Who is Saint Kabir? || Acharya Prashant (2016)
Questioner: I have a question about Kabir. As I know, he was also a kind of Sufi, not just Hindu or Muslim, he…
Speaker: See, the heart of Sufism and the heart of Vedanta , the heart of Hasidism , the heart of Christian mysticism, they are all one Heart. So, it would anyway be unwise to call anybody, any realized one, as belonging to any sect. You see, Kabir can’t be called a Hindu or a Muslim. Some people substitute it with calling him both a Hindu and a Muslim. I call him neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. Krishna cannot be called a Hindu. Jesus was even by fact not a Christian and he can’t even be called a Jew. You see, where does the Jesus lie? He revolts against Judaism, so for sure he is not a Jew, and he is not a Christian either because Christianity was not there.
So Jesus actually is some kind of an apostate – having no religion. I love atheism in that sense because you do not belong to anybody – any sect, any cult.
J. Krishnamurti – no authority. But when nobody is an authority, then God is an authority. That is why he keep saying – let nobody be an authority so that God may be the authority; so that Truth may be the authority.
So, Kabir , I don’t know why he needs to be called a disciple of some Guru or why he needs to be praised in a particular century or in a particular city.
Kabir is Truth.
You see, in our Learning Camps, here, today we are doing Kabir , tomorrow we’ll do an Upanishad , then we have some.., what have you brought, where is Siddhartha? (referring to one of the Camp members)
(Asking him) Hasidic poems or stories?
(Listener replies ‘Stories’.)
Speaker: Stories.
Listener: I love very much, Hasidic.
Speaker: Yes. In fact, I don’t have much of exposure to them, so I would enjoy reading those stories. Then, what else do we have?
(Listeners tell the name)
Speaker: We have Rumi , then we have Lao Tzu ; and do we feel a difference when we move from one to the other?
Listeners: (All together) No.
Speaker: Have you ever.., that’s the nature of our camps. We move from Lao Tzu to Hafiz and then back to an Upanishad , then to Gita and then…Nanak , Meera , and things keep happening. But, do you feel as if something is changing?
There is no change at all. There is actually no change at all.
So, for us this is a way of life, you know, everybody is there. And we don’t even think that they are different buddies, in the sense, different bodies. It’s very obvious that they all are One.
Even you know, we do a wonderful exercise when we return from the camp. We say you met these ten people, now for 1 month, daily, take any three of them; pick up a verse or a quote or a shloka (verse) attributable to them, and show us how these three are One. In a simple way, one small paragraph. And everybody does that, and that happens so effortlessly. Oh! of course it requires effort to type, but it does not require a mental effort to figure out. The figuring out is very easy. Or is it not?
Or is it not? I don’t know. You people, you are in a better position to say.
Listeners: Yes. It is. It’s very easy.
Speaker: On half of the days they don’t type, but that is because they don’t want to do the effort involved in typing. Otherwise, it is quite easy, very-very easy. In fact, you know, it is so miraculous, you take something from Kabir and you take something from Rumi , and Kabir and Rumi are 3 centuries apart. They never met each other, Kabir may not even have heard of Rumi , and yet some of their verses are even verbatim identical. Verbatim.
Some of what Krishna says and what Christ says, you feel like that you know one of them is copying.
(Laughter)
Speaker: It is so, so, so similar. Not even similar; same. It is just so same.
