Embrace Paradoxes: Kabir’s Teachings on Unity and Impermanence

Kabir is both widely known and cited, but also obscure. Few know about his own life and origins. Some believe he was abandoned by a Brahmin widow and later raised by Muslims. Historians refute this. They’re confident he was born to a family of Muslim weavers. As Shabnam Virmani notes in her stylishly-penned, sharply-compiled volume on Kabir’s dohas – Burn Down Your House – his sayings might resonate with Vedantic thought.

Yet he’s also embraced by those who are marginalized inside Hinduism. Dalits hang his portrait besides that of Ambedkar’s. Kabir appeals to secularists because he preaches against religious hatred, and to activists since he enjoins a path of action. At the same time, “he will also insist on quietude, drawing us inwards, to the realms of breath, stillness and an inner body awareness.”

Then again Kabir might have relished these contradictions and paradoxes, given his heretic rejection of all labels. Just as the scholar A.K. Ramanujan posited that there can be 300 Ramayanas, Virmani observes that there are countless versions of Kabir’s verses. After all each devotee or poetry buff is likely to add her/his/their imprint on the seer’s writings. And that is as it should be.

Equally, Virmani, a documentary film maker, director of the Kabir Project, author, scholar, singer and connoisseur of Sufi songs and mystic poets, emphasizes that we can learn from the legends surrounding the saint rather than obsess over “facts”. After all it is that Kabir, the one who resides in “the collective consciousness of a people” that really matters.

Heed His Syncretic Message

At a time when religious beliefs are being instrumentalized to foster social and political schisms, it would do well to attend to Kabir’s dismissal of those who are theological experts and yet incapable of recognizing the overarching Unity or Oneness that binds all.

He scoffs at those who read the Quran or the Gita, and dwell on differences rather than on our striking sameness. As Kabir puts it,

“A Qazi sits, intoning the Qur’an
Then raids a poor neighbor’s den.”

Or

“You read the Gita, but lack perception
There’s no chance you’ll ever awaken.”

Transcend Bookish Knowledge

In particular, Kabir was quick to criticize learned Pandits and Qazis, who derive pride and even arrogance from their exclusive knowledge of sacred texts. In one story, when Kabir arrived at a South Indian ashram, the Brahmins asked him to recite the Vedas to test his knowledge. Instead, he defiantly signaled to a buffalo, which then started bellowing verses “with perfect clarity and precision!”, compelling the overawed Brahmins to fall at his feet.

In another story, a pandit called Sarvajit, puffed up about his own learning, only added to his vanity in transmitting his knowledge to others. His mother challenged him to debate Kabir, and said she would be impressed only if he could defeat the poet-saint. Sarvajit travelled to Varanasi, where he challenged Kabir to an intellectual duel. Kabir said he was ignorant to begin with, and was willing to lend his thumbprint to a letter inscribed with “Kabir lost, Sarvajit won”. Each time Sarvajit returned with the letter and showed it to his mother, the message reversed: “Sarvajit lost, Kabir won.” Till Sarvajit had to accede to Kabir’s wordless powers.

Kabir often denigrated book knowledge, and urged folks to gain knowledge by doing or action.

“You’re not grounded in action
So what if your talk is big?
Like a palace of cards, your bluster
Collapses in just a wink”

Like Shams Tabrizi, who urged Rumi to burn all his books, Kabir warns against pretentious pedantry. Real knowledge knows no religious bounds, does not believe in single, sacred texts, and is available to all – regardless of caste, class or creed.

“Knowledge here, knowledge there
Knowledge stacked up in piles
A knowing that knows what knowing is
Now that’s the knowledge
That’s mine”

Value Time Rather Than Stuff

Kabir also knew that time is the greatest human resource, more precious, more glittering and more elusive than anything else. To make the most then of this disappearing dimension, we must seize present moments as they occur, rather than letting them slip into regrets about the past, or fantasies about the future.

Kabir urged us to constantly remember death, and the impermanence of everything. He calls the body “ghat” – “an urn or clay pot.” Given that Kabir himself was a weaver, metaphors of stuff made with hands are braided into his verses. He was aware viscerally of the fragility of things, including ourselves. As Virmani puts it, “Things are not beautiful but fragile, rather they are beautiful because they are fragile.”

In fact, the ecological crisis has been wrought because of our denial of death – of the death of objects and of not fashioning a graceful exit for that and those that die.

Dallying with death in this way, ironically enough, imbues life with a richness that it otherwise lacks. It also compels us to maintain a lighthearted outlook towards objects that will melt into air or be consumed by flames:

“A little life so laden
With sky-scraping desires!
All who stood were swept away
Bosses, bigwigs, beggars”

Virmani says: “Death is the master key – the guru – that unlocks so much that is fiercely Kabir – his freedom, his irreverence, his humour, his fearlessness.”

Relinquish Titles and Temporary Dwellings

Rather than rooting ourselves in a particular “home” or identity, Kabir asks us to revel in the opposite. To “place faith in homelessness, to place faith in unbelonging.” Such detachment should exude to everything – to ideologies, to beliefs, to material objects, to nationalities, to relationships.

The truth to Kabir, lies beyond dogmatic claims of “yes” or “no.” “The truth is in the pulsating, shape-shifting now. When it gets consecrated, codified and frozen into belief, it’s a stale truth, of some other space and time.” This would be a diktat worth heeding in our deeply polarized times.

After all, Kabir rejects national and religious boundaries, or differences between genders. “Kabir’s desires for oneness looks within, and finds a manifold diversity and wholeness there.”

Strive and Surrender

Should we continue striving or do we surrender? But surrender is not a passive or even indolent state. Achieving it requires effort.

We ought to lighten our burdens, the heavy load of desires that we cart on our heads.

“What is done is done by You
Nothing is done by me
Did someone say I did it?
It was You inside of me”

Choose The Thorny Path

In travelling down Kabir’s path, we enter a different terrain. A place where we re-explore our body, pay heed to (or consciously ignore) our senses, reacquaint ourselves with the subtle workings of our minds, hearts, nerves and other invisible organs. While also deeply re-engaging with our environs: “As we explore this kaaya nagar, the city of our body-self, we see it stretch out before us as a landscape of limitless peril and possibility.” 

Beyond the sensory gates, Kabir suggests we can access a tenth gate, embedded on the top of our skulls. The journey isn’t pleasant, and requires a willingness to face unexpected, menacing obstacles.

“If the path to God
Was fun and games
Would a whetstone face the knife?
Give up lust, greed and rage
Then you will arrive”

Foster The Witnessing Self

And just like all self-help exercises and diktats assume the presence of two selves – an acting self and a witnessing self, Kabir too suggests a pupil and guru self:

“Two birds sit on a branch
One pupil, one mentor
The pupil pecks and savors the fruit
The guru is at play forever”

As the guru starts playing a larger role, the senses start exercising more self-restraint. “We don’t eat, we savour.”

Kabir urges us to dive within to discover the unfragmented whole. “Kabir gives us another architecture to imagine the shape of our selves.”

“The world’s a mirage
That obscures the eternal
Kabir has seen through it
And blown its cover”

Relish Detachment and Solitude

Kabir’s poems simultaneously dwell on love and detachment. But this is not an icy withdrawal, devoid of feelings. “It is an ardent yearning for the state of non-attachment, an intense desire to be desire-less, a passionate cry for dispassion.”

Kabir reminds us that at the beginning and at the end, we are all alone. And ironically, “the more solitary we are, the more possible is our compassion towards others.”

“You come stark naked
You go stark naked
All your fancy garments
Will soon be shed”

References

Shabnam Virmani, Burn Down Your House: Provocations from Kabir, Speaking Tiger, 2024