My
essay ‘The Teacher of Kabir’ was published in Reading Hour, Sept-Oct 2012 Vol 2
Issue 5.
“Guru Govind dono khade, kake lagon panya l
Balihari Guru aapne, Govind diyo bataya ll”
When, on a day, the great Guru of Kabir and his Govind came round together to see him, he was in a dilemma about which of them he should make his obeisance first. He had no time to think it over and therefore got nervous. But soon it occurred to him that he is thankful to his Guru, who guided him through the mysterious way to Govind.
But in another couplet, Kabir teaches us that
“Guru Govind tao eak hai, duja yahu aakar l
When, on a day, the great Guru of Kabir and his Govind came round together to see him, he was in a dilemma about which of them he should make his obeisance first. He had no time to think it over and therefore got nervous. But soon it occurred to him that he is thankful to his Guru, who guided him through the mysterious way to Govind.
But in another couplet, Kabir teaches us that
“Guru Govind tao eak hai, duja yahu aakar l
Aapa met jeevat maray, tao pavay Kartar ll”
Guru and Govind are one and the same. The distinguishable world does not let us see them so. We, being the part of this world, are truth-blind because we cannot identify anything unless we differentiate one thing from the other, but he who crosses this bar like a dead man achieves the Supreme Being.
The above two statements of Kabir seem quite contrary to each other (as he presents his Guru and Govind in their separate forms at one place and in combined at the other). But then we cannot say he was mistaken, for his words often pack a lot many facts between two opposite views and always carry weight and authenticity. Anyway, to know what Kabir means to say by his contradictory statements, it is necessary to examine who his Guru and Govind were.
History says that he made Swami Ramanand his Guru. But the question is whether it was the swami, accompanied by Govind, that day visited him and was received by him in that way. Certainly it is doubtful because his Ram was different from the Ram of Tulsi or Govind of Soordas and Meera Bai, who, it is said, emerge to call on His devotees. Moreover, he talked more about Satguru than he did about a human guru in his verses. Now again to know who else they could have been, we may choose to find out what makes a guru.
The word ‘guru’ means a teacher and also a preacher. A school teacher has a key role to play in the teaching or learning process because it is he who gives a lot of information to his students, and it is his judicious and technical expression which makes a raw student understand a complicated subject; parents similarly play a vital role in their children’s education; and as for a preacher, his contribution to it is invaluable, for he makes humans into man; but, by and large, it seems that they cannot teach anything on their own because if they could, then a mother would make her baby known about a thing without showing it to him, or a primary school master would not take the help of a picture book.
Perhaps it is Nature that develops a base of learning, or else Archimedes could not have found his theory in a swimming pool; the sun and the moon must have been moving round the earth according to Copernicus, too; Newton’s class teacher would have done the job for him; or Wordsworth would not have called it his guide and guardian. Every time when we try to learn or understand something, we need an image of the thing built on our mind; for example, we pause at a line in a book and, for all our efforts we fail to understand what it says. Soon we blame our linguistic approach, whereas the real reason is that we are then unfamiliar with the thing it narrates.
Right from birth we gather images of things and their situations, action and its results by means of our senses while simultaneously storing them in our memory, which ultimately helps us learn more about them as our brain is able to yield a result only by relating or searching facts or details either in their actual forms, or in the form of their images. The richer store enables one to gain greater understanding and wider knowledge. This is why our elders boast of their better opinions.
Similarly, when we go to a thing, they answer our questions themselves. For example, as soon as we look at a tree, it starts telling us that it is a tree, not a tower. When we ask it what it has, it replies that it has a trunk, branches and leaves. What it gives may further be a query and, in reply, it would soon make us known that we may have fruit, shade etc from it. However, it will not tell us the different names of all those things. Here we need a teacher who ultimately explains us the common ways of how they are used and known. A teacher thus helps us convert our information into a linguistic form and gives speed to our learning by way of passing on past experience to us.
An illiterate person does the bookkeeping, too. He counts, adds and subtracts etc so accurately as an educated one does, though he goes a bit slow and up to a point. Moreover, there are certain other things which we do without any schooling. We eat and drink, make love and so on, for example. Our organs act automatically on matters of their physical requirements. Family or a society also exerts its influence on man. This just proves that education is more of a natural phenomenon than a process of teaching and learning in schools or at home. In fact, man makes books in collaboration with Nature.
At primary stages of education we identify time by change, space by the gap between two particular points and things by their distinguishable feature; but at the advanced stage we begin to perceive that there is neither the existence of time, nor of space, nor does a thing have a title of its own. Things start looking alike and the whole universe seems as if it were a light of one candle. That is to say, the top stage of knowledge is the absence of it.
Just after Kabir - who is quoted as saying “Masi kagad chhuwo nahi, kalam gahi nahi hath”- took birth, he found his Satguru in his mother as he looked at her, then in the room he was in, then in every corner of his house, then in the surrounding area, then in the open fields, in the air, in the sky and in all which he saw and felt. It looked to him that everything, small or big, was teaching him something. As he grew older, he found him emerging bigger, and little by little the whole universe became his Satguru. Then a miracle suddenly happened to him. His sense quickened and he caught a brilliant flash of Govind in his omnipresent Guru. He found both of them standing together. For a moment he was caught a dilemma about which of them to go for. But shortly after that he witnessed the distinguishable universe turning formless, shapeless; his brain stopped relating things; he got lost in Govind; his ‘I’ vanished, too; he entered the super conscious state - a realization of oneness with Brahman. Then at last he could know that nominatives, accusatives, genitives and all such perceptions are the results of an unreal understanding, or that our senses bring us false information, for they can by no means help us encounter with Nature void of time, space and nouns. And so in the following couplet of his Sakhi he says,
“Jab main tha tab Hari nahin, ab Hari hain main nahi l
Guru and Govind are one and the same. The distinguishable world does not let us see them so. We, being the part of this world, are truth-blind because we cannot identify anything unless we differentiate one thing from the other, but he who crosses this bar like a dead man achieves the Supreme Being.
The above two statements of Kabir seem quite contrary to each other (as he presents his Guru and Govind in their separate forms at one place and in combined at the other). But then we cannot say he was mistaken, for his words often pack a lot many facts between two opposite views and always carry weight and authenticity. Anyway, to know what Kabir means to say by his contradictory statements, it is necessary to examine who his Guru and Govind were.
History says that he made Swami Ramanand his Guru. But the question is whether it was the swami, accompanied by Govind, that day visited him and was received by him in that way. Certainly it is doubtful because his Ram was different from the Ram of Tulsi or Govind of Soordas and Meera Bai, who, it is said, emerge to call on His devotees. Moreover, he talked more about Satguru than he did about a human guru in his verses. Now again to know who else they could have been, we may choose to find out what makes a guru.
The word ‘guru’ means a teacher and also a preacher. A school teacher has a key role to play in the teaching or learning process because it is he who gives a lot of information to his students, and it is his judicious and technical expression which makes a raw student understand a complicated subject; parents similarly play a vital role in their children’s education; and as for a preacher, his contribution to it is invaluable, for he makes humans into man; but, by and large, it seems that they cannot teach anything on their own because if they could, then a mother would make her baby known about a thing without showing it to him, or a primary school master would not take the help of a picture book.
Perhaps it is Nature that develops a base of learning, or else Archimedes could not have found his theory in a swimming pool; the sun and the moon must have been moving round the earth according to Copernicus, too; Newton’s class teacher would have done the job for him; or Wordsworth would not have called it his guide and guardian. Every time when we try to learn or understand something, we need an image of the thing built on our mind; for example, we pause at a line in a book and, for all our efforts we fail to understand what it says. Soon we blame our linguistic approach, whereas the real reason is that we are then unfamiliar with the thing it narrates.
Right from birth we gather images of things and their situations, action and its results by means of our senses while simultaneously storing them in our memory, which ultimately helps us learn more about them as our brain is able to yield a result only by relating or searching facts or details either in their actual forms, or in the form of their images. The richer store enables one to gain greater understanding and wider knowledge. This is why our elders boast of their better opinions.
Similarly, when we go to a thing, they answer our questions themselves. For example, as soon as we look at a tree, it starts telling us that it is a tree, not a tower. When we ask it what it has, it replies that it has a trunk, branches and leaves. What it gives may further be a query and, in reply, it would soon make us known that we may have fruit, shade etc from it. However, it will not tell us the different names of all those things. Here we need a teacher who ultimately explains us the common ways of how they are used and known. A teacher thus helps us convert our information into a linguistic form and gives speed to our learning by way of passing on past experience to us.
An illiterate person does the bookkeeping, too. He counts, adds and subtracts etc so accurately as an educated one does, though he goes a bit slow and up to a point. Moreover, there are certain other things which we do without any schooling. We eat and drink, make love and so on, for example. Our organs act automatically on matters of their physical requirements. Family or a society also exerts its influence on man. This just proves that education is more of a natural phenomenon than a process of teaching and learning in schools or at home. In fact, man makes books in collaboration with Nature.
At primary stages of education we identify time by change, space by the gap between two particular points and things by their distinguishable feature; but at the advanced stage we begin to perceive that there is neither the existence of time, nor of space, nor does a thing have a title of its own. Things start looking alike and the whole universe seems as if it were a light of one candle. That is to say, the top stage of knowledge is the absence of it.
Just after Kabir - who is quoted as saying “Masi kagad chhuwo nahi, kalam gahi nahi hath”- took birth, he found his Satguru in his mother as he looked at her, then in the room he was in, then in every corner of his house, then in the surrounding area, then in the open fields, in the air, in the sky and in all which he saw and felt. It looked to him that everything, small or big, was teaching him something. As he grew older, he found him emerging bigger, and little by little the whole universe became his Satguru. Then a miracle suddenly happened to him. His sense quickened and he caught a brilliant flash of Govind in his omnipresent Guru. He found both of them standing together. For a moment he was caught a dilemma about which of them to go for. But shortly after that he witnessed the distinguishable universe turning formless, shapeless; his brain stopped relating things; he got lost in Govind; his ‘I’ vanished, too; he entered the super conscious state - a realization of oneness with Brahman. Then at last he could know that nominatives, accusatives, genitives and all such perceptions are the results of an unreal understanding, or that our senses bring us false information, for they can by no means help us encounter with Nature void of time, space and nouns. And so in the following couplet of his Sakhi he says,
“Jab main tha tab Hari nahin, ab Hari hain main nahi l
Sab andhiyara miti gaya, jab Deepak dekhya manhi ll”
(When I tried to know things by distinctions, I saw the world, not God; but soon after that there stimulated a third inner sense in me, it spread a celestial light from within; all shifted to that which makes matter; and finally there looked nothing else but God.)
(When I tried to know things by distinctions, I saw the world, not God; but soon after that there stimulated a third inner sense in me, it spread a celestial light from within; all shifted to that which makes matter; and finally there looked nothing else but God.)
- Ramesh Chandra Tiwari
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