Kabir in Light of Kriya – Doha 2

पोथी पढ़ पढ़ जग मुआ, पंडित भया न कोए |
ढाई अक्षर प्रेम का, पढ़े सो पंडित होए ||

Pothi padh padh jag muan pandit bhaya na koye |
Dhai akhar prem ka jo padhe so pandit hoye ||

अर्थ : बड़ी बड़ी पुस्तकें पढ़ कर संसार में कितने ही लोग मृत्यु के द्वार पहुँच गए, पर सभी विद्वान न हो सके. कबीर मानते हैं कि यदि कोई प्रेम या प्यार के केवल ढाई अक्षर ही अच्छी तरह पढ़ ले, अर्थात प्यार का वास्तविक रूप पहचान ले तो वही सच्चा ज्ञानी होगा.

Meaning: Countless people died from reading books/scriptures but none of them became intelligent. He who reads the word love becomes wise.

Explanation: When someone says that -“I have knowledge of x or y”, he means that he has an understanding of something, which is now stored in his memory, and he can recall it instantly. Memory is collectively known as knowledge. So, all knowledge is the memory, and the very word memory means- it is a thing of the past. The present has no memory.

‘Truth’ cannot be something in the past. It is the ‘eternal present,’ and therefore, cannot be stored in the memory, which is a thing of the past, the dead past. ‘Truth,’ on the other hand is in the present, the now, eternally flowing, pulsating with life, and therefore, cannot be touched by knowledge.

The mind, the Keno Upanishad describes, ‘cannot comprehend it.’ It is only when the mind is empty of all the garbage which we carry around in our brains, and when it is quiet and still as it is no longer becoming anything or struggling to acquire, that there is space for the Truth, the ever-present, to manifest.

The doors and the windowpanes, thick with the dark tint of pride and second-hand knowledge, have to be left open for the sweet, divine breeze to enter (Explanation from Shri Maheshwarnath Babaji, adapted from Book “Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master” by Sri M.)

– Amol Bhavsar

Sant Kabirdas in this Doha draws a relationship​ between books (pothi) and pundit (scholar) by making a sarcasm that no one could ever become a scholar by reading books alone since reading​/understanding of a two and a half lettered​ word Prem (Love) alone can make someone a scholar. By stressing on knowing/ understanding love Kabirdas signifies that love as generally understood by common man is no love at all since it is dependent on causes and therefore conditioned and not free and in absence of freedom there can be no possibility of love since knowing love is the awakening of supreme intelligence that makes one absolutely free and compassionate to one and all as violence in express or latent form ceases to find any more place in his life.

Only a person blossoming with love can be termed knowledgeable or scholar since such knowledge helps him in knowing himself as Satchidananda thereby becoming compassionate to everyone around since knowledge of a scholar not in the interest of mankind or living beings is no knowledge at all but at the most heaps of information gathering dust.

Further, all knowledge acquired through books or otherwise are manmade and therefore second hand and non-existential and a person having no knowledge of his existence or the mystery of evolution cannot, therefore, be considered pundit or scholar. In fact, what he thinks as knowledge is but information accumulated in time, stored up as memory and put to use only on demand and therefore purely old and of the past. In fact, it would be wrong to term such gathering of information as knowledge as it is second hand, borrowed and not new for the new/ unknown cannot be known by the application of known but only in a state of absolute stillness when duality ceases.

– Saket Srivastava