Kabir – The Weaver-Singer II

by T.L. Vaswani

Kabir I regard as one of the world’s Great Prophets of pure Spiritual Life. And Spiritual Life asks for purification from extraneous elements from all forms of compromise with the mass-man, from creeds and conventions. Pure Spirituality is liberated Spirituality. So we may understand why Kabir taught Rama-Name and Bhakti or Love in the heart. Kabir attached little value to asceticism of the body to pilgrimages and other practices of ‘popular’ religion.

Kabir speaks of a five-fold renunciation:

1. Renounce comfort! Live the simple life!

2. Renounce scriptures! They do not take you far, says Kabir. Scholars, He says, have gone astray, though they have read the Vedas. They know not the secret of the Self.

3. Renounce pride! Sat Karma – good deeds –, indeed, help the aspirant to Spiritual Life. Good deeds are really meant to wear of the rajas in us. The rajasic quality must be exhumed. Hence the need of Sat Karma. But often Sat Karma only develops pride – Ahankar – in us. And pride must go, if you will grow in the life of the Spirit. Pride is destroyed through the Name of the Lord. God’s Name, says Kabir, is the breaker of pride! Listen to what He says!

Your good deeds may be many: But alas! you are consumed with pride, He, Whose Name is the breaker of pride. How can He congratulate you on your good deeds, which only feed your pride? They who give up all pride, pride of caste and birth and race. And they who renounce attachment, and seek alone the Word Divine within, they move onward to the goal!

4. Renounce desire! It is the seed of sin. Kabir says: They who renounce the seed of all desire, all hot willing, – they are freed from body and space, and they pass into the freedom of timelessness!

5. Renounce moha – attachment! All moha is rooted in desire. Kabir says: They who renounce attachment and seek alone the Word Divine within, they attain to the Supreme!

Kabir’s mother, Nima, reproaches Him, one day. His father. Nur Ali or Niroo, is dead. The tamily must be looked after. Kabir has spent His time in singing the Name of Rama. The mother, Nima, cannot bear to see her children starve. She reproaches Kabir on His neglect.

What are you doing, my son?

she says,

Your father has gone. There is none else to look after the family, if you will not wake up. Open your eyes and do your weaving.

Then says Kabir to her, in a beautiful poem enshrined in the ‘Guru Granth Sahib’:

Say, who is son? Who is father? And uncle who? In separation from Hari, how shall I live, oh mother? No longer can the world deceive me: For I have known the deceiver (maya)!

And Kabir continues:

My God! Compassionate art Thou to the poor! I trust in Thee! And all my family have I put in the boat: Let it float on!

Kabir’s mother sobs and weeps. She says:

Oh Allah! How shall my children live? Kabir hath given up His weaving. Kabir inscribes Rama’s Name on His body!

Yes, Kabir has no moha.

Who is my father? Who is my mother?

asked Jesus.

Who is my mother?

is also the cry of Kabir’s emancipated heart.

Who is son, and who is father, and uncle who?

In answer to Nima’s loud lament, Kabir answers thus, in a beautiful song which, also, you may find in the Guru Granth Sahib:

Yes, mother! While the thread was passing through the bobbin, I forgot my Beloved God. Yes, mother! my understanding is poor and my caste is that of weaver. But this I know, mother! Losing in money. I have gained the Name of God! Hear, oh mother! Hear! The One God will provide for us all!

Kabir was illiterate but illuminated. In this regard, He reminds us of the great western mystic, Boehme. Kabir was, essentially, a man of interior illumination. But He was, as Boehme was not, a great musician and a great poet. Kabir was also, an expert craftsman. He made His living at the loom. In this regard, He reminds us of Ravi Das. Kabir was a simple weaver as Ravi Das was a simple cobbler.

Kabir was not an ascetic. He did not leave the world. His renunciation was inner not outer. He mingled as a man with men: He toiled, he recognised the sanctity of labour and He rejoiced in the interior life of communion with the Supreme.

Kabir blended mystical vision with industry. He believed in the harmony of hands and heart, and the more I think of Him, the more I feel that Kabir had a natural dislike for institutional religion, for all externalism. In this regard, He reminds me of the Quakers of England, who believe in the Inner Light. Kabir spoke, again and again of simple Union with God. He sang of Sahaj Samadh, ‘simple Union,’ the ‘Samadh’ of the simple heart. Kabir did not attach value to pilgrimages.

Not in Kaaba nor in Kailash, but in thy heart within must thou meet thy Lord,

he says. One of His songs has the significant words:

Where dost thou seek me? Lo! I am beside thee! Neither in temple nor in mosque am I: Neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash! I am not in outer rites and ceremonies. I am by thee, with thee, within thee!

‘Do not tell me,’ says Kabir, ‘that the Saints of God belong to this caste or that.

The saints transcend all castes, all countries, all creeds. Hath not God revealed Himself in different castes and different faiths? Barbers and washermen, carpenters and masons, sweepers and cobblers have communed with God, face to face.

So Kabir asks us to recognise the the value of home-life for Spiritual Advance. He sings:

Lamps burn in every home. Thy Lord is within thee: Why climb the palm tree to seek Him? The telling of beads is nought to him!

Kabir raised His voice against those who identified religion with externalism. Of the Interior Life, He spoke, in rapturous strains, again and again.

Misled,

He says,

is the man who, leaving home, wanders afar.

– Call back,

says Kabir,

call back the wanderer Home.

And Kabir urges, again and again, that the Home of homes is in the heart within.

Kabir did not stand aloof from life and its obligations. To Him life itself was a revelation of the Real. Kabir was a singer of life.

In life,

He says,

deliverance abides.

– Here and now mayst thou find the God! Not in a far-off forest, in the daily life, mayst thou greet thy God if thou wilt but awake.

In one of His poems, He says:

If your bonds be not broken now and here, in this earthly life, what hope is there for deliverance for you in death?

And again:

If God is found now, He is found in death and beyond. If you find Him not now, you but go to dwell in the City of Death.

Kabir emphasises the value of the immediate. Precious is your life. Do not waste it in distraction but so live that you may find Him before death overcomes you. God is now here, or He is nowhere! Do not therefore miss the Golden Chance this life gives you for self-realisation. Here is pure water before you. Drink it in. Be filled, be full. Do not leave the world empty-handed. Why do you pursue the shadow-shapes which come and go? Why do you wander after the mirage? The Water of Life is before you.

Listen the words of Kabir:

Dhruva, Prahlada and Sukdeva have drunk of the nectar: and Ravi Das, the cobbler, too. Listen to me, brother! Weave no longer your chains of false-hood! Hold no longer the load of desire on your head! Be Light, if thou wouldst, indeed, be liberated!

How may I be Light? Kabir’s answer significant.

1. Be detached; and

2. be true, – no matter what suffering you may have to pass through. Be true though persecuted by men, though assailed by suffering and pain. Bear witness to the Truth. And

3. be thirsty for Love.

This triple secret – detachment, worship of Truth and thirst of Love – is the key to that higher life to which all awakening must aspire as its crown.

The Saints,

says Kabir,

are drunk with Love.

The secret of the Prem Nagar, the City of Love, was seen by Kabir. He lived a life of detachment: He adored Truth, day by day, and His heart was filled with Love. Thinking of Him, I say to myself, what a joy in the thought that in this world of strife and pain, this world of conflict and contradiction, this broken world of tragedy and tears, have appeared, again and again, singers and seers like Kabir Who saw the Secret of the beauteous face of the Beloved.

Bayazid was a sufi, a fakir, a dervish of God, and of Him, one day, they ask:

Master! how old are You?

And the sufi Saint answers:

Four years am I.

– How can that be?

they ask.

And He answers:

My God was concealed from my soul by the conspiracy of the world for seventy years: but I have glimpsed a little of the beauty of God during the last four years, and they are the years which count as the period of life.

The conspiracy of the world is the action of maya. It throws a veil upon us, and God, the great Reality, the only Reality of life, is concealed from our souls. The Guru removes the veil. The Guru is the veil-withdrawer. The Guru is He Who lifts the curtain. Hence the very first step to be taken by a Sincere Seeker is, as I have urged again and again, search for the Guru. The Guru is the lift to raise us to the heights, – the lift which may take us, little ones, to the Satya Loka – the Realm of the Supreme.

And so the Disciple’s Way must needs be understood by every seeker after the Life Divine. In the teaching of Kabir, the disciple’s way is indicated thus:

1. One thing emphasised by Kabir over and over again, is longing – pyas. The disciple should become a pyasi, should grow in longing, before he can truly profit by the teaching of the Guru.

2. Again, he who would be a disciple must learn renunciation. Dharam Das, the greatest disciple of Kabir, was a very rich man. He renounced his wealth, spent it in spreading the message of his Guru. Tyaga (giving up) is essential to the life of him who takes saranam (refuge) at his Guru’s feet.

3. Thirdly, there is, in Kabir’s bani emphasis on seva (service). By seva is meant service of the Guru and of the Sadhus (pure ones) and of the community (Satsang), in whom the disciple sees his Guru reflected. Seva reflects itself naturally in objective acts. But the interior spirit of seva is humility. It is the secret of True Holiness to which the True Seeker aspires. And what is humility? In its perfect flowering, humility is self-abnegation, emptying out of all self, all ego. The True Disciple serves his master, day and night, and yet never feels that he has served. He says to himself: ‘I have done nothing, for I am nothing.’

4. Then there comes into the life of the disciple a strange, joy-filling experience. The disciple feels the Grace of God moving upon him. The Grace of the Guru to him is the Grace of God Himself. The disciple, in this strange experience, feels the thrill of what True Love is, – the Love of the Guru and the Love of God. The disciple, at this stage realises that the True Vocation of life is Love. ‘I shall be Love,’ he says to himself. And the way of Love is not to scramble for ‘great’ things. The way of Love is the little way. In little things, in simple things, in lowly things of life, the disciple knows, is his destiny fulfilled. And the aspiration within him grows from more to more: May I be little! May I grow, more and more, a little one!

The joy which comes to the True Disciple, to him who has learnt to walk the little way, the way of Love, the way of Guru Bahkti and Guru Seva, is indescribable.

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Footnote: Extract from ‘Prophets and Saints,’ by T.L. Vaswani, by courtesy of Jaico Publishing House, 125, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay- 1.