With Kabir Saheb, I Am a Fanboy!
Acharya Prashant: Gemmi, your Acharya ji is sold out to this beautiful display of guts. Only somebody with the utter heart of a lion can dare to proclaim in public — “कबीर कुत्ता राम का! Kabir is the pet dog of Ram!”
And he didn’t stop at that, he went ahead and christened himself as ‘Motiya’.
कबीर कुत्ता राम का, मुतिया मेरा नाऊँ। गलै राम की जेवड़ी, जित खैंचे तित जाऊँ॥
And when you come across something like this, you feel delighted to be alive at that moment.
When I am with Kabir Saheb, I feel grateful for being alive. I am grateful I was born so that I could come upon Kabir and he lived in Varanasi which I said is the seat of Hindu orthodoxy and yet he had the courage, the devotion and conviction to say, “पाथर पूजे हरि मिले, तो मैं पूजू पहाड़.”
At another place he says, “देवतन से कुत्ता भला.”
If one could attain God by worshiping stones, I would rather worship the mountains and he told to all the idol worshippers that even dogs are better than all these gods that you worship, at least dogs offer you some protection and security in the night, what do these gods offer you?
Macho man! My hero and I have been a fanboy! He is my superhero, and the sheer depth of his realization and the absolute simplicity of his expression -
माया माया सब कहे माया लखे न कोय। जो मन से न उतरे माया कहिए सोय।।
And there are volumes upon volumes trying to describe what ‘Maya’ is, the entire world is perplexed about ‘Maya’ — “What is Maya? What is Maya!”
And Kabir Saheb dismisses all this talk about Maya like this! with one flash of his hand, “जो मन से न उतरे माया कहिए सोय”. As if he is saying, “Son, the question is so simple why can’t you see the answer?” Like a math teacher consoling a beginner who is grappling with an actually easy but apparently insurmountable problem, “Son it is so easy, just say Y = e raise to the power x (e^x) and you will get the answer.”
Just substitute e^x with Y and you will get the answer.
जो मन से न उतरे माया कहिए सोय, done, done, dismiss.
And Maya is cringing and squirming, “Ahh, finally somebody got the better of me”.
जो मन से न उतरे माया कहिए सोय।।
That which keeps occupying your mind, that which you cannot get rid of — is Maya. Is there any other who ever put it across so simply, and so beautifully and so totally? There is nobody.
काल काल सब कहे काल न जाने कोय। जेति मन की कल्पना काल कहावे सोय।।
Time is another of our obsessions, and we never seem to get the better of it.
Time! What is time? What is time? What is time? What is space-time?
And Kabir Saheb says, “जेति मन की कल्पना काल कहावे सोय.” And here he has hit two birds with this one arrow. When he says, “जेति मन की कल्पना काल कहावे सोय” by ‘काल’ he means not merely time but also death.
Such fantastic mastery is rarely seen elsewhere. Obviously, you get glimpses of it at many other places as well, I respect all of them, all of them are very-very dear to me, I worship them. But when it comes to Kabir Saheb I said, “I Am a fanboy”.
When he speaks, when he sings, I can just stand and clap all day. Brute honesty and child-like simplicity, how can you put these two together?
Kabir Saheb does , Brute honesty and child-like simplicity and innocence.
I sometimes say to the ones around me, “If I am very unwell and dying don’t offer me Gangajal and all that, just sing Kabir Saheb to me, not that, that would take me to heaven, that might actually make me get up. I am not interested in heavens or swarg. But, if you bring Kabir Saheb to me chances are I will just spring back to my feet. No mambo-jambo, no miracles, no other worldly stuff.
Kabira!
The highest that the world can ever know is calling himself ‘Kabira.’
Oh, who will not fall in love with such a hero?
And work and work, work, work the entire day, work!
And have the courage to speak Truth to power, the bare Truth, the hard-hitting Truth. Never mix it up, never dilute it, put things as they are.
It goes something like this — “अश्वमेध, अजमेध, सर्पमेध, नरमेध, कहे कबीर अधर्म को धर्म बतावे वेद.”
When it came to cruelty towards animals, Kabir Saheb is in another league. He is probably the only well-known figure in the history of religion, who has spoken very clearly, loudly and unsparingly against cruelty to animals and flesh eating. He did not spare even the Vedas, when the Vedas said, “अश्वमेध should be there”.
You know what अश्वमेध is, right? A sacrifice in which the horse is offered. Similarly, the अजमेध, in which the goat is offered.
So, Kabir Saheb says, “कहे कबीर अधर्म को धर्म बतावे वेद.” And that is another reason why I so closely identify with Him.
Today veganism is the cause we espouse, Kabir Saheb was a vegan in those times. He was the staunchest vegetarian at least and he was very clear that if you eat, if you kill animals and if you eat animal flesh, then you are entering into evil and no forgiveness, no redemption would be available to you.
I can speak all night on Him, so stop me.
In fact, I have spoken more on Kabir Saheb than I have done on anybody else, both in Hindi and English. And I think as long as this body is there, I will continue doing that. And his entire corpus is enormous, there is so much to speak on.
