SONGS OF KABÎR


Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

Introduction by Evelyn Underhill

New York, The Macmillan Company

1915




INTRODUCTION


The poet Kabîr, a selection from whose songs is here for the
first time offered to English readers, is one of the most
interesting personalities in the history of Indian mysticism.
Born in or near Benares, of Mohammedan parents, and probably
about the year 1440, be became in early life a disciple of the
celebrated Hindu ascetic Râmânanda. Râmânanda had brought to
Northern India the religious revival which Râmânuja, the great
twelfth-century reformer of Brâhmanism, had initiated in the
South. This revival was in part a reaction against the
increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion
of the demands of the heart as against the intense
intellectualism of the Vedânta philosophy, the exaggerated monism
which that philosophy proclaimed. It took in Râmânuja's