Kabir was an extraordinary oral poet whose works have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium. He preached an abrasive, some-times shocking, always-uncompromising message exhorting his audience to shed their delusions, pretensions, and empty orthodoxies in favour of an intense, direct, personal confrontation with truth. Linda Hess points out in her introduction that Kabir a pound away with questions, prods with riddles, stirs with challenges, shocks with insults, disorients with verbal feints. His poems bristle with questions, assaults, paradoxes and enigmas. He confronts, irritates, and fascinates, always trying to set off a spark of consciousness in people who are sinking in the river of time, the ocean of delusion.’ The attentive reader cannot help being challenged by each leap and turn of this remarkable mind. 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 anthologies, being the sacred book of the Kabir Panth and the main representative of the Eastern tradition of Kabir’s verses. Shukdev Singh and Linda Hess have accomplished a translation of real grace and remarkable accuracy. The introduction and notes explore Kabir’s work, place it in its initial context, and explore its meaning for modern time.
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