Kabir Read online

  and he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.

  The darkness of night is coming along fast, and the shadows of love close in the body and the mind.

  Open the window to the west, and disappear into the air inside you.

  Near your breastbone there is an open flower.

  Drink the honey that is all around that flower.

  Waves are coming in:

  there is so much magnificence near the ocean!

  Listen: Sound of big seashells! Sound of bells!

  Kabir says: Friend, listen, this is what I have to say:

  The Guest I love is inside me!

  It is time to put up a love-swing!

  Tie the body and then tie the mind so that they swing between the arms of the Secret One you love.

  Bring the water that falls from the clouds to your eyes,

  and cover yourself inside entirely with the shadow of night.

  Bring your face up close to his ear,

  and then talk only about what you want deeply to happen.

  Kabir says: Listen to me, brother, bring the shape, face, and odor of the Holy One inside you.

  Why should I flail about with words, when love has made the space inside me full of light?

  I know the diamond is wrapped in this cloth, so why should I open it all the time and look?

  When the pan was empty, it flew up; now that it’s full, why bother weighing it?

  The swan has flown to the mountain lake!

  Why bother with ditches and holes any more?

  The Holy One lives inside you—

  why open your other eyes at all?

  Kabir will tell you the truth: Listen, brother!

  The Guest, who makes my eyes so bright,

  has made love with me.

  Friend, if you’ve never really met the Secret One,

  what is the source of your self-confidence?

  Stop all this flirtation using words.

  Love does not happen with words.

  Don’t lie to yourself about the holy books and what they say.

  The love I talk of is not in the books.

  Who has wanted it has it.

  The Guest Is Inside You

  The spiritual athlete often changes the color of his clothes,

  and his mind remains gray and loveless.

  He sits inside a shrine room all day,

  so that the Guest has to go outdoors and praise the rocks.

  Or he drills holes in his ears, his hair grows enormous and matted,

  people mistake him for a goat….

  He goes out into wilderness areas, strangles his impulses,

  and makes himself neither male nor female….

  He shaves his skull, puts his robe in an orange vat,

  reads the Bhagavad-Gita, and becomes a terrific talker.

  Kabir says: Actually you are going in a hearse to the country of death,

  bound hand and foot!

  Friend, please tell me what I can do about this world

  I hold to, and keep spinning out!

  I gave up sewn clothes, and wore a robe,

  but I noticed one day the cloth was well woven.

  So I bought some burlap, but I still

  throw it elegantly over my left shoulder.

  I pulled back my sexual longings,

  and now I discover that I’m angry a lot.

  I gave up rage, and now I notice

  that I am greedy all day.

  I worked hard at dissolving the greed,

  and now I am proud of myself.

  When the mind wants to break its link with the world

  it still holds on to one thing.

  Kabir says: Listen my friend,

  there are very few that find the path!

  I don’t know what sort of a God we have been talking about.

  The caller calls in a loud voice to the Holy One at dusk.

  Why? Surely the Holy One is not deaf.

  He hears the delicate anklets that ring on the feet of an insect as it walks.

  Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead,

  wear your hair matted, long, and ostentatious,

  but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?

  Breathe in that word out of which the whole Milky Way has come!

  That word is your Teacher; I heard that sound, and I am its disciple.

  How many are there alive who have taken in its meaning?

  Listen, student, hold to that word! Do it!

  All the old texts and holy poems shout about it.

  The world has its deep roots in that word.

  The Rishas and the devotees babble about it,

  but no one grasps how mysterious the word is!

  The father gets up from supper and walks out when he hears it.

  The ascetic returns to love when he hears it.

  The Six Great Systems keep laying it all out.

  The animal of renunciation drives toward that word.

  The world with all its elephants and microbes has jumped out of that word.

  Inside the word everything is full of light.

  Kabir says: True. But who knows where the word came from in the first place?

  I have been thinking of the difference between water

  and the waves on it. Rising,

  water’s still water, falling back,

  it is water, will you give me a hint

  how to tell them apart?

  Because someone has made up the word

  “wave,” do I have to distinguish it

  from water?

  There is a Secret One inside us;

  the planets in all the galaxies

  pass through his hands like beads.

  That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.

  There is a flag no one sees blowing in the sky-temple.

  A blue cloth has been stretched up,

  it is decorated with the moon and many jewels.

  The sun and the moon can be seen in that place;

  when looking at that, bring your mind down to silence.

  I will tell you the truth:

  the man who has drunk from that liquid wanders around like someone insane.

  Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

  All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

  The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

  And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

  If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

  Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

  The woman who is separated from her lover spins at the spinning wheel.

  The Baghdad of the body rises with its towers and gates.

  Inside it the palace of intelligence has been built.

  The wheel of ecstatic love turns around in the sky,

  and the spinning seat is made of the sapphires of work and study.

  This woman weaves threads that are subtle,

  and the intensity of her praise makes them fine!

  Kabir says: I am that woman.

  I am weaving the linen of night and day.

  When my Lover comes and I feel his feet,

  the gift I will have for him is tears.

  The Holy One disguised as an old person in a cheap hotel

  Goes out to ask for carfare.

  But I never seem to catch sight of him.

  If I did, what would I ask him for?

  He has already experienced what is missing in my life.

  Kabir says: I belong to this old person.

  Now let the events about to come, come!

  A certain bird sits in this tree. The delight of life is where it dances.

  Nobody knows where the bird is, nor what all this music means.

  It makes a nest where the branches make the most dark-ness.

  It
appears at dusk and disappears at dawn, and it never gives one hint of what all this means.

  Nobody talks to me about this singing bird.

  It has no color, nor is it free of color. It has no shape, no form, no boundaries.

  It sits in the shadow thrown by love.

  It lives in what cannot be reached, where time doesn’t end, where dying things don’t exist. And no one pays any attention to its coming or going.

  Kabir says: You brother, you seeker, this whole thing is a great mystery.

  Tell all the wise men it would be a good thing to know where this bird spends the night.

  What comes out of the harp? Music!

  And there is a dance no hands or feet dance.

  No fingers play it, no ears hear it,

  because the Holy One is the ear,

  and the one listening too.

  The great doors remain closed, but the spring fragrance

  comes inside anyway,

  and no one sees what takes place there.

  Men and women who have entered through both doors at once will understand this poem.

  Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?

  Far inside the house

  entangled music—

  What is the sense of leaving your house?

  Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,

  but inside there is no music,

  then what?

  Mohammed’s son pores over words, and points out this

  and that,

  but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,

  then what?

  The Yogi comes along in his famous orange.

  But if inside he is colorless, then what?

  Kabir says: Every instant that the sun is risen, if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony, in the hot fields, or in a walled garden, my own Lord is making love with me.

  At last the notes of his flute come in, and I cannot stop from dancing around on the floor….

  The blossoms open, even though it is not May,

  and the bee knows of it already.

  The air over the ocean is troubled,

  there is a flash, heavy seas rise in my chest.

  Rain pours down outside;

  and inside I long for the Guest.

  Something inside me has reached to the place

  where the world is breathing.

  The flags we cannot see are flying there.

  Kabir says: My desire-body is dying, and it lives!

  Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.

  My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.

  Inside your body there are flowers.

  One flower has a thousand petals.

  That will do for a place to sit.

  Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty

  inside the body and out of it,

  before gardens and after gardens.

  The Guest is inside you, and also inside me; you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.

  We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.

  Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

  The blue sky opens out farther and farther,

  the daily sense of failure goes away,

  the damage I have done to myself fades,

  a million suns come forward with light,

  when I sit firmly in that world.

  I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,

  inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,

  rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,

  there are whole rivers of light.

  The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.

  How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

  Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.

  The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.

  With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.

  How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy

  he sings inside his own little boat.

  His poems amount to one soul meeting another.

  These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.

  They rise above both coming in and going out.

  AFTERWORD

  Kabir and the Transcendental Bly

  JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY

  Translations are rivers—their sources often hidden, their destinations potentially oceanic—but for all that, they have a true claim to history. The history I imagine for Robert Bly’s immensely influential translations of Kabir connects them with the New England Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau. Here were men whose sense of human dignity and personal possibility, like Bly’s, led them to look beyond the shores of their own little Calvinist lake. They read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Thoreau took a copy of the Gita with him when he retreated to Walden Pond. As winter came and workers broke Walden’s ice into blocks, Thoreau indulged the thought that some of those blocks might end up before “the sweltering inhabitants … of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta,” floating upstream, as it were, on the river that had brought him the transcendental wisdom of the Gita. Or rather, both Thoreau and his Indian counterparts dipped from the same well.

  The aquifer may have been the same, but the surface concourse between Calcutta and Walden was indirect. Thoreau read the Gita not in Sanskrit but in Charles Wilkins’s English translation of 1785. Bly’s Kabir is not so different. It reworks the “hopeless” Victorian English of Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill, which benefited from an earlier English translation by Ajit Kumar Chakravarty and like it was based on the Bengali-script version of Kshitimohan Sen.1 And that takes us back, finally, to the Hindi linguistic stream where Kabir himself swam as a weaver living in Banaras (a.k.a., Benares, Varanasi) in the late fifteenth century. Or almost. Actually a complex history of written and oral transmission fills the time that intervenes between Kabir’s death in about 1518 and the publication of Tagore and Underhill’s Songs of Kabir almost exactly four centuries later. It’s true, as Bly says, that most of what has been said about the historical Kabir are rumors. Yet since the time Tagore translated Kabir, we’ve come to know a good bit more about the conditions under which these rumors spread, and especially about the ways in which early anthologies of Kabir’s poetry took shape. That doesn’t get us back to “the real Kabir.” Nothing ever will. But it does get us close enough that we can see how people saw him within a century of his own lifetime.

  The early collections

  Kabir had an enormous impact on his time. As in the case of Ravidas, the leatherworker poet who was somewhat his junior, or Tulsidas, the liberal Brahmin whose Hindi version of the Ramayana later became North India’s single most important religious text, the fact that he lived in Banaras meant worlds. It meant that his utterances could spread with a speed and authority that would otherwise have been hard to envision. Then, as now, Banaras was a major center of learning, trade, and pilgrimage. Words spoken there had built-in resonance as students, businessmen, performers, and religious travelers moved in and out of the city to locations all over India and even beyond. It was the perfect pulpit.

  Evidently Kabir’s words were quite unforgettable. Within a century of his death people were writing them down many hundreds of miles away, in Rajasthan and the Punjab. They came in three literary forms, each rhymed and possessing distinctive metrical arrangements:

  dohas (two-liners) or sakhis (witnessings), also called shaloks by the Sikhs—terse epigrammatic couplets that can be either recited or sung;

  ramainis—rhymed lyrics in chaupai meter that end in a couplet (doha); and

  pads (verses) or shabdas (words)—sung compositions whose length could vary from four verses to twelve or more. Each begins with a title verse that also serves as a refrain.

  Only the last of these made it into the Sen/Tagore/Bly corpus to any perceptible degree, and because the medium definitely conditions the message, that’s important. What’s said c
annot always be sung, and vice versa. Bly’s Kabir, moving with the dominant spirit of the pad or shabda, is intrinsically lyrical, though other Kabirs manage to subvert the form, making the singing sing against itself.

  As this implies, medium and message are closely related but not the same, and in fact collections of Kabir’s poetry that have survived from the early years tend to display quite distinct personalities, depending on how and where they were sung and who was doing the collecting. The great divide emerges between collections that were made in west-central India—in Rajasthan or the Punjab—and those that were made farther east, nearer to Kabir’s home in Banaras. The western Kabir is far more intimately, devotionally (bhakti) oriented than its eastern counterpart,2 though it would be wrong to paint the contrast black and white. East or west, Kabir retains a certain bodily focus and critical edge that sets him apart from other poet-saints of his time.