Bijak

(“inventory”) One of the three main collections of verse ascribed to the poetsaint Kabir (mid-15th c.?); the other two
are found in the Adigranth and the
manuscripts of the religious organization Dadupanth. Kabir is the best
known of the sants, an umbrella term
for a group of central and northern
Indian poet-saints who share several
concepts: stress on individualized, interior religion leading to a personal experience of the divine; disdain for external
ritual, particularly image worship; faith
in the power of the divine Name; and a
tendency to ignore conventional caste
distinctions. Of all the sants, Kabir is the
most iconoclastic with regard to established religious practices and authorities. He invariably emphasizes the need
for individual searching and realization.
Given the content of Kabir’s message,
it is notable that the Bijak is the scripture of the Kabirpanth, a religious community claiming to be his followers.
Certainly Kabir himself would have condemned the notion of making him the
founder of anything, or of his verses
gaining the authority of a scripture. In
content, the Bijak contains verses of
varying types: short epigrams that have
become proverbial wisdom, longer stanzas in the chaupai form, and shorter
two-line verse (doha). Linguistic features identify the Bijak as belonging to
the eastern part of the Hindi language
region, hence its common name as the
“eastern” recension. For translations of
the text itself, see Linda Hess and
Shukdev Singh (trans.), The Bijak of
Kabir, 1983.