One Hundred Poems by Kabir

Kabir, a great religious reformer and founder of a community of nearly one million Hindus living in northern India, lives among us today through his sublime mystical poetry.His fate was like that of so many exposers of the falseness of reality.He hated religious exclusion and sought to define the freedom guaranteed to God''s children and to offer it to humanity above all else.Although his followers have rebuilt and thrown down the barriers he worked so hard to break down, his magnificent poems have survived the distortion, spontaneous expressions of his vision and love. It is through these poems alone, not through the teachings attributed to him, that Kabir creates his enduring appeal. These poems encompass a diverse range of Sufi sentiments, from the most sublime and abstract concepts and the most otherworldly passion for encountering the Absolute to the most intimate and personal conceptions of God, using simple metaphors and religious symbols impartially inspired by Islamic and Hindu doctrines, so that it is impossible to determine the direction of their author: was he a Brahmin or a Sufi?