Kabir

by Robert Bly

  Also by Robert Bly

  POETRY

  Silence in the Snowy Fields

  The Light Around the Body

  The Man in the Black Coat Turns

  Loving a Woman in Two Worlds

  Meditations on the Insatiable Soul

  Morning Poems

  Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems

  The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

  (with James Hillman and Michael Meade)

  News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness

  The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy

  PROSE

  Talking All Morning (Interviews)

  The Eight Stages of Translation

  A Little Book on the Human Shadow

  (with William Booth)

  Iron John: A Book about Men

  The Sibling Society

  The Maiden King: A Reunion of Masculine and Feminine

  (With Marion Woodman)

  TRANSLATIONS

  Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

  Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

  Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems

  (with James Wright and John Knoepfle)

  Lorca and Jimenez: Selected Poems

  The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib

  (with Sunil Dutta)

  The Winged Energy of Delight

  (Selected Translations)

  Dedicated to Kabir, and all those working confused in inner labor

  Rumi says: Ecstatic love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  I

  The Gardener Is Coming

  II

  The Wanting Creature

  III

  The Bride Wants Her Lover

  IV

  The Guest Is Inside You

  Afterword by John Stratton Hawley

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  No one knows much about Kabir. A few life details and a few stories are told over and over. He was evidently not a monk or an ascetic, but was married, had children, and made his living by weaving cloth at home. Some say he was the son of Moslem parents, others that he was found on the streets and brought up by a Moslem couple. There may have been in the house books of the great Sufi poets of two hundred years before, such as Rumi. So it is possible Kabir knew the eccentric energy of the Sufis, the heretical or rebellious branch of the Mohammedans, by the time he was sixteen or seventeen. It is said he then asked Ramananda, the great Hindu ascetic, to initiate him. Ramananda had experienced the ecstatic power of the male god Rama and took “the glad joy of Rama” as his name. Ramananda refused Kabir, saying, “No, you’re a Moslem.” Kabir knew that Ramananda went down to the Ganges each day before dawn, and Kabir lay down on the steps. Ramananda walked out in the half dark and stepped on the boy’s body. Astonished, he leapt up and cried, “Rama!” Kabir then jumped up and said, “You spoke the name of God in my presence. You initiated me. I’m your student!” Ramananda then, it is said, initiated him. Kabir became a powerful spiritual man and poet. His poems are amazing even in his wide tradition for the way he unites in one body the two rivers of ecstatic Sufism—supremely confident, secretive, desert meditation, utterly opposed to orthodoxy and academics, given to dance and weeping—and the Hindu tradition, which is more sober on the surface, coming through the Vedas and Vishnu, Ram, and Krishna.

  Here is another Kabir story. At one time about fifteen hundred meditators came down from the hills and sat together in a big hall in north India. The number of people doing hard inner work in that century was large. They asked Kabir to read to them, but they had not asked Mirabai. Mirabai composed ecstatic bhakti poems; her whole life flowed in the stream of Radha-Krishna intensity. She walked from village to village with holy men singing her poems “for the Dark One,” and dancing; she was much loved. Kabir entered the hall and said, “Where is Mirabai? You know what I see in this hall? I see fifteen hundred male egos.” He refused to read until Mirabai came. So someone went for her—she was miles away—and they waited in silence, maybe one day or two. Mirabai at last arrived. She read for thirty-five minutes. At the end of that time it was clear that her bhakti was so much greater than anyone else’s in the room that the gathering broke up, and all the meditators, reminded of how much they had to do, went back to their huts.

  Mirabai wrote her poems in Rajasthani, and about two hundred of them have survived. This story of Mirabai and Kabir is lovely and, as the Sufis would say, in the spiritual world it happened. In chronology there is a problem. When my first small group of Kabir versions was printed in Calcutta, the publisher set down firmly the birth date of Kabir as 1398, and the death date as 1518. That means he lived one hundred twenty years. That’s possible. Most scholars guess Mirabai’s birth date as 1498. That means Kabir was a hundred years old the day she was born. So if both dates are true, then she could have been eighteen when she arrived at the hall, and he would have been one hundred eighteen years old. That’s possible; anything is possible. Or, since dating is difficult, both birth dates may be wrong. We do know that both poets lived—accounts of people who met them have survived. Mirabai does mention Kabir in one of her poems, as well as another poet, Namdev, born earlier, around 1270. Mirabai says, speaking to Krishna,

  Oh you who lift mountains, stay with me always!

  You brought a full ox to Kabir’s house, and mended the hut where Namdev lived.

  So there was a flow between the two, and the story suggests that very well.

  Most of the observations a critic could make about Kabir’s poems you can deduce by reading them. He does mention several times that his poems belong in the bhakti tradition, and I’ve decided to leave their word as it is. There’s very little one can say about the bhakti tradition that doesn’t diminish it. Perhaps we could see it more clearly by comparing it with a contrasting road. Some of the European saints of the Middle Ages, such as Tauler, walked the opposite path, they said no to the body and meant it. On this path, the link between the ego and the body is emphasized, and the ego is then dispersed through humiliation of the body. The humiliation is a long process associated with hatred of the senses. The practicer tries to imagine how disgusting his or her body will be when it’s dead, hair shirts and whips are used to humiliate the skin, attachments are dispersed, the practicer tries to free his spiritual energy from sexual energy by repulsion. Blake wrote the most powerful criticism of this path: “Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” “Priests in black gowns are walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.” The road was called the “via negativa,” and Eliot in his religious life consciously followed it.

  The bhakti path is not peculiar to India, is no one’s invention, and I’m sure existed in Ras Shamra and among the Etruscans. Some of the Odin myths and Babylonian myths that seem to us quaint will be seen to refer to it. In the Indian subcontinent a vast rise of bhakti energy began in the eighth or ninth century, as if ocean water had suddenly reappeared in the center of a continent. Sometime during those centuries an alternative to the Vedic chanting began. The Vedas were in Sanskrit, and the chanting done for others by trained priests, by what we might call religious academics. The new bhakti worship involved heart-love, feeling, dancing—Mirabai evidently used castanets and ankle rings—love of color, of intensity, of male-female poles, avoidance of convention, a discipline which is shared by Tristan and Isolde. Bhakti worship involves the present tense, and in contemporary language, rather than the old “classical” tongue, as when Dante decided to write La Vita Nuova in Italian rather than in Latin. The poets of India began to write ecstatic poetry in their local languages, an
d so refreshed the bhakti experience “from underneath.” Some poems were written specifically for the long bhakti sessions, which lasted three or four hours in the middle of the night, and the sessions were guided through their stages by chanted and sung poems.

  In north India, the bhakti experience became associated with Krishna as a visualization of the right side of the body, and with Radha as a visualization of the left. Jayadeva gave a great gift around 1200 with his Gita Govinda and its ecstatic passages of Radha and Krishna’s lovemaking. “Great circle” dances appeared, and marvelous paintings, where Radha and Krishna look at each other with enormous eyes. “The joy of looking for him is so immense that you just dive in and coast around like a fish in the water. If anyone needs a head, the lover leaps up to offer his. Kabir’s poems touch on the secrets of this bhakti.” The male poets usually describe Radha and Krishna from outside or evoke her feelings when separated. Mirabai never mentions Radha just as Christ never mentions the Essenes because he is the Essenes, just as she is Radha. Kabir sometimes speaks as a man, sometimes as a woman.

  This woman weaves threads that are subtle,

  and the intensity of her praise makes them fine.

  Kabir says: I am that woman.

  I am weaving the linen of night and day.

  When my lover comes and I feel his feet,

  the gift I will have for him is tears.

  The ecstatic meditator Shri Caitanya traveled occasionally between 1510 and 1530 from village to village in Bengal, teaching the villagers what bhakti experience looked and felt like, bringing dances with him, and the intensity rose higher. Namdev, Jnaneshwar, Chandidas, and Vidyapati wrote marvelous poems, all virtually unknown to us, in the years before Kabir. Mirabai, Kumbhandas, and Surdas are a few of the intense poets that followed.

  Kabir in his joyful poems delivers harsh and unorthodox opinions. He enters controversies. For example, when Christ says, “The Kingdom of the Spirit resembles a cottonwood seed,” the translators of the time found themselves dealing with three sets of opposites, familiar also to Chinese thought, of Spirit-Body, sky-earth, and Heaven-this world. The translator must choose among them. St. Paul, with other early fathers, committed the Church to translating the phrase as “the Kingdom of Heaven.” The opposite state, then, is this life. Salvation is then driven into the next life. Kabir says a simple error of translation like this can destroy a religion. This throwing of intensity forward is a destructive habit of both Hindus and Moslems, and Kabir, attacking both, writes of that in his terrifying poem:

  If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,

  do you think ghosts

  will do it after?

  What is found now is found then.

  If you find nothing now, you will simply end up

  with an apartment in the city of death.

  The best-known religious poetry in English, of Vaughn and Traherne, for example, contains rather mild and orthodox ideas. Such harsh instruction as Kabir gives we are unprepared for. In Vaughn the thought and feeling swim together under the shelter of a gentle dogma. In Kabir one leaps ahead of the other, as if jumping out of the sea, and the reader smiles in joy at so much energy. It is as if both thought and feeling fed a third thing, a rebellious originality, and with that tail the poem shoots through the water. We feel that speed sometimes in Eckhart also. Kabir says that when you do interior work, the work is not done by the method, but by the intensity. “Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.” The word “intensity” widens to its full range here. We understand that such intensity is impossible without having intense feeling, intense thinking, intense intuition, and intense love of colors and odors and animals. He hears the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.”

  In Kabir’s poems, then, you see the astonishing event—highly religious and intensely spiritual poems written outside of, and in opposition to, the standard Hindu, Mohammedan, or Christian dogmas. Kabir says, “Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what?” He also attacks the simple-minded Yoga practices and guru cults, such as we see growing up all around us in the United States. It’s valuable to have these practices discussed by an Indian, not a Westerner. Kabir says, “The Yogi comes along in his famous orange. But if inside he is colorless, then what?” To Kabir, the main danger is spiritual passivity. Kabir is opposed to repeating any truth from another teacher, whether of English literature or Buddhism, that you yourself have not experienced.

  The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but

  words.

  I looked through their covers one day sideways.

  Kabir talks only about what he has lived through.

  If you have not lived through something, it is

  not true.

  Kabir mocks passivity toward holy texts, toward popular gurus, and the passive practice of Yoga, but we must understand that he himself is firmly in the guru tradition and that he followed an intricate path, with fierce meditative practices, guided by energetic visualization of “sun” and “moon” energies. In poems not translated here—I don’t have the language for it, nor the experience—he dives into the whole matter of Sakti energy, ways of uniting right and left, and going upward with “the third.” These labors have not been experienced yet in the West, or have been experienced but discussed at length only in alchemy. He has, moreover, enigmatic or puzzle poems that no contemporary commentator fully understands. I love his poems and am grateful every day for their gift.

  A Note About My Versions

  My versions are based on poems in One Hundred Poems of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore, assisted by Evelyn Underhill (Macmillan). The English of the Tagore-Underhill translations is hopeless, and I simply put a few of them, whose interiors I had become especially fond of, into more contemporary language, to see what they might look like. In one poem I violated chronology, putting “a loaded gun” where Tagore says “deadly weapon.” I noticed that we have defenses against the general and the nostalgic, but not against the specific and the contemporary. That doesn’t excuse the change, but it explains my motive. I believe translation should be as accurate as possible. Kabir wrote the originals in Hindi; Tagore was working from a Bengali translation of that. Many errors may be built in, but I have done my best.

  ROBERT BLY

  The Gardener Is Coming

  Oh friend, I love you, think this over

  carefully! If you are in love,

  then why are you asleep?

  If you have found him,

  give yourself to him, take him.

  Why do you lose track of him again and again?

  If you are about to fall into heavy sleep anyway,

  why waste time smoothing the bed

  and arranging the pillows?

  Kabir will tell you the truth: this is what love is like:

  suppose you had to cut your head off

  and give it to someone else,

  what difference would that make?

  I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is

  thirsty.

  You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all

  is inside your own house;

  and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a

  confused look!

  Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to

  Calcutta or Tibet;

  if you can’t find where your soul is hidden,

  for you the world will never be real!

  Student, do the simple purification.

  You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut

  tree;

  and inside the seed there are the blossoms of the tree,

  and the chestnuts, and the shade.

  So inside the human body there is the seed, and

  inside the seed there is the human body again.

  Fire, air, earth, water, and space—if you don’t want

  the secret one,

  you can’t ha
ve these either.

  Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not inside the soul?

  Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water—

  now it has water inside and water outside.

  We mustn’t give it a name,

  lest silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.

  If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth:

  Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.

  The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,

  and he is the one who has made it all.

  I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?

  We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants—

  perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.

  Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

  The truth is you turned away yourself,

  and decided to go into the dark alone.

  Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,

  and that’s why everything you do has some weird failure in it.

  Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

  Jump into experience while you are alive!

  Think … and think … while you are alive.

  What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

  If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,

  do you think

  ghosts will do it after?

  The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic

  just because the body is rotten—

  that is all fantasy.

  What is found now is found then.

  If you find nothing now,