When he sings, I just stand and listen || Acharya Prashant, on Kabir Saheb (2019)

Questioner: Kabir is generally not very known in the West. In fact, even during my time in India over the years, you are the only one who has mentioned him to me. If time permits and no other question requires your attention, would you please share something about him to us? Who is Kabir to you? What do you admire about his life on earth, and what is the core of his teaching?

Acharya Prashant: Kabir Sahib… How do I talk about him? Bare honesty. Honesty, honesty, honesty! Honesty, thy name is Kabir!

He worked his entire life, first of all. He was a weaver, a small-time weaver from Varanasi by profession. Worked all his life—and there is a very strong reason why I am mentioning this in the first place as the most important thing about him. There has been an abundance of so-called religious teachers who do not bother to work. They just yak; all they have is gab—gab, talk, talk, and talk, not work. Kabir Sahib worked. He was a weaver and he would weave every day, and he would live out of what he would earn from there. Not that he is the only one who would work, there are many others in history. But India is a place where the devotional sentiment always runs high, and he was born in the Bhakti age, he belonged to the 14th and 15th century, and he lived in Varanasi, the center of all orthodoxy. He could have easily managed to have as much money and worldly goodies as he wanted. He never had anything from his people, his audiences. Never. And he wasn’t a beggar either. Neither was he a seated and decorated guru who would collect donations in lakhs and crores—people would come and offer millions to him, none of that: he never bothered to establish himself as a high-flying guru—nor was he a beggar. He wouldn’t say, “I am a bhikṣu (mendicant)”; he wouldn’t take the begging bowl and go about collecting alms. He worked like any ordinary person.

And he would call himself Kabira or Kabir. He would never give himself a title or sobriquet, nothing. He is Kabir, just Kabir. At least his addresses to himself never go beyond calling himself Kabir or Kabira. That’s honesty to the bone, to the core. Later on, his followers started calling him Sahib and Satguru Kabir and all those things. He never did all that. It’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful!