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Kabir was an extraordinary oral poet whose works have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium. He may have been illiterate and he preached an abrasive, sometimes shocking, always uncompromising message that exhorted his audience to shed their delusions, pretentions, and empty orthodoxies in favor of an intense, direct, and personal confrontation with the truth. Thousands of poems are popularly attributed to Kabir, but only a few written collections have survived over the centuries. The Bijak is one of the most important, and is the sacred book of those who follow Kabir.
The Bijak of Kabir serves as a foundational text for the Kabir Panth, challenging the reader to abandon institutionalized religious dogma in favor of a direct, unmediated experience of the divine. Kabir, an oral poet of North Indian origin, utilized a confrontational and often abrasive rhetorical style to dismantle the social and religious pretenses of his time. His work functions as a spiritual manual, stripping away the layers of ritual and orthodoxy that he argued obscured the path to ultimate truth.
What You Will Find
Scholars and theologians recognize this text as a primary source for understanding the Bhakti movement and the radical critique of medieval Indian social structures. Readers often note the intensity of the prose and the directness of the poet's voice, which remains as provocative today as it was centuries ago.
Page Count:
216
Publication Date:
2002-04-18
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0195148754
ISBN-13:
9780195148756
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