Kabir on Love ...
An Indian mystic-poet influenced by Muslim and Hindu teachings yet critical of both, Kabir (who is believed to have lived sometime between 1398 and 1518 of the common era) was a powerful contributor to the Bhakti or devotional movement in India. Many supernatural stories surround his early life. At the crux of Kabir's philosophy is union with God through self-discipline.
Here we embark on the first installation of a three part series (also see part two on Sanai and part three on Ghalib) on the mystic love poems of Persian and Indic sages, spanning syncretic and ecclectic Sufi, Muslim, and Hindu visions of union with the divine.
In particular, Kabir's vision of love is informed by a deep appreciation for the divine within each person. Many of his poems urge the reader to turn inward and to regard all human beings as manifestation of God. Perhaps it was this humanizing of the divine, and vice versa, that inspired his poems regarding cosmic union.
The Middle Way
You may recall a previous post of ours detailing the Madhyamaka school's version of the Middle Way, a Buddhist undertaking that, while expounded by the Indian sage Nāgārjuna, in fact traces itself to the earliest of teachings purportedly spoken by the historical Buddha himself from the Pāli Canon.
Why do we mention that here? It appears that Kabir, while not Buddhist and in fact critical of Buddhism, devised his own understanding of the Middle Way. His understanding was framed not in terms of a countermeasure to still the tides of metaphysical speculation, but in terms of navigating the extremes of sensory indulgence and sensory deprivation, a variation on the Middle Way also found in Buddhism.
Before launching into Kabir's poetry, we first briefly examine Kabir's version of the Middle Way, veering neither to the extreme of pleasure hoarding nor ascetic renunciation, given that both may be mistreated as objects of identification. Such an understanding deeply informed his understanding of love and mystic union.
Throughout his poetry, Kabir consistently stresses that the world is bound by objects of desire that function as sense enjoyments. Encumbered by these objects, around which we create false identifications and personalities, we often forget our spiritual goals. At the other extreme, haziness enshrouds those who renounce the householder life and live a life of poverty as ascetics. For Kabir, this is equally problematic as a potential source of identification, in this case with the life of a renunciant. While Kabir leaned toward the renunciant lifestyle, he found it equally unworthy as an object of identification relative to a life of luxury.
According to Kabir, the ideal embodiment of true renunciation concerns herself neither with “me” nor “mine.” The moment we cling to a personal ego, the mind becomes limited by self-centeredness. With a mind free from egoism, we realize pure consciousness in the form of union with Rama or Allah. So long as we allow egoism to take up our mind, the further we are from God.
Kabir’s poetry invites us to surrender the finite ego and to cultivate love for the infinite consciousness of God. This was Kabir's Middle Way.
The Runaway Mind
Sounds simple enough, but not actually so. Several obstacles stand in the way of our actualization of union. For Kabir, our chief obstacle in life is the “runaway mind,” the mind that regresses into the infinitely receding past and unfurls into the yet to unfold future, seeking a sense of safety and security in that which seems to promise but can never provide such comfort.
Kabir describes this runaway mind as a crafty huckster caught in the trap of the ego (wife) and the five senses (children). While such comparisons, wife standing for ego and children standing for the five senses, are problematic from a text critical perspective, they illustrate Kabir's renunciant tendencies.
The mind’s a shortchanging
Huckster with a crafty
Wife and five
Scoundrel children.
It won’t change its ways.
The mind’s a knot, says Kabir.
Not easy to untie. (13).
Here Kabir speaks in the third-person, informing us that the habit energy of the five senses and ego fuels the mind's tendency to run amok, a tendency which inevitably ties us up as if into a knot, thereby constraining freedom of movement.
Perhaps the crafty huckster is caught in the trap of “I,” “me,” and “mine” more than any symbolic manifestations or objects of possession. Wife and children are not to blame. Rather, the issue lies in clinging. For Kabir, wife and children are objects over which one tends to lay claim, which further tightens the knots of suffering. Anything we think we own, we also stand to lose.
Harnessing Habit Energy
Kabir further reminds us that these knots can be undone by transforming our maladaptive habit energies into behaviors conducive toward liberation. Powerful habit energy accumulated since time immemorial triggers our disembodiment, conditioning us to view the world through the notion of separateness. Thus we find ourselves constricted and bound by our conditioning. Once we take back control of the mind and cease being pushed around by our habit energy, an unbinding occurs. To quote Kabir:
Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qu’ran
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven. (14)
Reflecting his free-thinking tendencies, Kabir here reminds us that our own mind is what both shackles and unbinds us. By giving our mind over to external sources of presumed authority, we become enslaved. By indulging its habit energy, which orients us toward pursuit of sensual pleasures and material objects, we are shackled. By taking charge and rising above habit energy, we become fully alive, present, relaxed, connected, and re-embodied.
Shifting the direction of our habit energies, we come to witness the unity of God. For Kabir, love is all that makes sense. He thus dismantled his loom and sacrificed weaving, his career, for God’s love. One may wonder what triggered his radical departure from a conventional form of livelihood. Perhaps he felt an absence, an incompleteness or lack of wholeness, which led him to seek union with God. Perhaps he awakened to the realization that his sense of a separate self was nothing more than a false appearance, a dream manifested by egoic habit energy.
Love may serve as a cure of sorts for the mind that is enmeshed in habit energies and reluctant to surrender its egoic tendencies. When the idea of individual self shatters, we come to transcend any dualistic notions such as “me” and “not-me.” All separateness vanishes into the unitive nature of phenomena.
Open the inward eye, says Kabir.
It’ll make the well disappear;
The water carriers too. (41)
In the Indian subcontinent, ritual bathing in holy water, such as the River Ganges, has long been practiced. Perhaps the well and water carriers stand for a similar sort of ritual ablution. Reflecting the dissolving of impurities and the embrace of unity with God, when one gazes inward, the well (physical body) and the water carriers (five senses) are “emptied” insofar as they are realized to be an illusion and thus unworthy of identification. Consequently, when the water of life runs dry, the unity of God can move and flow into us. Likewise, once the outflow of the mind and conditioned body via the five senses cease, one experiences an inflow of unconditional love, pouring inward via mystical union with the divine.
A Dynamic Process
As usual, we return here to the relevance of such reflections to us today. With so much of the world's population preoccupied with profit and prestige, why should one even consider looking into the poetry of a fifteenth century Indian mystic?
For Kabir, awakening to God's presence is a dynamic process that requires constant awareness and continual remembrance. God is the home of our infinite consciousness, a home where we may always return despite long forgetting its unconditional embrace. Kabir emphasizes that continual remembrance of the name of God (Rama) is necessary to fuel and nourish the recognition of God.
No matter what one's religious background, or lack thereof, Kabir's use of the term "God" can be understood to stand for connection, much like "religion," from the Latin religare, to re-bind. When we remain forgetful, we grow disconnected from ourselves and our surroundings. Through remembrance (mindfulness or smṛti in Sanskrit, from smara स्मर, to re-mind or remember) we become reconnected. Through this reconnecting, remembering, re-minding, re-binding, we are in actuality un-bound, free.
Songs of Kabir. Trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. New York Review Books, 2011.
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