other · literary

Kabir — Songs

c. 1440–1518 CE · Medieval India (15th century CE) · Varanasi (Kashi) and Maghar, North India

I — O Servant, Where Dost Thou Seek Me?

1O servant, where dost thou seek Me?

2Lo! I am beside thee.

3I am neither in temple nor in mosque:

4I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash:

5Neither am I in rites and ceremonies,

6nor in yoga and renunciation.

7If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me:

8thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time.

9Kabir says, "O Sadhu! God is the breath of all breath."

II — Do Not Go to the Garden of Flowers

10Do not go to the garden of flowers!

11O Friend! go not there;

12in thy body is the garden of flowers.

13Take thy seat on the thousand petals of the lotus,

14and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.

III — Between the Conscious and the Unconscious

15Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has set up a swing:

16all beings, even the suns and moons, ride upon it,

17and it never stops.

18Millions of beings are there:

19the sun and the moon in their courses are there:

20millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.

21All swing! The sky and the earth and the air and the water;

22and the Lord Himself taking form:

23and the sight of this has made Kabir a servant.

IV — The River and Its Waves

24The river and its waves are one surf:

25where is the difference between the river and its waves?

26When the wave rises, it is the water;

27and when it falls, it is the same water again.

28Tell me, sir, where is the distinction?

29Because it has been named as wave, shall it no longer be considered as water?

30Within the Supreme Brahma, the worlds are being told like beads:

31look upon that rosary with the eyes of wisdom.

V — I Have Been Thinking of the Difference Between Water and the Waves

32I have been thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it.

33Rising, water still remains water; falling, it is water:

34where is the distinction?

35I have been thinking of the difference between the seed and its shell:

36there is no difference.

37There is neither the beloved nor the lover:

38the very existence of the lover shows him and the beloved to be one.

VI — The Moon Shines in My Body

39The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:

40the moon is within me, and so is the sun.

41The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me;

42but my deaf ears cannot hear it.

43So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine,

44his works are as naught:

45When all love of the I and the Mine is dead,

46then the work of the Lord is done.

VII — O How May I Ever Express That Secret Word?

47O how may I ever express that secret word?

48O how can I say He is not like this, and He is like that?

49If I say that He is within me, the universe is ashamed:

50If I say that He is without me, it is falsehood.

51He makes the inner and the outer worlds

52to be indivisibly one:

53the conscious and the unconscious, both are His footstools.

VIII — When the Bride Is One With Her Lover

54When the Bride is one with her lover,

55who cares to know who is the lover, and who the Beloved?

56Behold how a mad elephant tears down all the fences,

57and destroys the whole plantation of sugar-cane.

58So does the love of God make the man mad:

59he forgets the world, he forgets even himself.

IX — I Do Not Know What Manner of God Is Mine

60I do not know what manner of God is mine,

61I have neither seen Him nor heard Him.

62Kabir says: "The wave is nothing but the sea."

X — The Lake of My Heart

63The lake of my heart is full to the brim:

64but from where the water comes, that no one knows.

65The lotus of my heart is in bloom:

66but from where the fragrance comes, that no one knows.

67The bird of my heart flies away in ecstasy:

68but where it goes, that no one knows.

69Kabir says: "O Sadhu! think, contemplate.

70Within thy body is the garden of God:

71find Him there — the Beloved of thy soul."

notes

Kabir (c. 1440–1518) was a North Indian mystic poet who has been claimed as a spiritual ancestor by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike, and by neither more than by his own followers, the Kabir Panth. Born into a Muslim family of weavers in Varanasi (Kashi), the most sacred city of Hinduism, he composed songs in the vernacular Hindi of his day — songs that mocked the pretensions of both Brahmanical Hinduism and orthodox Islam and pointed toward a formless divine reality accessible only in the interior of the human heart. Kabir was largely illiterate. His works were compiled by his followers and by later editors — most famously in the Bijak, the Adi Granth of the Sikhs (where 500 of his verses are preserved), and various collections. Because so many later poets composed "in Kabir's voice," the boundaries of his authentic corpus are impossible to fix; what is quoted as "Kabir" is a tradition as much as an individual body of work. Legend holds that on Kabir's death, his Hindu and Muslim followers quarrelled — one side wanting to cremate him, the other to bury him. When they raised the sheet from his body, they found only a heap of flowers, which they divided between them. The 1915 translation by Rabindranath Tagore (from Bengali versions collected by Kshiti Mohan Sen) is the most influential English rendering, and made Kabir known to the modern West. Translation: Rabindranath Tagore, assisted by Evelyn Underhill, "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," London: Macmillan, 1915. Public domain.

DharmaHinduMysticalPoetryBhakti

related texts

The Bhagavad Gitaother · c. 200 BCE–200 CE

## Chapter I — The Sorrow of Arjuna (Arjuna-Vishada Yoga) [1] Dhritarashtra said: [2] Tell me, O Sanjaya! gathered on the plain of Kuru, [3] That sacred plain, both these my hosts arrayed, [4] What did they? Ready for the battle there? [5] Sanjaya said: Then the great Commander, Duryodhana, [6] S…

Masnavi of Rumi — The Spiritual Coupletsother · c. 1258–1273 CE

## Book I — The Song of the Reed [1] Hearken to this Reed forlorn, [2] Breathing, ever since it was torn [3] From its rushy bed, a strain [4] Of impassioned love and pain. [5] "The secret of my song, though near, [6] None can see and none can hear. [7] Oh, for a friend to know the sign [8] And mi…

The Upanishads — Selectedother · c. 800–200 BCE

## Chandogya Upanishad — Tat Tvam Asi (That Art Thou) [1] There lived a man called Svetaketu Aruneya. [2] His father said to him: "Svetaketu, go to school. [3] There is no one in our family who is not learned." [4] So he went to school at twelve years of age, [5] And having learnt all the Vedas, r…

Meister Eckhart — Selected Sermonsother · c. 1290–1327 CE

## The Spark of the Soul [1] There is something in the soul which is only God and the soul, [2] and it is so pure and so lofty and so noble that no creature can enter into it, [3] but only God alone. [4] This is the little spark of the soul, of which the masters say [5] that it is uncreated and u…