he was destined
"from the beginning of time." In 1518, an old man, broken in health,
and with hands so feeble that he could no longer make the music which
he loved, he died at Maghar near Gorakhpur.
A beautiful legend tells us that after his death his Mohammedan and
Hindu disciples disputed the possession of his body; which the
Mohammedans wished to bury, the Hindus to burn. As they argued
together, Kabîr 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
Mohammedans at Maghar, and half carried by the Hindus to the holy
city of Benares to be burned-- fitting conclusion to a life which had
made fragrant the most beautiful doctrines of two great creeds.

II
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