Person · nirguni poet-saint & weaver
Kabīr
Also known as Kabir, Kabir Das, Sant Kabir, Kabirdas
Weaver of Banāras, raised Muslim, whose couplets attack Hindu and Islamic ritual with equal contempt and insist the divine is without form or name. Some five hundred of his verses are in the Guru Granth Sāhib; the Bījak is the Kabīrpanthī collection; and the Hindi he wrote in is the plain speech of an artisan.
- Date
- c. 1440 – 1518
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Bījak; Guru Granth Sāhib; Kabīr Granthāvalī
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He left Banāras for Maghar to die, where dying was said to forfeit salvation, in order to prove the claim empty. The story that his followers found flowers instead of a body, and divided them for burial and cremation, is told by both communities and is a joke at both of their expense.
Connections (5)
- Samadhi atMaghar
Kabīr chose Maghar to die in because tradition held that dying there cost you liberation, and dying in Banāras bought it — a proposition he thought absurd. The grave and the samādhi stand a few metres apart, one built by Muslims and one by Hindus, on the same plot and over the same man.
- Life routeKabīr Chaurā, Varanasi
Kabīr Chaurā in Banāras is where he worked as a weaver and where the Kabīrpanth has its principal maṭh. The two ends of his life are the city whose salvation-claim he spent it attacking and the town he went to precisely because that claim said not to. The Kabīrpanth reads him as its founder, the Sikhs as a bhagat, and Muslims as a Sufi, and none of the three readings can accommodate the other two.
- Court associationTulsīdās
Kabīr and Tulsīdās are the two poles of Banāras devotion a century apart: one a Muslim-raised weaver who said god has no form and no name and that pilgrimage is a swindle, the other a Brahmin who wrote the Rāma story that made the city's pilgrimage make sense to millions.
- Court associationEknāth
Eknāth at Paithan and Kabīr at Banāras reached the same conclusion about caste and ritual from opposite ends of the social order and a thousand kilometres apart, with no contact between them. One was a Brahmin censured for eating with Mahārs; the other a weaver who thought the whole apparatus fraudulent.
- Scripture as guruHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)
Kabīr contributes 292 hymns, more than any other bhagat and more than most of the Gurus. A Muslim-raised weaver who thought both religions' ritual fraudulent is read as scripture every morning at Amritsar, and the Kabīrpanth reads him separately from its own book. The Granth arranges its contents by rāga rather than by author, so a weaver's hymn sits between two Gurus' in the same musical measure with nothing in the layout to distinguish them.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kabir”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
Open Kabīr in the repository →