Kabirpanth

Religious community whose members
are followers of the northern Indian
poet-saint Kabir. Some Kabirpanthis are
ascetics, and some are householders.
The group’s most important center is
located in Benares (where Kabir is
believed to have lived) and houses an
ascetic community. Although in his
poetry Kabir rejects ritual, worship, and
reliance on anything but one’s own
unmediated experience—a context
implying the practice of yoga—the
Kabirpanth has taken on all of these
conventional religious trappings. The
community’s sacred text is the Bijak, a
collection of poems and epigrams
attributed to Kabir. Its sacred centers
have pictures of Kabir, who has become
an object of worship. Elaborate rituals
are performed on certain prescribed
days. This situation is ironic because it
appears that many of the practices Kabir
condemned have been adopted by the
community professing to follow his
teachings. Given Kabir’s continual
emphasis on the need for unmediated
personal experience of the divine, the
notion that he would be seen as the
founder of a sect would itself have been
outrageous to him. For further information see David Lorenzen, “Traditions of
Non-Caste Hinduism: The Kabir Panth,”
in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol.
21, No. 2, 1987.