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    Songs of Kabir: A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic
    Songs of Kabir: A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic
    Songs of Kabir: A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    Songs of Kabir: A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic

    By Red Wheel Weiser

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    The poet Kabir, one of the most intriguing and celebrated personalities in the history of Indian mysticism, lived in the fifteenth century. He was a great religious reformer and left behind an exquisite body of poetry of enlightenment that weaves together the philosophies of Sufism, Hinduism, and the Kabbala. These poems express a wide range of mystical experience, from the loftiest abstractions to the most intimate and personal realization of God, and have become a classic Sufi text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Wheel Weiser
    Release dateFeb 15, 2002
    ISBN9781609254629
    Songs of Kabir: A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic

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    • 5/5
      timeless wisdom rendered in Tagore's exquisite translation, with a helpful introduction to put it all in context. This spiritual classic is up there with The Tao and The Gita, in my humble opinion.
    • 5/5
      I downloaded this free Kindle edition with some trepidation, expecting what I paid...nothing. Instead, as I became fascinated with Evelyn Underhill’s erudite and detailed introduction to this edition, translated by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, I realised I’d stumbled on a gem.The introduction is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of the lyrical, mystical poems that follow. Reading it again after one has read the SONGS OF KABIR deepens both the enjoyment of the introduction itself and the songs.But it’s in the ecstasy of Kabir’s spiritual experiences as he struggles to share his transcendent experience of the Divine that make this book so excellent. As do the Psalms of King David, Kabir’s works range across human emotions, from the depths of despair to the heights of an overwhelming love.Kabir’s faith and love of a Divine Being he experienced personally, in his ordinary life as a weaver, could not be boxed by traditional religions, and his impatience with rituals and rules that increase the distance between man and the Divine is clear (“…The Kazi is searching the words of the Koran, and instructing others: but if his heart be not steeped in that love, what does it avail, though he be a teacher of men? The Yogi dyes his garments with red: but if he knows naught of that colour of love, what does it avail though his garments be tinted?...” [Poem LIV]The real heart of these poems – what speaks most clearly to the reader across the centuries – is Kabir’s passion and adoration of the Divine Presence in his daily life. Not for this mystic the lonely mountaintop and isolation from the real world. The SONGS OF KABIR clearly reflect the inspiration and joy of a man who had discovered an essential Truth and who carried his God within his heart:“Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have broken away from the clutch of all narrowness. Kabir says: I have attained the unattainable, and my heart is coloured with the colour of love.” [Poem XLVIII]Kabir was, indeed, a free spirit who had discovered the meaning of Love.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Songs of Kabir - Red Wheel Weiser

    SONGS OF KABIR

    A 15th Century Sufi Literary Classic

    Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

    Introduction by Andrew Harvey

    First published in 2002 by

    Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

    368 Congress Street

    Boston. MA 02210

    www.redwheelvveiser.com

    Introduction copyright © 2002 Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

    All rights reserved.

    Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-82318

    ISBN: 1-57863-249-8

    08 07 06 05 04

    8  7  6  5  4  3  2

    TCP

    The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

    INTRODUCTION TO THE 2002 EDITION

    YOU have in hand a new edition of a book first published in English in 1915, In this terrible and desperate time—after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon permanently shattered a whole civilization's sense of security and began an international war on terrorism that may last for years and decide the future of humanity—it may seem frivolous, even shocking to celebrate the re-publication of a famous translation by Tagore of the Indian mystic Kabir. With human history now being poured red-hot from the cauldron of terror and war, what use is there in reading and meditating on a hundred or so of the poems of an illiterate weaver from Benares? Some five hundred years have passed since Kabir wrote these poems. He lived and worked in a civilization very different from our own and from a mystical vision that may seem irrelevant to us now, trapped as we are in a conflict whose impact is ever more unnerving and brutal.

    Kabir wrote, More than all else do I cherish at heart that love which makes me to live a limitless life in this world? How in our world, increasingly limited by fear and violence, can we credit his claims let alone believe they have any light to give to our situation?

    Such a reaction is understandable but it fails to realize that the root of the problems that now afflict us from every direction lie in a worldwide spiritual crisis that only the highest and deepest mystical knowledge and vision can cure. This worldwide crisis is essentially a crisis of human identity. Humanity as a whole has lost its sense of radical interconnection with the Divine and so with the creation. And, as individuals, we have lost that mystical connection with each other.

    More than forty years ago, Teilhard de Chardin wrote, We have come to the moment when we will have to choose between suicide and adoration. These words may have seemed unduly apocalyptic when they were first written in the 1960s. Now, to anyone who is spiritually awake to what is happening, they are nothing less than the clearest imaginable formulation of the choice that faces humanity. We can choose the suicide of an addiction to materialism and a materialistic vision of humanity or we can choose adoration of the Divine and the Divine in the creation and in the human. Such an adoration could engender a massive revolution of the heart and so a wholly new way of acting in every arena.

    Are we as a race going to go on choosing division and separation, the passion to possess and dominate, the constant reaching after violence to solve our problems? Or are we going to listen to the drumbeats of Apocalypse and undergo a vast inner transformation that would at last give us access to the Divine within us and its force, stamina and brilliantly refined knowledge of unity of all beings and things? This is what Kabir wrote of. He called it the formless God that takes a thousand forms in the eyes of his creatures.

    It must be clear now to anyone who wants to see, that the problems the world faces-not only of terrorism but also of environmental holocaust, population explosion and the cruel domination of a world economic system that keeps a few countries living in decadent comfort while the rest of the world starves-cannot be dealt with using the consciousness at which humanity now finds itself. We must transform or commit suicide. We are going to have to take, in massive numbers and with great fervor, a leap into our inner divinity and into the limitless life in this world it alone can give us. If we don't do this, not only will we die out as a species, but we're apt to take the whole of Nature with us in a bloodbath of unimaginable devastation and ferocity.

    As we struggle-those of us who are awake and many more who will be awakened by the horror of what is to come-the testimony of the greatest mystics to our essential divine identity and to the powers, new life, energy, and vision that spring from it will be our central inspiration. These men and women from history will be our oxygen, the force and truth that keep us hoping and fighting and working and enduring though everything. In the all-testing times ahead, only a deep mystical inner faith and knowledge will have the power to lift people to a plane of truth that no horror or cruelty can disturb.

    As we take this new and unprecedented journey into our divine truth, the hundred or so poems of Kabir that are offered here in the sublime translations of Rabindranath Tagore will be of profound help to us. With Rumi, Jesus, Ramakrishna and Aurobindo, Kabir is one of a handful of spiritual geniuses whose realization transcends all barriers of dogma, religion, country and civilization. Kabir's God is at once immanent and transcendent and beyond either. He is both the uncreated Eternal Light and the cosmos constantly birthed and re-birthed from it. He is the eternal and glorious One and the friend directly knowable to all those who want to offer their hearts in love to Him, whatever their caste or faith. Only such a clear knowledge is of any use in the mystical journey for, as he wrote in one of his greatest poems:

    It is a hard

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