Kabir

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Kabir

(born 1440, Varanasi, Jaunpur, India — died 1518, Maghar) Indian mystic and poet. A weaver who lived in Benares, he preached the essential oneness of all religions and was critical of both Hinduism and Islam for meaningless rites and mindless repetition. From Hinduism he accepted the ideas of reincarnation and the law of karma but rejected idolatry, asceticism, and the caste system. From Islam he accepted the idea of one God and the equality of all men. Revered by both Hindus and Muslims, he is also considered a forerunner of Sikhism, and some of his poetry was incorporated into the Adi Granth. His ideas led to the founding of several sects, including the Kabir Panth, which regards Kabir as its principal guru or as a divinity.

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Biography: Kabir

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Kabir (c. 1440 - c. 1518), thought to be active in India during the first half of the fifteenth century, was a religious mystic who spoke in poetic sayings that were passed down to his followers. It is difficult to say much more about his life with any certainty, for his life is perhaps more encrusted with legend than that of any other religious figure.

Kabir was probably not literate. The sparse information about his life and work that has come down from his own time has been embellished by oral tradition and manipulated by religious groups with their own agenda, to a point where it is impossible to establish even such basic facts as the places and dates of Kabir's birth and death. Yet Kabir has exerted a strong hold on religious and literary imaginations in both India and the West. He certainly existed, and has an establiished body of followers in India who explicitly proclaim devotion to his ideals, and he is admired for his nonsectarian mysticism and the intensity of his poetic language. Features common to many accounts of his life are thought to be accurate aspects of his biography. If Kabir posed insuperable challenges to biographers, he nevertheless continued to be a substantial spiritual presence in modern life.

Rejected All Organized Religions

Accounts of Kabir's life, in both India and the West, offer conflicting information regarding his birth. Indian admirers of Kabir list long life among his remarkable feats. Some have claimed that he lived as long as 300 years, and the lifespan of 120 years is still commonly given, with a birth year of 1398 and a death year of 1518. He spent much of his life in the city of Benares, and the book that introduced Kabir to the West placed his birth there in 1440, with the common date of 1518 given for his death. Many other towns in northern India have been proposed as his birth-place, with Magahar named perhaps more often than any other.

It is somewhat clearer that Kabir was born into the Islamic faith, for Kabir or al-Kabir, meaning the Great One, is a common name in the Islamic world and is one of the 99 names of God given in the Quran. In spite of what appears to have been his steadfast rejection of organized religion in all its forms, both Hindus and Muslims have tried to claim Kabir as one of their own. One common legend holds that Kabir was the child of the widow of a Brahmin, a member of the priestly caste of Hindu India, and that he was given to a Muslim weaver's family to raise. Sources and legends concur that Kabir practiced the weaver's trade, and this may be regarded as one of the few solid facts in his biography.

A story often told about Kabir's early life, and generally ascribed to his own words, sheds some light on his religious orientation. The story concerns Kabir's initiation into the life of a religious mystic. Despite his Muslim background, Kabir hoped to become a disciple of the Hindu mystic Ramananda. Realizing that his chances were slim, he hid on some steps leading down to the Ganges river, steps that Ramananda generally used in the morning while making his way to the river to bathe. The Hindu ascetic accidentally stepped on Kabir, and called out "Ram! Ram!" - roughly, "My Lord! My Lord!" Kabir went on to claim that this mantra spoken by Ramananda initiated him into discipleship of the Hindu mystic. Ramananda's Hindu attendants as well as local Muslim observers were outraged, but Kabir continued to claim discipleship with the Ramananda, and the great saint was impressed with his persistence. Kabir's own poems mention Ramananda as his guru, and the direct, devotional language of the two mystics has many common aspects. Ramananda was at one time thought to have died in the first half of the fifteenth century, but it is now believed that he was born around 1400 and died around 1470. If Kabir was indeed a young religious seeker when he met Ramananda, the date of 1440 emerges as potentially close to his birth date.

Manual Labor Influenced Poetry

It is generally agreed that Kabir was a weaver, and that he never went to school or learned to read and write. This background of manual labor had a strong impact on Kabir's poetry, which uses common imagery of family and natural phenomena to communicate sometimes very subtle riddles and conundrums to point the way to the nature of the divine. Scholars have disagreed, however, as to how vigorously Kabir pursued his trade after he embarked on a life of mysticism. Evelyn Underhill, in the introduction to Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's well-known English translation of Kabir's poems, opined that "Like Paul the tentmaker, [German mystic Jacob] Boehme the cobbler, [English preacher John] Bunyan the tinker, [and German religious writer] Gerhard Tersteegen, he knew how to combine vision and industry; the work of his hands helped rather than hindered the impassioned meditation of his heart." Other writers, however, have pointed to words ascribed to Kabir in which he appears to recount arguments with his wife, or his mother, over the problems a religious sage experienced in supporting a family. Kabir was married at least once, and had one or more children.

The most striking features of Kabir's poetry are its ecstatic feeling and its rejection of both Hinduism and Islam in favor of a direct relationship with the divine. Kabir's poetry is best known in the West in Tagore's translation, published in 1915; all quotations in this essay are taken from that translation. The authenticity of the 100 "Songs of Kabir" contained in that volume has been questioned, but there is no such thing as an authentic body of Kabir's words. "I have had my Seat on the Self-Poised one," Kabir said. "I have drunk of the Cup of the Ineffable. / I have found the Key of the Mystery. / I have reached the Root of Union. / Traveling by no track, I have come to the Sorrowless Land: very easily has the mercy of the great Lord come upon me…. There the whole sky is filled with sound, and there that music is made without fingers and without strings; / There the game of pleasure and pain does not cease. / Kabir says 'If you merge your life in the Ocean of Life, you will find your life in the Supreme Land of Bliss.'" Kabir used many kinds of imagery to convey ideas of religious ecstasy, but very common among them are images of music (especially "unstruck" or unsounded music) and marital love. He was apparently a musician himself and probably sang his poems rather than speaking them.

Like other great mystics, Kabir pointed to the inward life of the mind as the source of contact with the divine. "Do not go to the garden of flowers!" he said, in Tagore's translation. "O Friend! go not there; / In your body is the garden of flowers. / Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty." Kabir's thoughts on consciousness could express metaphysical subtlety: "Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious, there has the mind made a swing: / Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never ceases its sway…. All swing! The sky and the earth and the air and the water; and the Lord himself taking form: / And the sight of this has made Kabir a servant." For the most part, though, his language was simple and directed toward common people; ordinary Indians responded to his words and formed a Hindu sect devoted to his writing. A count of members of these "Kabirpanthis" in 1900 found about one million of them.

Experienced Religious Persecution

In his own time, however, Kabir seemed to have antagonized religious authorities and to have been persecuted for his beliefs. It is easy to see why; Kabir had no use for religious observances and sometimes ridiculed specifically denominational religious teachers. "O servant, where dost thou seek Me?," he has the divinity ask in one of the best-known poems in the Tagore translation. "Lo! I am beside thee. / I am neither in temple nor in mosque; I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash: / Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation. / If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see me; thou shalt meet me in a moment of time." Kabir believed that the divine could be found everywhere, in common substances, and his thought had some aspects in common with the modern doctrine of pantheism. He rejected both Hindu worship of idols and the Islamic sacred text. "The images are all lifeless; they cannot speak: / I know, for I have cried aloud to them. / The Purana and the Koran are mere words: / lifting up the curtain, I have seen."

Late in life, Kabir was apparently charged by the Indian emperor Sikandar Lodi with claiming that he had divine powers. He was forced to leave Benares and wandered from place to place around northern India. In poems thought to date from the end of his life, he lamented that his fingers could no longer make the music to accompany his songs of praise. Venerated soon after his death, which perhaps occurred in 1518, Kabir eventually became the object of a kind of adoration he would probably have discouraged while he was alive. Of the dozens of legends that surround his life and death, an especially poetic one concerns his burial: Hindus and Muslims wrangled over his dead body, with the Hindus wanting to cremate it according to custom, while Muslims argued that he should be buried. In the midst of the argument, Kabir appeared in the air and told the disputants to pull back the cloth that covered him. They did so, and found a pile of flower petals. The petals were divided, with the Muslims burying their half and the Hindus burning theirs.

Some of the esteem in which Kabir is held in India today results from the belief that he succeeded in merging Islamic and Hindu streams of thought. He has influenced Hinduism and also the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism, and some have found links between Kabir's songs and traditions of Christian mysticism. The Tagore translation of Kabir's poems was followed by other renderings of his work in English, and some of his works have been set anew to music. Kabir enriched the modern Hindi language with many expressions and turns of phrase, and in 1952 a Kabir image (although none is known to have been made while he was alive) appeared on an Indian nine-rupee postage stamp.

Books

Hedayetullah, Muhammad, Kabir: The Apostle of Hindu-Muslim Unity, Motilal Banarsidass (India), 1977.

Tagore, Rabindranath, trans., Songs of Kabir, Macmillan, 1915.

Varman, Ram Kumar, Kabir: Biography and Philosophy, Prints India, 1977.

Vaudeville, Charlotte, Kabir, Oxford, 1974.

Online

"Biography of Kabir," http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/kabir (February 13, 2006).

"Kabir: The Mystic Poet," http://www.boloji.com/kabir/index.html (February 13, 2006).

Columbia Encyclopedia: Kabir

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Kabir (kəbēr'), 1440-1518, Indian mystic and poet. A Muslim by birth, he was a weaver in Benares (Varanasi) and early in life may have become the disciple of the famous Hindu saint Ramananda. Kabir opposed caste practices, ritual, image-worship, and all forms of religious sectarianism; he taught the brotherhood of Hindu and Muslim under one God. Because of his anti-institutional ideas he was subject to persecution and banished from Benares c.1495. Thereafter he traveled from one N Indian city to another and died at Maghar near Gorakhpur. His songs in Hindi show the fusion of Muslim and Hindu devotional traditions.

Bibliography

See Poems of Kabir, tr. by R. Tagore, 1972; I. A. Ezekiel, Kabir, the Great Mystic (1966).

Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Kabir

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(ca. 1440-1518)

One of the most celebrated mystics of fifteenth-to sixteenth-century India, who practiced yoga and attempted to reconcile Hindus and Moslems. After his death he was claimed by both religions. Kabir's inspirational hymns are very moving and are still popular in present-day India. His teachings were a forerunner of Sikhism, which was established by his disciple Guru Nanak.

Sources:

Hedayetullah, Muhammed. Kabir: The Apostle of HinduMuslim Unity. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.

Kabir. One Hundred Poems of Kabir. Translated by Rabinadrath Tagore. London, 1915.

Kay, Frank E. Kabir and His Followers. London, 1931. Lorenzen, David N. Kabir Legendas and Ananta-das's Kabir Parachai. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Westcott, G. H. Kabir and the Kabir Panth. Calcutta: Varanasi Bhartiya Publishing House, 1974.

Quotes By: Kabir

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Quotes:

"Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I."

Artist: Kabir

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Active: 2000s
Genres: Rap
Instrument: Producer, Engineer, Main Performer
Representative Albums: "Cultural Confusion," "Peaceful Solutions," "Mystical Soundscapes"

Biography

Rapper Kabir was born in London, although at an early age he moved to Boston looking to make his name in hip hop. After working with the funk/jazz group Uncle Trouble, he finally released his solo album, Cultural Confusion, in 2001. He continued to work with Uncle Trouble as well as another group called the Miracle Orchestra. ~ Bradley Torreano, All Music Guide

Discography: Kabir

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Wikipedia: Kabir

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Al-Kabir ("the Great") is also one of the 99 names of God in Islam. For a complete disambiguation page, see Kabir (disambiguation)

Satguru Kabir
A painting of Kabir
Born	1440 Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India
Occupation	weavers

Kabīr (also Kabīra) (Hindi: कबीर, Punjabi: ਕਬੀਰ, Urdu: کبير‎ (1440—1518)^[1] was a mystic composer and saint of India, whose literature has greatly influenced the Bhakti movement of India.^[2]

1 Early life and background
2 Philosophies
3 Poetry career
4 Religious
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links

Early life and background

Kabir was raised by childless weavers named Niru and Nimma (it is disputed whether they were Muslim or Hindu), who found him near Lahara Tara Lake, adjacent to the holy city of Varanasi.^[3] But his birth is surrounded by legends. The most popular belief is that being the supreme power, he appeared in form of a baby. He was never "born" as such.

He was a Bhakti saint, who sang the ideals of seeing all of humanity as one, his name, Kabir, is often interpreted as Guru's Grace. He kept himself away from the fundamentalism of all the religions and explained the root philosophies of spirituality.

A weaver by profession, Kabir ranks among the world's greatest poets. In India, he is perhaps the most quoted author. The holy book of the Sikhs the Guru Granth Sahib contains over 500 verses by Kabir. The Sikh community refers to Kabir as a Bhagat, while others who hold the Granth in high reverence call him a Guru.

Kabir openly criticized all sects and gave a new direction to Indian philosophy. This is due to his straight forward approach that has a universal appeal. It is for this reason that Kabir is held in high esteem all over the world. To call Kabir a universal Guru is not an exaggeration.

He is also considered one of the early northern India Sants. One source for modern adaptations of Kabir's poetry is Robert Bly's The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir.

For more details on this topic, see Sant Mat.

Kabir is associated with the Sant Mat, a loosely related group of teachers (Sanskrit: Guru) that assumed prominence in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent from about the 13th century. Their teachings are distinguished theologically by inward loving devotion to a divine principle, and socially by an egalitarianism opposed to the qualitative distinctions of the Hindu caste hierarchy and to the religious differences between Hindu and Muslim.^[4] The sants were not homogeneous, consisting mostly of these sants' presentation of socio-religious attitudes based on bhakti (devotion) as described earlier in the Bhagavad Gita.^[5] Sharing as few conventions with each other as with the followers of the traditions they challenged, the sants appear more as a diverse collection of spiritual personalities than a specific religious tradition, although they acknowledged a common spiritual root.^[6]

The first generation of north Indian sants, (which included Kabir), appeared in the region of Benares in the mid 15th century. Preceding them were two notable 13th and 14th century figures, Namdev and Ramananda. The latter, a Vaishnava ascetic, initiated Kabir, Ravidas, and other sants, according to tradition. Ramananda's story is told differently by his lineage of "Ramanandi" monks, by other Sants preceding him, and later by the Guru Nanak and subsequent Sikh Gurus. What is known is that Ramananda accepted students of all castes, a fact that was contested by the orthodox Hindus of that time, and that his students formed the first generation of Sants.^[7]

Philosophies

Kabir was influenced by prevailing religious mood such as old Brahmanic Hinduism, Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism, teachings of Nath yogis and the personal devotionalism from South India mixed with imageless God of Islam.^[8] The influence of these various doctrines is clearly evident in Kabir's verses. Eminent Historians like R.C.Mazumbar, P.N. Chopra, B.N.Puri and M.N. Das, etc have held that Kabir is the first Indian Saint to have harmonised Hinduism and Islam by preaching a universal path which both Hindus and Muslims could tread together^[9] . But there are a few critics who contest such claims.^[8]

The basic religious principles he espoused are simple. According to Kabir, all life is an interplay of two spiritual principles. One is the personal soul (Jivatma) and the other is God (Paramatma). It is Kabir's view that salvation is the process of bringing into union these two divine principles. The social and practical manifestation of Kabir's philosophy has rung through the ages.^[10]. Despite legend that claims Kabir met with Guru Nanak, their lifespans do not overlap in time.^[11] The presence of much of his verse in Sikh scripture and the fact that Kabir was a predecessor of Nanak has led some western scholars to mistakenly describe him as a forerunner of Sikhism.^[11]

His greatest work is the Bijak (the "Seedling"), an idea of the fundamental one. This collection of poems demonstrates Kabir's own universal view of spirituality. His vocabulary is replete with ideas regarding Brahman and Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation. His Hindi was a vernacular, straightforward kind, much like his philosophies. He often advocated leaving aside the Qur'an and Vedas and to simply follow Sahaja path, or the Simple/Natural Way to oneness in God. He believed in the Vedantic concept of atman, but unlike earlier orthodox Vedantins, he followed this philosophy to its logical end by spurning the Hindu societal caste system and worship of murti, showing clear belief in both bhakti and sufi ideas. The major part of Kabir's work as a bhagat was collected by the fifth Sikh guru, Guru Arjan Dev, and forms a part of the Sikh scripture Guru Granth Sahib.

While many ideas reign as to who his living influences were, the only Guru of whom he ever spoke was Satguru. Kabir never made a mention of any human guru in his life or verses, the only reference found in his verses is of God as Satguru.

Poetry career

"The poetry of mysticism might be defined on the one hand as a temperamental reaction to the vision of Reality: on the other, as a form of prophecy. As it is the special vocation of the mystical consciousness to mediate between two orders, going out in loving adoration towards God and coming home to tell the secrets of Eternity to other men; so the artistic self-expression of this consciousness has also a double character. It is love-poetry, but love-poetry which is often written with a missionary intention. Kabîr's songs are of this kind: out-births at once of rapture and of charity. Written in the popular Hindi, not in the literary tongue, they were deliberately addressed—like the vernacular poetry of Jacopone da Todì and Richard Rolle—to the people rather than to the professionally religious class; and all must be struck by the constant employment in them of imagery drawn from the common life, the universal experience. It is by the simplest metaphors, by constant appeals to needs, passions, relations which all men understand—the bridegroom and bride, the guru and disciple, the pilgrim, the farmer, the migrant bird—that he drives home his intense conviction of the reality of the soul's intercourse with the Transcendent. There are in his universe no fences between the "natural" and "supernatural" worlds; everything is a part of the creative Play of God, and therefore—even in its humblest details—capable of revealing the Player's mind." ^[12]

His poems resonate with praise for the true guru who reveals the divine through direct experience, and denounced more usual ways of attempting god-union such as chanting, austerities etc. His verses, which being illiterate he never expressed in writing and were spoken in vernacular Hindi, often began with some strongly worded insult to get the attention of passers-by. Kabir has enjoyed a revival of popularity over the past half century as arguably the most acceptable and understandable of the Indian saints, with an especial influence over spiritual traditions such as that of Sant Mat and Garib Das, Radha Soami. Prem Rawat ('Maharaji') also refers frequently to Kabir's songs and poems as the embodiment of deep wisdom.

(1)

kabīrā jab ham paidā hue

jaga hańse ham roye

aisī karanī kara calo

pachey hansi na hoye

( above phrase indicates towards the great analogy & deep thinking of the sant Kabir. It says "Kabir when you were born everyone was laughing only you were crying so always live in such a way so that nobody will laugh on your deeds even after your death in fact they remember them & regard you, how ever a few people confuse it with kabīrā jab ham paidā hue jaga hańse ham roye aisī karanī kara calo ham hańse jaga roye)

chadariyā jhinī re jhinī

he rāma nāma rasa bhinī

(2)

aṣṭa kamalā ka carkhā banāyā

pañca tattva kī pūnī

nava dasa māsa bunana ko lāge

mūrakha mailī kinhī

(3)

jaba morī chādara bana ghara āyā

rańga reja ko dinhī

aisā rańga rańgā rańgare ne

lālo lāla kar dinhī

(4)

cādara oḍha śańka mat kariyo

yeh do dina tumko dinhī

mūrakha loga bheda nahi jāne

din din mailī kinhī

(5)

dhruva prahlāda sudāmā ne oḍhi

śukadeva ne nirmala kinhī

dāsa kabīra ne aisī odhī

jyoń kī tyoń dhara dinhī

TRANSLATION

1) Poet Kabir Das says, “When I was born, the world smiled and I cried. However, I will do such deeds that when I leave, I will be the one smiling and the world will be the one crying.” This life is like a very thin transparent shawl which should be drenched in the holy name of Lord Rama, the Reservoir of Pleasure.

2) The eight lotuses is the spinning wheel using the five earthly elements to make the chadar (the body). In nine or ten months, the chadar is completed; however, the fools will destroy it.

3) When the chadar is completed, it is sent to the dyer -rang rej-(the spiritual master) to color it. The dyer (the spiritual master) colored it as such that it is all red (the color of self-realization).

4) Do not have doubts or fears while wearing this chadar. It is only given to you for two days and it is temporary too. The foolish people do not understand the temporariness of this chadar, and they day by day destroy it.

5) Great devotees such as Dhruva Maharaja, Prahlad Maharaja, Sudama, and Śuka have worn this chadar as well as purified their chadars as well other chadars (souls). The servant, Kabir Dasa, is attempting to wear this chadar as given to him originally by his guru.

--- Oha Param Purakh Devadidev, Bhagat Het Narasinh Bhev "The Eternal Lord incarnated as Narasimha for the sake of the Devotee (Prahlad)"

Religious

Kabir did not classify himself as Hindu or Muslim, Sufi or Bhakta. The legends surrounding his lifetime attest to his strong aversion to established religions. From his poems, expressed in homely metaphors and religious symbols drawn indifferently from Hindu and Muslim belief, it is impossible to say of their author that he was Brâhman or Sûfî, Vedântist or Vaishnavite. He is, as he says himself, "at once the child of Allah and of Râm."^[12] In fact, Kabir always insisted on the concept of Koi bole Ram Ram Koi Khudai..., which means that someone may chant the Hindu name of God and someone may chant the Muslim name of God, but God is the one who made the whole world.

In Kabir's wide and rapturous vision of the universe he never loses touch with the common life. His feet are firmly planted upon earth; his lofty and passionate apprehensions are perpetually controlled by the activity of a sane and vigorous intellect, by the alert commonsense so often found in persons of real mystical genius. The constant insistence on simplicity and directness, the hatred of all abstractions and philosophizings, the ruthless criticism of external religion: these are amongst his most marked characteristics. God is the Root whence all manifestations, "material" and "spiritual," alike proceed; and God is the only need of man: "Happiness shall be yours when you come to the Root." Hence, to those who keep their eye on the "one thing needful," denominations, creeds, ceremonies, the conclusions of philosophy, the disciplines of asceticism, are matters of comparative indifference. They represent merely the different angles from which the soul may approach that simple union with Brahma which is its goal, and are useful only insofar as they contribute to this consummation. So thorough-going is Kabîr's eclecticism, that he seems by turns Vedântist and Vaishnavite, Pantheist and Transcendentalist, Brahmin and Sûfî. In the effort to tell the truth about that ineffable apprehension, so vast and yet so near, which controls his life, he seizes and twines together—as he might have woven together contrasting threads upon his loom—symbols and ideas drawn from the most violent and conflicting philosophies and faiths.^[12]

His birth and death are surrounded by legends, as nothing certain is known about his birth or death. He grew up in a Muslim weaver family, but some say he was really son of a Brahmin widow and was adopted by a childless couple.

One popular legend of his death, which is even taught in schools in India (although in more of a moral context than a historical one), says that after his death his Muslim and Hindu devotees fought over his proper burial rites. The problem arose since Muslim custom called for the burial of their dead, whereas Hindus cremated their dead. The scene is depicted as two groups fighting around his coffin one claiming that Kabir was a Hindu, and the other claiming that Kabir was a Muslim. However, when they finally open Kabir's coffin, they found the body missing. Instead there was a small book in which the Hindus and Muslims wrote all his sayings that they could remember; some even say a bunch of his favourite flowers were placed. The legend goes on to state that the fighting was resolved, and both groups looked upon the miracle as an act of divine intervention. In Maghar, his tomb or Dargah and Samādhi Mandir still stand side by side.^[13]

Another legend surrounding Kabir is that shortly before death he bathed in both the river Ganges and Karmnasha to wash away both his good deeds and his sins.

Kabir is revered as Satguru by the Kabirpanthi spiritual group, based in Maghar.

References

^ "http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/kabir.html, http://literaryindia.com/Biographies/Biographic-Note/kabir.html, http://www.sikhlionz.com/bhagatkabir.htm, http://www.wisdomportal.com/Peace/Kabir-Peace.html
^ "Rare Literary Gems - CRL FOCUS Newsletter". http://www.crl.edu/focus/Spr05litGems.asp?issID=3. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
^ Kabir Biography
^ Woodhead, Linda & Fletcher, Paul. Religion in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations (2001) pp.71-2. Routledge (UK) ISBN 0-415-21784-9"
^ Lipner, Julius J. Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1994). Routledge (United Kingdom), pp. 120-1. ISBN 0-415-05181-9
^ Gold, Daniel, Clan and Lineage amongst the Sants: Seed, Substance, Service, in Sant Mat:Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India in Schomer K. and McLeod W.H. (Eds.). pp.305, ISBN 0-9612208-0-5
^ Hees, Peter, Indian Religions: A Historical Reader of Spiritual Expression and Experience, (2002) p359. NYU Press, ISBN 0-8147-3650-5
^ ^a ^b Kabir, Linda Hess, Linda Beth Hess, Shukdev Singh, Śukadeva Siṃha, The Bijak of Kabir (2002), Oxford University Press. pp.5 ISBN 0195148762
^ A Social, Cultural and Economic History of India, Volume II,(1974)Macmillan, page 90
^ Courtney, David. "Kabir, Musician Saint of India". http://www.chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/kabir.html.
^ ^a ^b Harbans Singh. "Encyclopedia Of Sikhism". http://www.punjabilok.com/faith/sufi_bhakti/sant_kabir.htm.
^ ^a ^b ^c^{[citation needed]}
^ "Kabir, Mystic Philosopher, 1398-1518". http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/kabir.html. Retrieved 2005-12-18.

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Kabir

Biography

Contents

Early life and background

Philosophies

Poetry career

Religious

See also

References

Further reading

External links