Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
Hindu theology was familiar with this expression as signifying the eternal self-existent revelation contained in the Vedas. Kabir appears to have held that articulate sound is an expression of the Deity and that every letter, as a constituent of such sound, has a meaning. But these letters are due to Mâyâ: in reality there is no plurality of sound.
In these works, which relate the conversion of Dharm Das afterwards one of Kabir's principal followers, Kabir is identified with the Creator and then made a pantheistic deity much as Kṛishṇa in the Bhagavad-gîtâ. He is also the true Guru whose help is necessary for salvation. Stress is further laid on the doctrine of Śabda, or the divine word.
His teaching marks a turning-point in the history of modern Hinduism. Firstly he held that caste need not prevent a man from rightly worshipping God and he admitted even Moslims as members of his community. To this liberality are directly traceable the numerous sects combining Hindu with Mohammedan doctrines, among which the Kabir Panthis and the Sikhs are the most conspicuous.
This one step is the most difficult act of life; yet urged by love, man has taken it again and again. This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual biography, that I need not insist upon it. "In the field of this body," says Kabir, "a great war goes forward, against passion, anger, pride and greed.
Apart from some special metaphors the whole doctrine set forth in the Sukh Nidhan and Amar Mul is little more than a loose Vedantism, somewhat reminiscent of Sufiism. The teaching of Kabir is known as the Kabirpanth. At present there are both Hindus and Mohammedans among his followers and both have monasteries at Maghar where he is buried. The sect numbers in all about a million.
The great men and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new power and joy to restore existing institutions to fuller vitality, as did the successive regenerators of the monastic life, such as St. Bernard and St. Teresa and many Sufi saints; or they form new groups, new organisms which they can animate, as did St. Paul, St. Francis, Kabir, Fox, Wesley, Booth.
The founder Nânak lived from 1469 to 1538 and was born near Lahore. He was a Hindu by birth but came under Mohammedan influence and conceived the idea of reconciling the two faiths. He was attracted by the doctrines of Kabir and did not at first claim to teach a new religion.
They said that Kabir, the weaver, was favoured of God, and the crowd flocked round him for medicine and miracles. But he was troubled; his low birth had hitherto endowed him with a most precious obscurity to sweeten with songs and with the presence of his God. He prayed that it might be restored. Envious of the repute of this outcast, the priests leagued themselves with a harlot to disgrace him.
The Sikh religion, itself, was originally a religious reform, which found its germs in the mind of the great Kabir, and afterward attained birth in the brave reformer, Nanak Shah, during the fifteenth century. It is a shrewd, an amiable, and also a brave attempt to harmonize Mohammedanism and Hinduism.
The history of ideas, too, becomes clear and intelligible if we suppose that Râmânand, Kabir and Nanak flourished about 1400, 1450 and 1500 respectively. One should be cautious in allowing such arguments to outweigh unanimous tradition, but tradition also assigns to Râmânand an improbably long life, thus indicating a feeling that he influenced the fifteenth century.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking