[In the following essay, Vaudeville emphasizes that Kabīr's religious beliefs were nonconformist and stressed the interiority and mystical nature of the spiritual experience, as he satirized religious orthodoxy and showed contempt for pious sages and prophets.]

Kabīr (1440-1518)—from his true name Kabīr-Dās, “the servant of the Great (God)”—is one of the great names of the literature and religious history of North India. He belongs to that first generation of poets of the “Hindi” language who composed couplets and songs for the people in a language which they understood: a mixed Hindī dialect, a kind of dialectal potpourri which is not amenable to the classifications of the linguists. This jargon was first used by the innumerable itinerant preachers who at the time, as from all antiquity, traversed the country in all directions: Yogis covered with ashes, Muslim Sufis draped with picturesque patchwork robes, Jain ascetics dressed in white or only in “cardinal points,” sants and bhagats, as one called the Vishnuite “saints” or “devotees”—all intoxicated with the Absolute or with divine love, all free and bold, exploiting without mercy the inexhaustible liberality of the poor Indian peasant. Kabīr, who knew them well, often evoked them, and not without irony:

Sweet is the food of the beggar! He collects all kinds of grains,
He does not depend on anyone and, without distant expeditions, he is a great king!

If Kabīr himself did not disdain to mingle with this motley crowd sometimes, he was, however, never an ascetic, nor a Yogī, nor even a professional “devotee.” Born of a caste of weavers recently converted to Islām, a poor artisan lacking in culture, perhaps even illiterate as he boasted, he practiced the ancestral craft in a narrow alley in Kāshi, the modern Banaras. Banaras, the holy city of the “great god” Śiva was then, even more than today, the fortress of Brahmanic orthodoxy where the Pandits and the Pāndés, the Scribes and Pharisees of Hinduism, held sway as masters. For the Pandits and their holy Scriptures, for the Pāndés and their idols, for the immense mystification and exploitation of the ignorance and credulity of the masses, Kabīr felt only a profound contempt joined with the most resounding indignation. He did not cease to pursue them with his sarcasm, in violent, often vulgar, language, in which bursts forth the rebellion of a proud soul against the venality, the baseness, and the hypocrisy of these so-called scholars, these sorry shepherds who with tranquillity lead a great multitude of defenseless sheep to their ruin:

I am the beast and you are the Shepherd who leads me from birth to birth,
But you have never been able to make me cross the Ocean of Existence: how then are you my master?
You are a Brahman, and I am only a weaver from Banaras:
          Understand my own wisdom:
You go begging among kings and princes, and I think only of God!

The work of Kabīr contains a resounding satire on Brahmanical orthodoxy and the superstitions of popular Hinduism. Not only does he condemn with finality worship of idols, these “lifeless stones,” but he he also rejects with contempt all the proceedings and ceremonies by which popular Hindu devotion manifests itself: purificatory bathings, ritual fasts, pilgrimages, and all sorts of practices:

What is the good of scrubbing the body on the outside,
          If the inside is full of filth?
Without the name of Rām, one will not escape hell,
          Even with a hundred washings!

This contempt is not inspired by his Muslim faith and there is no iconoclastic rage in it. If the Brahman and the Pāndé are his favorite targets, he feels scarcely more respect for the official representatives of the Islāmic religion, the Mullah and the Qazi, who are less venial but no less proud and pedantic, and who are still more intolerant:

The one reads the Veda, the other does the qutba,
          This one is a Maulana, that one is a Pāndé:
They bear different names,
          But they are pots from the same clay!
Says Kabīr, both have gone astray
          And neither has found God. …
The one kills a goat, the other slays a cow:
          In quibbles they have wasted their life!

This satire is brought to bear not simply on the vices and weaknesses of men but reaches in them and behind them to the systems themselves which they defend or pretend to represent. It is the authority of the Veda and the Qur’ān, as much and even more than the Pandit or the Qazi, that Kabīr attacks, or, more precisely, he rebels against the pretension of resolving by means of “books” or by way of authority the mystery of the human condition and the problem of salvation:

Well! Pandit, by virtue of reading and reading, you have become clever:
Explain to me, then, your Deliverance!
.....Well, Qazi! What then is this Book that you discourse on?
Night and Day you are jangling and wrangling,
          And you do not understand that all systems are the same.

The Paradise to which men aspire and the thought of which makes them forget their own mystery is but a snare:

Everyone speaks of going there,
But I do not know where that Paradise is!
They do not understand the mystery of their own self
And they give a description of Paradise!

It is therefore rather inaccurate to represent Kabīr as a reformer of Hinduism, or even as an apostle of religious tolerance and of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Undoubtedly, he loves to repeat that “the Hindu and the Turk are brothers,” since God is present in all. But this reform is a final condemnation, and this tolerance is supported by a kind of rationalism which rejects absolutely every revelation based on an authority extrinsic to the human soul. In this, Kabīr follows the long nonconformist tradition which has its source in the Buddhist “heresy,” if it is not still more ancient. In fact, a form of late Buddhism, mingled with practices and concepts of tantric magic, had profoundly impregnated the lower layers of Hindu society in North India several centuries before Kabīr. Some recent researches have made it possible to establish the dependence of Kabīr on the tradition of tantric Yoga. The family of Kabīr belonged to a caste of married “Jogis” or “Jugis” recently converted to Islām. Many of these Jogis were, in fact, weavers. This family origin would explain Kabīr's irreducible opposition to Brahmanical orthodoxy as well as his ignorance of the Islāmic religion, which he seems to have known only from the outside.¹

The schools and sects of tantric Yoga differ according to their “method” or “practice” (sādhana). The metaphysical basis always remains very nearly identical: it is characterized by a pure idealism and by a kind of dualistic monism. Whether Buddhists or Śivaites, the Yogis do not recognize any existence other than that of spirit, “the mental,” and no field of experience other than that of the human body, which is itself considered a microcosm. All truth is experimental; it ought not to be discovered but “realized” within the body with the aid of psychological practices: concentration, control of breathing, sexual practices. For the Yogis the Absolute manifests itself under two aspects: negative and positive, static and dynamic, male and female. The supreme goal of their sādhana is a state of “non-duality” or of unity transcending the opposites, which ought to be “realized” by the Yogi at the end of a kind of process of regression: reabsorption of the states of consciousness in the consciousness and of the latter in the Undifferentiated. By thus overcoming the “mental” the Yogi attains the liberating trance, samādhi, which is conceived as “the great bliss,” mahāsukha, of which nothing can be expressed. Through this sādhana the Yogi's body becomes incorruptible and the Yogi himself obtains immortality. The perfect Yogi claims to overcome death.

These conceptions form the background and, as it were, the terrain for the development of Kabīr's religious thought. However, in his time, two other currents had already penetrated the old substratum of popular Hinduism: that of Vishnuite devotion (bhakti), which had come from the South, and that of Islāmic mysticism, which had been spread by the Sufīs in Northwest India since the thirteenth century.

Contrary to Yoga, which is essentially technique, Bhakti is essentially faith, the adoration of a personal God, who is generally “manifested” in an anthropomorphic form, that of an avatāra or “descent.” It is this visible form of a “qualified” (saguna) God which is the object of Vishnuite devotion. This God asks of his devotee (“bhakta”) or of his servant (dāsa) nothing but faith, love, and trust. The attitude of the perfect bhakta, then, is one of humility and of totally giving himself into the hands of his chosen divinity, that is to say, of the divine Form that he has chosen as the object of his worship. The bhakta expects his salvation only by grace, whatever may be his own moral faults. The invocation of the name of the divinity is enough to purify the devotee. In its purest and highest form Bhakti is prapatti, “abandon,” the total self-surrender of the devotee to his Lord. The religion of Bhakti is one of a deeply felt love for a visible god, a love which suffices for everything and is its own recompense; Bhakti is constantly represented as the “easy path,” a kind of moyen court which makes all asceticism unnecessary and which manifests itself by a kind of continual exaltation and an abundance of tears. As a religion essentially emotive, based on rather uncertain metaphysical foundations, but strongly monotheistic in its fundamental orientation, Bhakti appears remarkably in harmony with the religious needs of the Indian masses; one can say that it remains, to this day, the truly popular religion. The polytheistic forms which it continues to gather around itself have much less significance than one generally believes. It is remarkable that the entire Hindu tradition recognizes in Kabīr himself a “great bhatka,” in spite of his fierce negations and his irreducible opposition to all kinds of idolatry and to all the divine “manifestations” adored by the Vishnuite bhaktas.

The mysticism of the Muslim Sufīs is based on a complete abandonment to the will of an all-powerful and merciful God—but this God is a completely spiritual Being, infinitely removed from all sensible manifestation. The man who discerns in creation a reflection of His Beauty is seized with a love for Him, a love which is above all the intense desire to meet Him, and he rushes toward Him by the path of detachment. Far from being strewn with flowers, this “path” (tariqa) is bristling with sorrows; the soul of the lover is tortured by desire for the inaccessible Beauty and by separation from his Beloved. Permanent union with his God is unattainable in this life and will be achieved only after death when the purified soul will be freed from the bonds of the body. But it sometimes happens that God makes himself in some way perceptible for some moments to that mysterious internal organ which is the “heart” (sirr) of man. The Sufī, like the Yogi, is turned inward in the quest for a superior Reality which manifests itself in the most profound depths of his soul. It may be pointed out, however, that the forms of Sufism which were widespread in North India at the time of Kabīr had already been influenced by Vedanta monism and had also assimilated some yogic methods, so much so that the Sufīs appeared to the people as a variety of Yogis. And one knows that Kabīr himself, although he was opposed to the Islamic practices and was rather suspicious of all pious mendicity, often associated with the Sufīs, numerous at the time in the west of the country.

The three currents of thought that we have attempted to define summarily agree on one point: the pre-eminence of the interior experience over any other source of religious and metaphysical knowledge. For the Yogi there is only experimental truth; he does not search for the truth and the Truth does not come to him: he “realizes” it, that is, he “makes” it, in proportion as he progresses in his sādhana (the word signifying both “method” and “realization”). The bhakta accepts in principle the postulates of Brahmanical orthodoxy, and recognizes at least theoretically the eternal truth of the Veda—but he cares very little about it, for he has no need of it in order to be saved. He needs a visible form or of a manifestation of the divinity in order to “pin” his devotion there, but in the choice of it he remains free to follow the desire of his heart and the inclination of his imagination: it is his own religious experience which largely determines the conception and the image that he makes of his God. The Sufī is apparently less free, since he acknowledges the Qur’ānic revelation and the principles of Islāmic orthodoxy—but he gets around this in his own way, by gnosis: without denying the validity of the traditional path, based on the Qur’ānic prescriptions, he willingly leaves it to the mass of believers, in quest of the joys of “Paradise.” He chooses another way for himself, the way of love and of intimate experience of God, a way reserved for the initiates only; in this way he will come to a progressive illumination, symbolized by the rending of the veils which separate him from the perfect Beauty.

The blessedness to which the Sufī aspires is not the Islāmic paradise, but a kind of mysterious life in God, sometimes expressed as a veritable immersion or absorption in Him.

These various currents explain the genesis of the sādhana of Kabīr: it does not appear to have precise metaphysical bases, but seems rather to be an original synthesis of Bhakti and of medieval Yoga, with some elements borrowed from the Sufī tradition. Throughout Kabīr's work the accent is on interiorization: man ought to turn his attention away from the exterior world, from all sensible forms, in order to withdraw into the innermost depths of his conscience (undoubtedly analogous to the sirr of the Sufīs) where God dwells:

They say that Hari dwells in the east and that Allah resides in the west:
Search in your heart, search in your heart—there is his dwelling and his residence!
I believed that Hari was far off, though he is present in plentitude in all beings,
I believed Him outside of me—and, near, He became to me far!

The new Yogi has left there all his practices. Love (prem) henceforth is his only technique and his goal is the mysterious “meeting” with God:

Says Kabīr, in love, I have found Him,
Simple hearts have met Raghouraï. …

This meeting between the Lord and the soul in its depths is a mysterious experience which Kabīr calls paricaya, from a word which signifies “acquaintance by sight or by contact.” Kabīr liked to underline the ineffable and transcendent character of this “experience”:

In the body, the Inaccessible is obtained, in the Inaccessible, an access,
Says Kabīr, I obtained the Experience, when the Guru showed me the Path.
Love has lighted the cage, an eternal Yoga has awakened,
Doubt has vanished, happiness has appeared, the beloved Bridegroom has been found!

Kabīr seems most often to interpret this union as an ultimate absorption of the lover in the Beloved:

When I was, Hari was not—now Hari is, and I am no more,
Every shadow is dispersed when the Lamp has been found within the soul. …
The One for whom I went out to search, I found Him in my house,
And this One has become myself, whom I called Other!

Kabīr willingly borrows the language and metaphors of Yoga in order to describe the conditions of the meeting; this is possible only by the destruction of the “mental,” and a final victory over “duality”:

The lamp is dry, the oil is used up,
The guitar is silent, the dancer has lain down,
The fire is extinguished and no smoke rises,
The soul is absorbed in the One and there is no more duality. …

Kabīr has lost himself; he has disappeared like salt in meal, like a drop in the ocean:

You search, you search, O Friend—but Kabīr has disappeared:
The drop is absorbed in the Ocean: how find it again?
.....By the touch of the magic stone, the copper is changed,
But this copper, having become gold, is saved!
By the company of the saints, Kabīr is changed,
But this Kabīr, having become Rām, is saved!

The frequent allusions to the absorption of the soul in God explain how Kabīr could be considered a monist nirgunī, that is, a partisan of the “non-qualified” (nirguna) Absolute in opposition to the partisans of Bhakti, worshipers of a personal and “qualified” (saguna) God. But this monistic interpretation of the thought of Kabīr is contradicted by the essential role that love plays in his sādhana and by the nature of the relation which he maintains with his God, Rām. The principal difficulty of interpretation comes undoubtedly from the fact that India, in its totality, conceives the person as a limitation of Being, and cannot accept the idea of a personal God who would not be anthropomorphic at the same time or in some way tainted with “illusion.” Now Kabīr formally rejected all the illusory manifestations of the divine which are the object of Vishnuite devotion, and he claimed to direct his love to God, the unfathomable Being, “as He is in Himself.” For those who understand only sentimental devotion, this love is a mystery: “Inexpressible is the story of Love: if one told it, who would believe it?”

The attitude of nirgunī Kabīr toward his God, to whom he usually gives the Vishnuite names (Hari, Rām, Govinda), is not that of the philosopher before a metaphysical entity, but rather that of the devotee before the God “who has bound his heart to His own with gentle bonds.” The weaver Kabīr entertains relations of the most touching familiarity with this unfathomable and ineffable Being. He retains an acute consciousness of his own misery and looks only to the grace of his Lord for his salvation, that is, the joy of meeting:

How shall I be saved, O Master, how shall I be saved?
          Here I am, full of iniquities!
Weary, I stand at your royal threshold:
Who then, if not You, will care for me?
          Let me see your face, open the door!

His confidence is complete; he belongs body and soul to his Master:

I am your slave, you may sell me, O Lord,
My body and my soul and all I have, all is Rām's.
If you sell me, O Rām, who will keep me?
If you keep me, O Rām, who will sell me?

Rām is not only the companion and friend; He is more than a father—He is a mother:

Whatever fault a son commits,
His mother will not have a grudge against him:
O Rām, I am your little child,
Will you not blot out all my faults?

Similar prayers and the sentiments which they express are not rare in the Bhakti literature, even before Kabīr. But the latter spoke of a completely spiritual Being, which he endeavored to discover in the depths of his own soul. Kabīr's devotion differs from Vishnuite Bhakti not only in its object but also in its character. Indeed, it does not consist only of the sentiments of tenderness, trust, and abandon, of which the entire Bhakti literature provides so many examples: it is also—and above all—an ardent quest, a heroic adventure in which he is completely involved, at the peril of his life. Kabīr's conception of divine love seems to be an original synthesis of the traditions of Yoga and of Sufīsm, the former exalting man's effort, the latter making of the yearnings, of the torments suffered by the exiled soul in its mortal condition, the necessary condition for every spiritual ascension. For Kabīr, Bhakti is no longer the “easy path,” but the precipitous path where the lover of God risks his life:

Bhakti is the beloved wife of Rām, it is not for cowards:
Cut off your head and take it in your hands, if you want to call upon Rām!

Rām is the inestimable “Diamond” that one buys only with his life, and the love of Rām is “cutting as the edge of the sword,” terrible as the fiery furnace; in the “tavern” of Love, the Tavernkeeper demands the blood price. Many are the verses which seem to paraphrase the Scripture: “fors sicut mors dilectio, dura sicut infernus aemulatio, lampadae ejus lampadae ignis atque flammarum.”

The path which leads toward God is, then, a path of suffering, vigils, and tears, and there is no other. This suffering has its source in the separation—at least apparent—of the soul from its Beloved. As the wife whose husband is on a distant journey, she languishes in sorrowful and faithful vigil. This mysterious suffering that Kabīr calls viraha, “separation,” is one of his favorite themes:

I cannot go to You and I cannot make You come:
So You will take my life, burning me in the fire of separation!
Kabīr, painful is the wound, and suffering continues in the body:
This unique suffering of love has seized my entrails. …

This suffering is itself a mystery, hidden from profane eyes. Nothing of it appears externally. He who loves “bleeds silently in the depths of his soul, as the insect devours wood.” Only the Lord can understand it: “He who has opened the wound understands this suffering and he who suffers it.”

He who loves does not, however, seek to avoid this torment, for he knows that this torment is the mark of divine election. The soul which has not known it will not have access to the true life:

Do not revile this suffering: it is royal,
The body in which it is not found will ever be but a cemetery!

It seems that Kabīr, like certain Sufīs, such as the celebrated Mansur Hallāj, has come to love suffering itself, as a privileged path to God:

Kabīr, I went out searching for Happiness and Suffering came to me,
Then I said: “Go home, Happiness—I no longer know anything but Truth and Suffering!”

The Yogis called the “living dead” (jīvanmukta) the ascetic who had succeeded in “conquering the mind” and thus freeing himself from his empirical self. Kabīr borrows this idea of the “living dead” from them and applies it to the mystic engaged in the Way of Love, who has sacrificed his earthly life. But this “death” is, in reality, the condition for the true “life” in God:

If I burn the house, it is saved, if I preserve it, it is lost,
Behold an astonishing thing: he who is dead triumphs over Death!
Death after death, the world dies, but no one knows how to die,
Kabīr, no one knows how to die so that he will no longer die!

This astonishing synthesis of such disparate elements shows the originality of Kabīr. Whatever the systems from which he was able to borrow, it is evident that all of his religious thought is ordered by an intimate experience, which may be properly called “mystical.” If Kabīr happens to speak the language of Yoga, indeed, of Vedanta monism, it is difficult to misapprehend the import of some affirmation apparently tainted with monism or pure idealism. If Kabīr has a dogma, it is that of the immanence of the divine. God is the “milieu” of the soul, as water is the milieu of the water lily:

Why do you wither, O Water Lily?
Your stem is full of water!
In the water you were born, in the water you live,
In the water, you have your dwelling, O Water Lily.

The mystery is not that the “water lily” lives but that it dies. Death is the only true scandal; it is the perpetual defiance thrown in the face of God. The attitude of Kabīr with regard to the mystery of human destiny is essentially pragmatic, as that of the Yogis and of the Buddha himself: he seeks less to pierce the mystery than to triumph over death, in which he recognizes the fruit of a monstrous separation between the soul and its divine milieu. A man without culture but profoundly intuitive, when Kabīr tries to speak of this ineffable Reality that he has discovered in the depths of his soul, he quite naturally borrows a language of pure immanence which is that of the Yogis and Sufīs of his time. However, guided by his own intimate experience, Kabīr seems to presume the existence of a God who is both immanent and transcendent. While he is incapable of reconciling these two aspects, he holds firmly “the two ends of the chain,” preferring the obscurity of paradox to the false clarity of a superficial systematization—and he keeps repeating that God is the Wholly Other, the Unknowable, the Ineffable, whose nature remains always inaccessible to created intelligence: “You alone know the mystery of your nature: Kabīr takes his refuge in You!”

For Kabīr, God is “the One,” “the True,” “the Pure,” “the Mysterious.” He feels only contempt for all those “makers of pious discourses” who pretend to speak of Him without having seen Him! Where is the truthful witness? What credence is to be given to these sages, to these prophets? All are dead and their bodies “burn with fire.” And the gods also are dead! Who has ever defied Death? This world is only a see-saw on which swing myriads of beings given up to their ruin:

Myriads of living beings swing while Death meditates:
Thousands of ages have passed and it has never suffered a defeat.

For Kabīr, only God himself can meet the challenge of death. It is He, the “perfect Guru,” who instructs his disciple in the depths of the soul and opens in him that mysterious wound from which life will emerge; the “Word” of the divine Guru is “the single arrow” which pierces the depths of the soul:

When I found grace with the Perfect Guru, He gave me a unique revelation,
Then the cloud of love burst with rain, flooding my limbs.

Then Kabīr, having unmasked the immense imposture of the false prophets, remains alone before his God, the unfathomable Being, at the same time near and far, immanent and inaccessible to the soul:

O Madhao! You are the Water for which I am consumed with thirst.
In the midst of this Water, the fire of my desire grows!
You are the Ocean and I am the fish
Which dwells in the Water and languishes with its absence.

Toward Him, there is no marked trail, no “way” other than the painful and faithful awaiting of an unforseeable illumination. God speaks only in the secret of the soul—but most men are incapable of hearing Him, and they run in crowds to their ruin “in the way of the world and of the Veda.” This spiritual quest, this heroic effort toward a purely interior religion ends on a note of infinite despair. Through the grace of Rām, Kabīr and some “saints” have been able to cross “the Ocean of Existence,” but the world is not saved, and will not be, for death remains unconquered and continues to reign over it.

“O Death, where is your victory?” This triumphant cry of St. Paul did not reach the ears of Kabīr. For him, hope is dead and no light can ever rise upon this world. The saint is he who does not yield, who does not resign himself, and who goes out alone, gropingly, in search of the true life, illumined by that unique Lamp which burns in the depths of his heart.

Notes

1. The Tantric Yoga tradition seems to have profoundly impregnated the lower layers of society in North and Central India from the tenth century. In the north the most famous sect is that of the Nāth-Panthīs or Kānphaṭa-Yogīs (“the Yogis with pierced ears”) who claim as a founder the fabulous Yogī Gorakhnāth. Besides the innumerable wandering Yogis, who were usually celibate and “unattached” (Yogī bairāgī, avadhūtas), there were numerous castes of married Yogis, called Yogīs grhastīs (also called Jogīs, Jugīs) and considered as beyond the pale of Hindu society, properly speaking. The majority of these Jogis seem to have been musicians, cotton-carders, and weavers. Many of these castes were superficially Islāmicized during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such seems to have been the case with the Julāhas of Banaras in the fourteenth century (cf. Ch. Vaudeville, Au cabaret de l'Amour, Paroles de Kabīr [Paris: UNESCO, 1959], Introduction, p. 24).