Introduction
I. The Life of Kabir
As Sant Ajaib Singh points out in his Foreword, the life of Kabir is lost
in the mists of legend and it is very difficult, from this point so far
removed in time from Kabir's life, to know many hard facts about it.
Still, there are certain elements of that life about which the traditions
seem to agree and about those we can be reasonably sure.
TIME AND PLACE
As Sant Ji said, it has been generally agreed for centuries that Kabir
lived from 1398 to 1518. There are variations on those dates: one alternative
that is proposed is 1380 to 1440, and another from 1440 to 15 18.
Neither alternative is based on tradition, however; they are speculative
reconstructions by modern scholars who apparently have difficulty
with the abnormally long life span. But while the span is long, even for
spiritual Masters, it is not unprecedented: a minority of Indian holy
men have always been long-lived. The celebrated Trailanga Swami,
who apparently lived for three hundred years in Benares in relatively
modern times in the full glare of the British Raj, is a case in point; one
of his disciples, a woman, Shankari Mai Jiew, born in 1826, was still
alive in 1946-precisely Kabir's life span.'
It was my own good fortune to meet the Maharishi Raghuvacharya,
a well-known yogi of Rishikesh who became, in his nineties, a disciple
of Sant Kirpal Singh Ji. I met Raghuvacharya on two occasions-in
1965 and 1969-when he was well over 100 years old. He died in 1970,
aged 115, in full control of his powers; when I had met him the year
I . See Paramhansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, pp. 291-295, for an interesting
account of Trailanga Swami; but his remarkable age is attested to by many
witnesses. As this book was going to press, the Boston Globe (February 9, 1982) carried
the obituary of Ike Ward, born into slavery in 1862, dead from old age (without having
been through a period of ill health) at 120.
xvii
before he had given every impression of being a vigorous 65. Yet his
long life and birth date was known to hundreds of people, as he had
lived in Rishikesh all of his life.
So while it is unusual for Kabir to have lived such a long life, it is by
no means impossible; and since tradition has fixed on those dates from
early times, and nothing else about Kabir's life is any less unusual, it
seems reasonable to accept them.
It is also reasonably certain that he was born in Benares (then called
Kashi) and lived there most of his life, dying in the nearby town of
~ a ~ a h a r .
SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES
It is as certain as anything can be about Kabir that he was a Muslim by
birth and belonged to the julaha caste. Strictly speaking, Muslims are
not supposed to have any caste; but in India this idea has tended to
erode under the pressure of mass conversions of lower-caste Hindus,
who, in attempting to escape the difficulties of inferior caste, only succeeded
in bringing them with them into Islam. This would appear to be
the case with the julahas, apparently a Sudra caste that converted en
masse between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The word julaha
means "weaver" in Persian, and the members of the caste are usually
either weavers or farmers. Their social status was and is very low, and
their conversion did not raise it, either in the eyes of Hindus or of
Muslims.
From the very beginning, Kabir has been identified as a julaha. Indeed,
he identifies himself that way. Although his songs and poetry are
not rich in autobiographical information (Anurag Sagar is particularly
disappointing in this respect) what information they do contain is
especially valuable; and the fact is that Kabir happily, perhaps gleefully,
lets the world know that he is a julaha:
I am of low community, my caste is julaha;
I have only one advantage and that is of Naam.
Since the julahas were by definition Muslims, and since Kabir is an
Islamic name (it is actually Arabic and is found in the Koran), his Islamic
faith would appear to be beyond dispute. It has been disputed, though,
on the grounds that his teaching appears to be given entirely within a
Hindu frame of reference. Anurag Sagar is a case in point: while much
of the poem is dedicated to exploding Hindu theology, it is done from
within: the ideas are stood on their head, as it were, by someone who
knows them inside out and who refutes them by showing the truth that
2. See note on page 15 below ["Kashi"].
3. Songs :sf the Macters, p. 16. This song IS from the Granth Sahib. Gujar~2
INTRODUCTION X ~ X
they are supposed to reflect. There is very little Islam in Anurag Sagar,
or in Kabir's poetry in general (although many of the songs contain brief
references to Islamic ideas).
There are various explanations for this, one of them being the obvious
one that Kabir was concerned with the here and now: most of the people
in the area of his mission were Hindus, and he wanted to reach them via
their own religious language. Another is that the concerns of the Anurag
Sugar are in areas where Hindu mythology is very rich, and the
characters and events of that mythology lent itself to Kabir's poetic
genius in ways that the comparatively barren Islamic tradition could not.
And then there is the fact that the amount of Islamic education julahas
received was very small: the caste as a whole was and is illiterate, and
does not rank high on the priority list of Muslim educators. Kabir's
guru, as we will see, was a Hindu, and Kabir is generally considered a
Hindu saint by modern Hindus: in fact, he has become a Hindu god, and
idols of him are found in Hindu temples-ironic fate for a Saint who denounced
idolatry as strongly as any Hebrew prophet. His Hindu admirers
do not deny his Muslim origins, but they either ignore or explain
them away. Nevertheless, that a Saint who was not only a Muslim but an
illiterate, low-caste Muslim should so win the hearts of Hindus and rise
to such a position of eminence among them is totally without parallel in
all history and testifies eloquently to the "incredible power" Sant Ji
mentions in his Foreword.
His parents, who figure in the Anurag Sagar, were Nima (his mother)
and Niru (his father). They were not, according to Kabir himself, his actual
physical parents, as his birth was miraculous; but he chose them, for
reasons explained in the poem, was brought up by them as their son, accepted
the limitations of their low caste, and learned the weaver's trade
from his father. There is evidence in his writings that his mother had a
very difficult time dealing with his Sainthood and all that it implied, and
also with his use of Hindu concepts in his teaching:
Kabir's mother weeps bitterly, worrying:
"How is this child going to live, 0 God?". . .
Kabir says, "Listen, mother,
God is the only giver for all of us."
[Kabir's mother asks:]
"Who in our family has ever invoked Ram?"
When he grew up, he married Loi, who was also his disciple, had two
children-a son Kamal and a daughter Kamali-and earned his living as
4. Ibid.
5. Granth Sahib, Bilaval4
a weaver. Loi and Kamali are not mentioned in Anurag Sagar, but
Kamal is, in a context that makes it clear that he was Kabir's physical
son. Thus it is very unlikely that he was not married, as some of his Hindu
followers (who find the concept of a married holy man difficult to accept)
maintain. In the Sant Mat tradition it is not unusual for a Master to
be married, and as Kabir was the founder of that tradition there is no
reason why he should not have been. Those who object to this maintain
that Loi and the children were all disciples only; but as the traditions
clearly depict all three in an intimate relationship with Kabir on a daily
domestic basis, it is extremely unlikely that they were not his physical
family.
KABIR AND RAMANANDA
The Anurag Sagar maintains, and Sant Mat tradition affirms, that Kabir
is the proto-Master or original Saint, who has descended directly from
God four different times, once in each yuga or time-cycle, founding a
line of Masters each time, and that his incarnation in the present timecycle
or Kali Yuga-that is, the life of the historical Kabir-is thus only
a fraction of his totality. In the Anurag Sagar Kabir goes into greater or
lesser detail on each of these four incarnations, as well as his preincarnate
activity, and his account is accepted by the Masters of Sant
Mat as a straightforward accurate approximation of actions and events
which are ultimately too tremendous to fit easily into our verbal and conceptual
framework. His description of his various incarnations, like
many other parts of the poem, is as true as it can be, given the limits of
the medium it is conveyed in, and forms a basic and important part of
the body of ideas and stories that constitute the verbal tradition of Sant
Mat; and the Masters who have come after him have accepted Kabir as
the founder of the various lines of Masters.
Nevertheless, tradition affirms, and Kabir's writings bear it out, that
Kabir took initiation from a Guru, and the Guru was Ramananda. This
may seem contradictory; but it is a basic pillar of Sant Mat that everyone
needs to sit at the feet of a Master. As Jesus said to John the Baptist,
when the latter in amazement asked him why he had come to him, "Thus
it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness."6] The situation is exactly
analogous; and just as John's question implies that he should be coming
to Jesus, rather than the other way around, so the tradition affirms that
ultimately Kabir liberated Ramananda. But still Kabir outwardly sat at
Ramananda's feet and humbled himself before him in the eyes of the
world. Sant Kirpal Singh Ji has written:
All born Saints, though very few, come into the world with esoteric knowledge right from their birth but have for form's sake to adopt
a Master. ["Thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness."]
Kabir Sahib, for instance, had to accept Shri Ramananda as his
Master
___
_ 6. Matthew
( 19)
http://www.SupremeMasterTV.com/BMD
"All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."
— Kabir
:bees: